Titian And Venetian Painting, 1450-1590

Bruce Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429975264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This up-to-date, well-illustrated, and thoughtful introduction to the life and works of one of the giants of Western Painting also surveys the golden age of Venetian Painting from Giovanni Bellini to Veronese and its place in the history of Western art. Bruce Cole, Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University and author of numerous books on Italian Renaissance art, begins with the life and work of Giovanni Bellini, the principal founder of Venetian Renaissance painting. He continues with the paintings of Giorgione and the young Titian whose work embodied the new Venetian style. Cole discusses and explains all of Titian's major works--portraits, religious paintings, and nudes--from various points of view and shows how Venetian painting of this period differed from painting in Florence and elsewhere in Italy and became a distinct and fully-developed style of its own.

1
Venice, 1510

The year 1510 constituted a fateful moment in the history of Venetian art. In that year, aged about thirty-four, the painter Giorgione died in Venice. His death, noted by some prescient contemporary observers, came at a time when Venetian art was undergoing a process of fundamental transformation, a process which he himself had helped to initiate. The year 1510 also saw the creation of seminal paintings by several of his talented contemporaries: Giovanni Bellini, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Titian. These paintings were to become the first in a long series of works which would, within less than a century, elevate the Venetians from a school of local importance to a major force in the history of Western art.

In 1510, an informed observer looking at Giorgione's Tempest [25], Titian's Santo frescoes [33,34], or Sebastiano del Piombo's altarpiece in the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo [28] might have realised that these remarkable paintings both embodied and transformed the ancient traditions of Venetian painting upon which they so heavily depended. Their artists visualized the world, its inhabitants, and their beliefs and dreams in a way never before seen in the West.

Giorgione and his equally gifted near-contemporaries, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo, had all studied with Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516). Bellini and his painter brother Gentile (c. 1435-1507) had, in turn, learned their art in the family workshop headed by their father, Jacopo (c. 1400-1470). As a young man, Giovanni Bellini had painted a series of imaginative pictures based partially on the ancient traditions of Venetian picture-making that began in the Middle Ages and partially on some of the new developments that had lately come into northern Italy from Florence.

By 1510, the year of Giorgione's death, the old Giovanni Bellini himself had developed a personal style of great lyrical beauty, which, while it still embodied many of the venerable characteristics of Venetian art, was to become one of the foundations of Renaissance painting in the city Bellini's late works, such as the Madonna and Child painted in 1510 [16], were to have a major impact not only on his pupils Giorgione and Titian, but on the subsequent development of Venetian Renaissance painting. Yet Bellini himself would be influenced by these two artists around 1510 when Venetian art was experiencing major new developments.

Bellini's influence was also felt by a number of more minor, but still highly talented artists whose conceptions of style and subject depended on his earlier works. For example, in paintings from 1510 by Vittore Garpaccio [23] and Marco Basaiti, one sees these men each responding in their own specific way to the new, broader horizons of the increasingly monumental figural style and expressive landscape favored by Bellini in his late work. Their responses, albeit limited, to the ferment occurring around 1510 graphically demonstrate the artistic dynamism and diversity of the time.

The year 1510 also saw the commissioning of Titian's frescoes for the Confraternity (Scuola) of Saint Anthony of Padua [33, 34]. These revolutionary works, the first which can be dated with certainty to the artist's hand, were a result of what Titian had learned from both Bellini and Giorgione. But more importantly, they embodied many of the elements of an idiom which was to become a cornerstone in the history of European art.

The prospects for Titian's future career improved around 1510 due to two events. The first was Giorgione's removal from the Venetian scene by death in 1510; the second was the departure from Venice of a potential rival, Sebastiano del Piombo, another remarkable artist trained in the Bellini shop. In 1511 Sebastiano moved to Rome, where he transformed himself into a rather slavish follower of his idol Michelangelo. But before he left, he painted a major altarpiece for the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo [28], probably in 1510. A moving and prophetic work, it reveals Sebastiano's not inconsiderable skill and demonstrates just how talented an artist the Venetian scene lost in that eventful year of 1510.

