Famous European Artists

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

Another person who greatly influenced the early life of Titian was Palma Vecchio of Bergamo, eminent for his portraits of women. Perhaps there was a special bond between these two men, for it is asserted that Titian loved Palma's beautiful daughter, Violante. Palma had three daughters, whom he frequently painted; one picture, now at Dresden, shows Violante in the centre between her two sisters; another, St. Barbara in the church of Santa Maria Formosa in Venice, Palma's masterpiece, and still another, Violante, at Vienna, with a violet in her bosom.

Titian's earliest works were a fresco of Hercules, on the front of the Morosini Palace; a Madonna, now in the Vienna Belvedere, which shows genuine feeling with careful finish; and portraits of his parents, now lost. His first important work was painted about the year 1500, when he was twenty-three, "Sacred and Profane Love," now in the Borghese Palace at Rome.

Eaton says of this, "Out of Venice there is nothing of Titian's to compare to his 'Sacred and Profane Love.'... Description can give no idea of the consummate beauty of this composition. It has all Titian's matchless warmth of coloring, with a correctness of design no other painter of the Venetian school ever attained. It is nature, but not individual nature; it is ideal beauty in all its perfection, and breathing life in all its truth, that we behold."

Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who have studied the more than one thousand pictures to which the name of Titian is attached, say in their life of the great painter, "The scene is laid in a pleasure ground surrounded by landscape, swathed in the balmy atmosphere of an autumnal evening. A warm glow is shed over hill, dale, and shore, and streaks of gray cloud alternate with bands of light in a sunset sky. To the right, in the distance, a church on an island, and a clump of cottages on a bend of land, bathed by the waters of the sea; and two horsemen on a road watch their hounds coursing a hare. To the left a block of buildings and a tower half illumined by a ray of sun crown the hillside, where a knight with his lance rides to meet a knot of villagers.

"Nearer to the foreground, and at measured intervals, saplings throw their branches lightly on the sky, which, nearer still, is intercepted in the centre of the space by a group of rich-leaved trees, rising fan-like behind the marble trough of an antique fountain. Enchanting lines of hill and plain, here in shadow, there in light, lead us to the foreground, where the women sit on a lawn watered by the stream that issues from the fountain, and rich in weeds that shoot forked leaves and spikes out of the grass.

"Artless (Sacred) Love, on one side, leans, half-sitting, on the ledge of the trough, a crystal dish at her side, symbolizing her thoughts. Her naked figure, slightly veiled by a length of muslin, is relieved upon a silken cloth hanging across the arm, and helping to display a form of faultless shape and complexion. The left hand holds aloft the vase and emblematic incense of love; the right, resting on the ledge, supports the frame as the maiden turns, with happy earnestness, to gaze at her companion. She neither knows nor cares to heed that Cupid is leaning over the hinder ledge of the fountain and plashing in the water.... Not without coquetry, or taste for sparkling color, the chestnut hair of the naked maiden is twisted in a rose-colored veil; the cloth at her loins is of that golden white which sets off so well the still more golden whiteness of her skin. The red silk falling from her arm, and partly waving in the air, is of that crimson tone which takes such wonderful carminated changes in the modulations of its surface, and brings out by its breaks the more uniform pearl of the flesh."

To this figure of Sacred Love, into which the young painter evidently put his heart, he gave the beautiful and half-pensive face of Violante. Did he intend thus to immortalize her, while he immortalized himself? Very likely.

"Sated (Profane) Love sits to the left, her back resolutely turned towards Cupid, her face determined, haughty, but serene; her charms veiled in splendid dress, her very hands concealed in gloves.... A plucked rose fades unheeded by the sated one's side, and a lute lies silent under her elbow.... She seems so grand in her lawns and silks; her bosom is fringed with such delicate cambric; her waist and skirt, so finely draped in satin of gray reflexes; the red girdle, with its jewelled clasp, the rich armlets, the bunch of roses in her gloved hand, all harmonize so perfectly."

For the next six or seven years, while Venice was engaged in wars with the French and the Turks, little is known of the young Titian, save that he must have been growing in fame, as he painted the picture of the infamous Cæsar Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI., Jacopo da Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos, who had charge of the Papal squadron against the Turks, and other paintings, now lost. The picture of Pesaro was owned by Charles I. of England. In 1825 William I., King of the Netherlands, presented it to the city of Antwerp, where it is highly prized.

In 1507 the State of Venice engaged Giorgione to fresco the new Fondaco de' Tedeschi, a large public structure for the use of foreign merchants, which had two halls, eighty rooms, and twenty-six warehouses. A portion of this work was transferred to Titian. Above the portal in the southern face of the building, Titian painted a "Judith," the figure of a woman seated on the edge of a stone plinth, in front of a stately edifice. In her right hand she waves a sword, while with her left foot she tramples on a lifeless head. Two other grand frescos were painted by him, all now despoiled by the northern or "Tramontana" winds.