The Madonnas and Conversation pieces again show us most vividly how his taste is working. The Gipsy Madonna, Figure [268], at Vienna, painted about 1505, is highly Giorgionesque, but Giorgione never painted such sculptural forms, nor ever conceived so resolute a Christchild. Even the throwing of the outlet to one side reveals Titian. At Madrid and Vienna are superb half-length Madonnas arranged symmetrically after Bellini’s fashion, but with greater freedom of pose. Titian soon saw that the old compositional forms could not express the new energy. He makes repeated experiments, shifts the Madonna to one side, as in the unfinished Madonna with St. Anthony at Florence. He adds figures and rearranges them until the Conversation piece becomes an audience, with the saints and donors approaching the Madonna, as in an Adoration of the Magi. We find the completed form in the admirable Conversation piece, of about 1510 with its two versions in the Louvre and at Vienna, Figure [269]; and considerably later, a further development in those numerous full-length Holy Families in landscapes of which the Madonna of the Hare (1530), Figure [270], and The Marriage of St. Catherine, at London, are consummate types. And with all the conscious experimentalism of this work, the sense of character and of beauty is unperturbed. As compared with the contemporary Holy Families of Raphael, the accent is more individual and local. These superb Madonnas and gracious female saints with attendant martyrs and church doctors, are merely the lads and lasses of Carpaccio’s legends, grown up to manhood and womanhood, increased in dignity and sweetness.
Fig. 268. Titian. Gipsy Madonna.—Vienna.
Fig. 269. Titian. Madonna with Saints.—Vienna.
Until the death of Giovanni Bellini, in 1515, Titian seems a little hampered by his example as by that of Giorgione. Then, as if relieved of a restraint, Titian pursues his own aims. His design, in such great altar-backs as the Assumption and the Madonna of the Pesaro family, doubles its breadth and energy. His mythologies, in the bacchanals for the Alabaster Chamber of Alphonso d’Este, at Ferrara, are no longer pensive lyrics, but dithyrambs; primordial lyrics, for animation and power. The religious pictures, such as the noble Entombment in the Louvre, are no longer insistently pathetic. Subjective poetry is everywhere giving way to masculine assertion of the splendor of love, motherhood, comradeship. And these great objective commonplaces, which were the very staple in their day of Greek Epic and Sculpture, receive in Titian their finest modern embodiment. His new energy requires a changed color. All the hues are brighter and more resonant. Their harmonies no longer require the bond of deep shadow, but are positive and established at the middle of the color scale, where color is most itself. If the music of Giorgione was that of vibrating lute strings, that of Titian has the clarity and clangor of exquisitely harmonized woodwind and brass.
Fig. 270. Titian. Holy Family with Rabbit.—London.
Before sounding this new music, Titian prudently secured the sinecure, a Commissionership of the Salt Taxes, which old Giovanni Bellini had enjoyed. While scheming for it, he was designing also the most famous of his great altar-pieces, the Assumption, Figure [271]. It was finished in 1518, set on the high altar of the Friar’s Church, whither it has lately returned. Titian adopts a form of composition which Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael had employed. The upper celestial tier is symmetrically arranged, almost in a domical way, the lower tier abounds in swinging turns and gestures, one carefully balancing the others. The forms are large and athletic, such as the Renaissance preferred, for greater gravity. Their weight is compensated by the ease with which they hold themselves and by the numerous floating and falling cherubs, playfully at home in their clouds, like so many celestial rose leaves for the crispness and lightness with which Titian’s brush has touched them in.