Sebastiano's change of residence in 1511 was motivated by his desire to work in the city which was to become the only serious rival of Venice for most of the sixteenth century: Rome. Under the brilliant patronage of several popes who wished to renew the luster of the Holy City and of the papacy itself, artists from all over the Italian peninsula found work there, including those two presiding figures of the Renaissance in central Italy, Raphael and Michelangelo. In 1510 each of these artists was engaged on a major Roman project: Michelangelo on the Sistine Ceiling [35] and Raphael on the School of Athens. Around 1510 Venetian artists were already well aware of some of the major innovations of these two artists through the reproductive mediums of prints and drawings. Both Raphael and Michelangelo were interested in monumental drama enacted by heroic protagonists within rationally planned, architectonic space. Order, balance, and gravity were essential elements in their artistic visions. To achieve these, they built their pictorial worlds through a rigorous study of subject and setting, clarified and refined through drawing. Careful, precise planning and the slow development of space and form through a myriad of paper studies were used to make a cartoon in which all the studied elements of the picture to be painted were resolved. Such a process was the hallmark not only of Raphael and Michelangelo, but of the entire tradition of central Italian painting, a tradition upon which the Venetians of the sixteenth century often reflected. Soon the influence of the work created by the formidable figures of Raphael and Michelangelo, and some of their lesser contemporaries working in Rome and Florence, was to become part of the vibrant intellectual and formal world of Venetian painting.

Venetian art in 1510 was anchored in the past, but buffeted by strong winds of change, both from within and without. It was a time of intense artistic germination from which would arise the unbroken succession of painters destined to create an extraordinary epoch in the history of art. From the death of Giorgione in 1510 to that of Tintoretto in 1594, Venice was the crucible in which painting-in all its various characteristics of style, subject, and meaning-underwent a fundamental transformation destined to set the stage for every school of European art down to the present day.

The achievements of Venetian Renaissance painters provided an important base for the artists of Baroque Rome. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Venetians inspired not only Caravaggio, the Carracci family, and their contemporaries in Rome, but also constituted major sources of inspiration and motif for artists working outside the Italian peninsula. Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Velázquez derived much of their pictorial style and interpretation of subject from extensive study of the Venetian paintings, which were considered throughout the seventeenth century high points in the history of art.

Admiration for the famous Venetians continued unabated during the eighteenth century. In France the painting of mythological scenes and portraits, among other types, by Boucher, Watteau, and Fragonard strongly reflected Venetian influence. As in the previous century, French and other European artists made pilgrimages to Italy to study firsthand the famous Venetian works, many of which they knew partially through reproductive engravings and copies, both painted and drawn.

Venetian form, technique, and color entered the mainstream of nineteenth-century European painting where their example and influence remained undiminished. From Goya's work at the very beginning of the century, to Turner's around its midpoint, to the Impressionists at its end, Venetian painting played a seminal role in the history of Western art.

The city from which the remarkable school of Venetian painting of the sixteenth century arose had, like the school itself, a particular relationship with the rest of the Italian peninsula. By 1510 Venice already enjoyed a long and eventful history.¹ One of the most powerful city-states in the Italian peninsula, it could trace its foundation to the time when refugees from the Po Valley, fleeing the successive waves of barbarian invasions, escaped from the mainland to the comparative offshore safety of the islands of mud flats, the location of present-day Venice.

By the sixth century, settlements on the small islands had been established, and by 741 the city had elected its first leader, the doge. The earliest settlers soon began to reclaim land from the lagoon by driving large timbers into the mud of the shallow waters to form foundations for their homes, churches, and commercial buildings. As the city grew in size, land was increasingly reclaimed and the various small islands which make up Venice were linked by the series of canals and bridges for which the city is still so famous. But the amount of land reclaimed always remained small compared to the holdings of the city-states of the mainland. For much of its history, Venice was forced to buy rather than raise its own agricultural products.

So it depended instead on the sea for its existence. To the Venetians the sea was both protectress and provider and, as such, it occupied a sacred place in the thoughts and beliefs of the city. All Venetian life was built and sustained, literally, on an aqueous foundation. The city's particular ties to the sea gave it a romantic uniqueness celebrated worldwide for centuries in both paint and prose.

Founded as part of the Eastern Empire of Rome and recognized as a semi-independent entity, the city soon began to establish the strong commercial links that would eventually make it a formidable power both in the East and the West. Venice's physical and social divergence from the city-states of the rest of the Italian peninsula arose partially from its close spiritual and commercial connections with Constantinople and the Byzantine East, From its earliest history, Venice, led by its patrician oligarchy, looked to the East not only for its commercial livelihood in trade, but also for important elements of its sacred and secular culture.

