Two portraits which were both painted within the year 1545 show Titian at the parting of the ways. The Aretino, in the Pitti Palace, the even finer sketch being in the Frick Collection, New York, Figure [276], reveals the truculent and sensual man of letters in all his formidable massiveness. The satin and velvets in which he is clad are painted lightly but with fullest regard for their textures and material beauty. Titian liked Aretino and had profited by his bitter and venal pen. So without emphasizing Aretino’s effrontery and brutality Titian brings out his resolute intelligence.
In the portraits of Paul III, Figure [277], especially in that scene where the decrepit Pope muses craftily between two smooth flatterers and traitors, his own kinsmen, the sinister air seems filled with contesting wills. A veil of atmosphere interposes itself before the figures. The touch is light, contrasts are evaded, materials count for very little, there is no copying of rich surfaces. Even the color is reduced to tones of gray merely warmed with reds or cooled with blues.
Fig. 276. Titian. Pietro Aretino.—Frick Coll., N. Y.
Fig. 277. Titian. Paul III and his Nephews.—Naples.
In its tremulous psychology, in its reticence, in its substitute of richly broken monochrome for a gamut of real color, this picture is a kind of negation of everything Titian had attained. His remaining thirty years were given to ideals which are no longer bounded by the Venetian lagoon, but are as broad perhaps and indeterminate as the modern imagination itself. Before exploring this mystery of Titian’s renovation of his art at seventy, and since his Venetian style has closed, we may do well to consider some of his contemporaries at Venice and in Lombardy.
Sebastiano del Piombo[[80]] was born at Venice in 1487, and like most of his generation emulated the smouldering harmonies of Giorgione. He paints such admirable portraits as the so-called Fornarina, at Florence, which long passed for a Raphael. He soon passes from the lyrism of Giorgione to a dramatic mode quite his own. He was called to Rome, made keeper of the Papal Seal, became an executant of Michelangelo’s designs, and thus indulged a losing rivalry with Raphael. He commands a heavy dignity in his male portraits, and in his various pictures of the Dead Christ and Mary, attains a robust and telling pathos. Down to his death, in 1547, he maintained a tradition of Giorgionesque color in the alien air of Rome, and represented something of the gravity of the Venetian Renaissance in a city rapidly giving itself to sensationalism.
Fig. 278. Palma Vecchio. Adoration of the Shepherds.—Louvre.