We do not wonder that all the leading personages of Italy wished to be painted by Titian. His are the portraits of a man of intellect. They show the subject at his best; grave, cultivated, stately, as he appeared and wished to appear; not taken off his guard in any way. What can be more sympathetic as a personality than the Ariosto of the National Gallery? We can enter into his mind and make a friend of him, and yet all the time he has himself in hand; he allows us to divine as much as he chooses, and draws a thin veil over all that he does not intend us to discover. The painter himself is impersonal and not over-sensitive; he does not paint in his own fancies about his sitter—probably he had none; he saw what he was meant to see. There was what Mr. Berenson calls “a certain happy insensibility” about him, which prevented him from taking fantastic flights, or from looking too deep below the surface.
Titian. ARIOSTO. London.
(Photo, Mansell and Co.)
CHAPTER XVIII
TITIAN (continued)
With the “Assumption,” finished in 1518 for the Church of the Frari, Titian rose to the very highest among Renaissance painters. The “Glorious S. Mary” was his theme, and he concentrated all his efforts on the realisation of that one idea. The central figure is, as it were, a collective rather than an individual type. Well proportioned and elastic as it is, it has the abundance of motherhood. Harmonious and serene, it combines dramatic force and profound feeling. Exultant Humanity, in its hour of triumph, rises with her, borne up lightly by that throbbing company of child angels and followed by full recognition and awestruck satisfaction in the adoring gaze of the throng below, yet Titian has contrived to keep some touch of the loving woman hurrying to meet her son. The flood of colour, the golden vault above, the garment of glowing blues and crimsons, have a more than common share in that spirit of confident joy and poured-out life which envelops the whole canvas. In the worthy representation of a great event, the visible assumption of Humanity to the Throne of God, Titian puts forth all his powers and steeps us in that temper of sanguine emotion, of belief in life and confidence in the capacity of man, which was so characteristic of the ripe Renaissance. In looking at this splendid canvas, we must call to mind the position for which Titian painted it. Hung in the dusky recesses of the apse, it was tempered by and merged in its stately surroundings. The band of Apostles almost formed a part of the whispering crowd below, and the glorious Mother was beheld soaring upwards to the golden light and the mysterious vistas of the vaulted arches above.
The patronage of courts had by this time altered the tenor of Titian’s life. In 1516 Duke Alfonso d’Este had invited him to Ferrara, where he had finished Bellini’s “Bacchanals.” It bears the marks of Titian’s hand, and he has introduced a well-known point of view at Cadore into the background. In 1518 Alfonso writes to propose another painting, and Titian’s acceptance is contained in a very courtier-like letter, in which we divine a touch of irony. “The more I thought of it,” he ends, “the more I became convinced that the greatness of art among the ancients was due to the assistance they received from great princes, who were content to leave to the painter the credit and renown derived from their own ingenuity in bespeaking pictures.” Alfonso’s requirements for his new castle were frankly pagan. Mythological scenes were already popular. Mantegna had adorned Isabela d’Este’s “Paradiso” with revels of the gods, Botticelli had given his conception of classic myth in the Medici villa, already Bellini had essayed a Bacchanal, and Titian was to make designs for similar scenes to complete the decorations of the halls of Este. The same exuberant feeling he shows in the “Assumption” finds utterance in the “Garden of Loves” and the “Bacchanals,” both painted for Alfonso of Ferrara. The children in the former may be compared with the angels in the “Assumption.” Their blue wings match the heavenly blue sky, and they are painted with the most delicate finish.