The independence and power of Venice were symbolized by the Basilica of Saint Mark, the Doges' Chapel (named after the patron saint of the city), and the adjacent Palace of the Doges.² From the latter through a labyrinth of governing bodies and committees, all designed to ensure that power could not be concentrated in the hands of a single individual or family, the city built its considerable Eastern Empire stretching down the Dalmatian coast and into the Aegean Sea.³ Venice's constitution and government were widely admired throughout the West, especially during the Enlightenment. Despite, or perhaps because of, its ponderous governmental machinery, which kept power out of the hands of a dictator, the city preserved its independence longer than any other major European power, from about the sixth century to the end of the eighteenth century, when it was conquered by Napoleon.

By 1510 Venice's independence, wealth, and prestige had made the city the unique and beautiful place that it remains, largely unaltered, today. Already a distinguished center of painting in 1510, Venice was on the eve of a period of artistic creativity of astounding dimensions destined to last for nearly a century. Much of the impetus for this remarkable development was found in the mind and hand of Giovanni Bellini, the founder of Venetian Renaissance painting.

Notes

1. On the history of Venice, the most readable and informative introduction is J. Norwich, A History of Venice, New York, 1989; see also F. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic, Baltimore, 1973. A detailed guide to Venice is G. Lorenzetti, Venice and Its Lagoon, Rome, 1961 Brilliant impressions of Venice are found in M. McCarthy, Venice Observed, London, 1956, and J. Morris, The World of Venice, New York, 1960.

2. Information on Venice's Basilica of Saint Mark and the Palace of the Doges is provided by D. Howard, The Architectural History of Venice, New York, 1981, and G. Lorenzetti, Venice and Its Lagoon, Rome, 1961.

3. For Venice's empire, see J. Morris, The Venetian Empire, London, 1980.

2
Precursors

Giovanni Bellini and the Birth of Venetian Renaissance Painting

In the Renaissance, art was a profession, an enterprise practiced in workshops frequently composed of artists related to one another. Often the business was handed down from father to son.¹ Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516) was the son of a painter, the brother of another painter (Gentile, c. 1435-1507), and the brother-in-law of yet another painter. Giovanni's father, Jacopo Bellini (c. 1400-1470), was himself an important figure in the history of Venetian painting.² A pivotal and imaginative artist, he was one of the first Venetians to incorporate substantial elements of mainland art into his work. As a youth, he must have marveled at a large fresco, the Naval Battle between the Venetians and Otto III (c. 1410), by the central Italian painter Gentile da Fabriano in the most important room of the Palace of the Doges, the Sala del Maggior Consiglio.³ Gentile's art, which was deeply infused with the Florentine realism of Masaccio and his contemporaries, came as a profound surprise to Venetian eyes used to their own more stylized art of the day. That Jacopo Bellini was impressed by Gentile da Fabriano's work seems certain; less secure is the traditional identification of Jacopo Bellini with a Venetian Jacopo who was attested as a pupil of Gentile da Fabriano in Florence in 1423.

In any case, the style of Jacopo Bellini, known from the admittedly small evidence of a handful of authentic panel paintings and several drawing or pattern books, reveals the grafting of motifs and spatial conventions from mainland Italy onto a Venetian style. These outside influences come not only from contemporary central Italian examples, such as the works of Gentile da Fabriano, but also from older northern Italian sources, such as the highly complex painted narratives of Altichiero (c. 1325-1395), who worked in nearby Padua. Like so many Venetian artists who were to follow him, Jacopo Bellini borrowed selectively, with purpose and sophistication.

His most revealing works are the large drawings bound in two volumes now in London and Paris. These drawi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. Venice, 1510
• 2. Precursors: Giovanni Bellini and the Birth of Venetian Renaissance Painting
• 3. Giorgione, Sebastiano, and the Young Titian to c. 1510
• 4. Titian: Early Success, 1516–1530
• 5. Titian: International Fame, 1530–1543
• 6. Titian: Maturity
• 7 Titian: The 1550s
• 8. Titian: The Late Works
• 9. Titian's Heirs
• Selected Bibliography
• Index