Dear Readers,
A February serving of an Italian Connection:
Tiziano (Titian) Ristorante, will soon be spruced up and ready for business, at a corner location in my neighborhood, that once housed Laghi’s, cuisine di Emilia-Romagna, Locanda San Pietro, cuisine di Venezia, and most recently, Karamanduka, which featured “mariscos” the sea food specialties of Peru’s lengthy coastline.
Tiziano’s new owner told me he had originally selected the name “Pallino” (the little ball, larger bocce balls aim for in order to score) but a web search turned up a “Paolino” in Baltimore, M.D. that was too close for comfort in this litigious society so he went with Tiziano (Vecellio), the anglicized art world knows as Titian. In days gone by, you could select a name for your business, provided it was not already registered at City Hall, in the municipality where you planned to do business or if the nature of your business was different, i.e. Carlo’s Cuisine vs. Carlo’s Car Wash, but today even little mom and pop shops must beware of innocently stepping on a name game minefield.
In an effort to make a few creative décor suggestions for the newly minted Tiziano’s, I dusted off my copy of “Titian” (an ideal introduction to one of the greatest painters of the Renaissance and the finest artist of the Venetian school) written by Peter Humprey, a Professor of Art History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he began teaching in 1977 and has written widely on Venetian painting.
An “abbondanza” of colored illustrations of Titian’s paintings which range from portraits of young children, Venetian ladies, gentlemen, soldiers, and statesmen to religious and mythological scenes with written commentary help place the artist’s career and works into the social and historical content of the sixteenth century Italy and help the viewer better understand why Titian’s influence in the history of art is so immense and why it has inspired many great masters from Rembrandt to Velasquez and the Impressionists.
Tiziano Vecellio was born circa 1485 in Pieve di Cadore, a small village in the Dolomite range of the Alps, near Belluno (Veneto). He was the eldest of a family of four and son of Gregorio Vecellio, a distinguished councilor, soldier, and superintendent of the castle of Pieve di Cadore and husband of Lucia, his wife. Titian’s father also managed local mines for their owners. Many relatives, including Titian’s grandfather, were notaries and were well-established in the area, which was ruled by Venice.
At the age of twelve he and his brother Francesco were sent to an uncle in Venice to find an apprenticeship with a painter. Sebastian Zuccato, a well-known mosaicist and family friend, arranged for the brothers to enter the studio of the elderly Gentile Bellini and later that of his brother Giovanni Bellini. The Bellinis were the leading artists in the city. There Titian found a group of young men about his age, among them Giovanni Palma, Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano Luciani, and Giorgio da Castelfranco, nicknamed Giorgione.
In 1507-1508 Giorgione was commissioned by the state to execute frescoes on the re-erected Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Titian and Morto da Feltre worked along him. After Giorgione’s early death in 1510, Titian continued to paint Giorgionesque subjects for some time, though his style developed its own trademarks. Titian’s talent in fresco is shown in those he painted in 1511 at Padua in the Carmelite church and in the Scuola del Santo, among them the Meeting at the Golden Gate, three scenes from the life of St. Anthony of Padua, the Murder of a Young Woman by Her Husband, A Child Testifying to his Mother’s Innocence, and The Saint Healing the Young Man with a Broken Limb. From Padua in 1512, Titian returned to Venice.
In 1513 he obtained a broker’s patent in Fondaco dei Tedeschi (state-warehouse for German merchants) and became superintendent of government works, charged to complete painting left unfinished by Giovanni Bellini in the hall of the great council in the ducal palace. Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin, painted in 1518, first brought him fame. He painted several works at Ferrara for Alphonso I, including world-renowned Bacchus and Ariade, 1522. For Philip II of Spain he painted The Sleeping Venus, as well as The Last Supper and A Last Judgment.
Among the most notable are his Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, 1538 and the magnificent portrait known as The Man with the Glove in the Louvre. Titian’s career had escalated rapidly after he received a commission, 1511, to execute three frescoes for the Scuola del Santo in Padua. By 1513 he had begun painting a Battle for the Chamber of the Grand Council in the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Upon the death of Giovanni Bellini, 1516, Titian became official painter to the Republic.
In 1525 he married a lady named Cecilia, thereby legitimizing their first child, Pomponio, and two other followed, including Titian’s favorite Orazio, who became his assistant. About 1526 he became acquainted with Pietro Aretino, the influential and audacious figure who features so strangely in the chronicles of the time. Titian sent a portrait of him to Gonzaga, duke of Mantua.
