In 1533, Titian, by command, met the Emperor Charles V at Augsburg, was promptly made a knight and later a count palatine. From now on he was much employed by the Emperor and his son Philip. With that relationship a change begins to come over his art. He becomes less exuberant, more official and objective. Titian at sixty has said almost every possible thing on his own account, and is content for a space to be observer and recorder of the stately world about him. We have descriptions of him at this time, maintaining a princely hospitality in his palace, and declining to share the dissipations which he willingly provided for such loose-living friends as Francesco Sansovino and Pietro Aretino.
He strangely depoetizes himself. The change comes somewhere about 1536, and a notable evidence of it is in the portrait of a lady in peacock blue velvet, in the Pitti. Posterity has agreed to call her simply La Bella, and so impersonal a style well befits her impassive beauty. Materially Titian has never painted more exquisitely, but it has become a painting of surfaces. The appeal is vague, general, social, there are no personal intimations, merely a magnificent statement of entirely obvious perfections.
Again Titian is content to be the mere painter in the so-called Venus of Urbino, Figure [274]. It was painted about 1538, and is in the Uffizi. Evidently the sleeping Venus of Giorgione is in Titian’s mind, but what a loss in awaking her! Titian sees the gracious forms for what they are of nacreous light and rosy shadow, he sees the room for what it is in distribution of curtained interior and alcove space irradiated by morning light. He studies curiously the delicate nuances of bluer sheet and creamier skin, he models out the slender body with faintest investment of almost imperceptible shadow. In short, he is just a painter, but what a painter he is!
Fig. 274. Titian. Venus of Urbino.—Pitti.
About the same time he did the official portraits of Eleonora and Federigo Gonzaga. He treats them as grandees. They are imposing, almost pompous, every inch the prince and princess. He sees with a courtier’s eye, and gives to official portraiture that impersonal cast which it has since only too faithfully retained. He revives the great traditions of Venetian narrative painting. The great wall painting, in the Ducal Palace, of the Imperial Victory at Cadore has perished. Old copies and engravings tell us of its energy, picturesqueness and panoramic breadth. Fortunately the great mural canvas, finished in 1538 and representing Mary entering the Temple, is still in its place; for the old School of the Carità has become the Academy. In this picture Titian realizes all that the Veronese and Venetian painters from Altichiero down had sought for. Like his predecessors, he is chiefly spectacular, subordinating character, but he attains a monumental breadth which they never remotely glimpsed. The scheme is worked out in magnificent oblongs varied by triangular forms which repeat the motive of the steps. The chief narrative motives, the childish determination of the Virgin, the gracious expectancy of the high priest, the admiration of the women below, hold their own amazingly in the vast space. The surface sings with color. The painting was affixed to the wall in 1538, fully ten years before Paolo Veronese had made this sort of pageantry his special domain.
Almost as dispassionate is the great canvas, depicting Christ before the People (1543), at Vienna. It becomes less an expression of the submission of Christ than an exaltation of the Imperial power that has him in charge and of the mob spirit that cries for his blood. The architectural surroundings are magnificent. There are wonderful details, as in the howling boy at the left and the white form of a girl caught in the throng. Her sudden apparition as an element of relief and mystery anticipates by nearly a century a similar device in Rembrandt’s Night Watch.
Very characteristic in its patrician decorum is The Disciples at Emmaus, in the Louvre, Figure [275], which was painted about 1545. Here there is no intensity in the moment of surprise and revelation. Benignly the Christ breaks bread; reverently and without excitement the disciples give him his due worship. All the homeliness and surprise that are in St. Luke’s narrative, and that Rembrandt later emphasized, have been leveled out in the interest of discretion and nobility. The disciples show no more enthusiasm than a Venetian dignitary and prelate should.
Fig. 275. The Supper at Emmaus.—Louvre.