In August 1530 his wife died giving birth to a daughter, Lavinia, and with his three children moved his house, and got his sister Orsa to come from Cadore and take charge of the household, in a fashionable suburb, at the extreme end of Venice, on the sea, with beautiful gardens and a view towards Murano. Titian was now at the height of his fame. During the last twenty-five years of his life (1550-1576) the artist worked mainly for Philip II mostly as a portrait painter of family members.
Titian’s portraits of Philip II, those of his daughter, Lavinia, and those of himself are numbered among his masterpieces. Titian had engaged his daughter Lavinia, the beautiful girl whom he loved deeply and painted various times, to Cornelio Saccinelli of Serravalle. She had succeeded her aunt Orsa, then deceased, as the manager of the household, which, with the lordly income that Titian made by this time, placed her on a corresponding footing.
The marriage took place in 1554. She died in childbirth in 1560. Some of Titian’s most acclaimed works of the ensuing years were the Assumption for the Church of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (1518) (in which the soaring movement of the Virgin is said to anticipate the later Baroque period), three paintings for Alfonso d’Este in Ferrara (the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal, and Bacchus and Ariadne) (1518-23), and the altarpiece in Ancona (1520), a polyptych in Brescia centered on a Resurrection of Christ (1520-2), and the altarpiece for the Pesaro family side altar in the Church of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (1519-26).
Later Titian’s work became more heavily weighted toward portraiture. Among prominent subjects were Pope Paul III (1546) and Charles V (1548), Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The Emperor appointed Titian court painter and gave him the rank of Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur. He traveled to Rome in 1545-6 for his only visit there. In 1550 he was in Augsburg to paint portraits of Emperor Charles V’s son, who was to become Philip II of Spain and an important later patron of Titian, Titian was extremely, and famously old, about 91, when the plague raging in Venice seized him, and he died on 27 August 1576.
He was the only victim of that plague to be given a church burial and was interred in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, as first intended, and his Pietà was finished by Palma the Younger. He lies near his own famous painting, the Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro. No memorial marked his grave until the Austrian rulers commissioned Canova to provide the large monument. Immediately after Titian’s own death, his son and pictorial assistant, Orazio, died of the same epidemic.
His sumptuous mansion was plundered during the plague by thieves. It is interesting to note that congeniality as well as talent contributed to the longevity of Titian’s career and commissions. Tiziano Vecellio (1485-1576) always known in English simply as Titian was one of the greatest artists in an age extraordinarily rich in artistic genius.
Like his slightly older contemporary Michelangelo (1475-1564), Titian was widely recognized from the time of his early maturity as possessing creative gifts that were considered to be divine. Also in common with Michelangelo, Titian’s pre-eminence in the art of sixteenth-century Italy was established through an exceptionally long career, stretching over seven decades.
But whereas the Florentine Michelangelo though of himself as a sculptor – despite also practicing as a painter, Titian devoted himself exclusively to paintings. In contrast to the career of Michelangelo, which was marked by constant bitterness and frustration, that of Titian was attended by every worldly success. A native of the Venetian mainland, Titian spent his life in the wealthy and cosmopolitan city of Venice, where he worked extensively for the government as well as for a wide range of other local patrons.
His circle of patronage quickly extended beyond Venice to include some of the most powerful figures in the international arena, from a series of rulers of other Italian states, including the pope, to the German Emperor and the King of Spain. Titian owed his worldwide fame above all to the quality of his art, which amazed his contemporaries by its naturalness and vividness. But his professional success was certainly also facilitated by a congenial and urbane personality that contrasted strikingly with the notorious touchiness and abrasiveness of Michelangelo.
Titian’s paintings can be found in many famous European museums, however, closer to home The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. has many of the artist’s works available for viewing. Among them by Tiziano Vecellio’s Cardinal Pietro Bembo, Cupid with the Wheel of Fortune, Doge Andrea Gritti, Madonna and Child and the Infant St. John in a Landscape, Portrait of a Lady, Ranuccio Farnese, St. John the Evangelist on Patmos, Venus and Adonis, and Venus with a mirror, a print of which may be suitable for the ladies room at the newly Tiziano’s in San Francisco, California.
10631 Vinedale Street, Sun Valley, CA 91352 - Phone (818) 767-3413 - Fax: (818) 767-1410
