Giorgione Part 11

"Not long afterwards he was commissioned to paint a large picture for the High Altar of the Church of the Frati Minori, where t.i.tian, quite a young man _(pur giovanetto)_, painted in oil the Virgin ascending to Heaven.... This was the first public work which he painted in oil, and he did it in a very short time, and while still a young man _(e giovanetto)_."

This phrase could hardly be applied to a man over thirty, so that t.i.tian's birth cannot reasonably be dated before 1486 or so, and is much more likely to fall later. The previous deduction that it was 1488-9 is thus further strengthened.

The evidence, then, of Dolce, writing in 1557, is clear and consistent: t.i.tian was born in 1488-9. Now let us see what is stated by Vasari, who is the next oldest authority.

The first edition of the _Lives_ appeared in 1550--that is, just prior to Dolce's _Dialogue_--but a revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1568, in which important evidence occurs as to t.i.tian's age. After enumerating certain pictures by the great Venetian, Vasari adds:

"(_a_) All these works, with many others which I omit, to avoid prolixity, have been executed up to the present age of our artist, which is above seventy-six years.... In the year 1566, when Vasari, the writer of the present history, was at Venice, he went to visit t.i.tian, as one who was his friend, and found him, although then very old, still with the pencil in his hand, and painting busily."[155]

According to Vasari, then, t.i.tian was "above seventy-six years" when the second edition of the _Lives_ was written, and as from the explicit nature of the evidence this must have been between 1566, when he visited Venice, and January 1568, when his book was published, it follows that t.i.tian was "above seventy-six years" in 1566-7--in other words, that he was born 1489-90.

Still confining ourselves to Vasari, we find two other pa.s.sages bearing on the question:

"(_b_) t.i.tian was born in the year 1480 at Cadore.[156]

"(_c_) About the year 1507 Giorgione da Castel Franco began to give to his works unwonted softness and relief, painting them in a very beautiful manner.... Having seen the manner of Giorgione, t.i.tian early resolved to abandon that of Gian Bellino, although well grounded therein. He now, therefore, devoted himself to this purpose, and in a short time so closely imitated Giorgione that his pictures were sometimes taken for those of that master.... At the time when t.i.tian began to adopt the manner of Giorgione, being then not more than eighteen, he took the portrait," etc.[157]

This pa.s.sage (_c_) makes t.i.tian "not more than eighteen about the year 1507," and fixes the date of his birth as 1489-90, therein agreeing with the previous deduction at which we arrived when examining the pa.s.sage in Vasari's second edition. Thus in two places out of three Vasari is consistent in fixing 1489-90 as the date. How, then, explain (_b_), which explicitly gives 1480?

Anyone conversant with Vasari's inaccuracies will hardly be surprised to find that this statement is dismissed by all t.i.tian's biographers as manifestly a mistake. Moreover, it is inconsistent with the two pa.s.sages just quoted, and either they are wrong or 1480 is a misprint for 1489.

Now, from the nature of the evidence recorded by Vasari, it cannot be a matter for any doubt which is the more trustworthy statement. On the one hand, he speaks as an eye-witness of t.i.tian's old age, and is careful to record the exact year he visited Venice and the age of the painter; on the other hand, he makes a bald statement which he certainly cannot have verified, and which is inconsistent with his own experience! In any case, in Vasari's text the evidence is two to one in favour of 1489-90 as the right date, and thus we come to the agreeable conclusion that our two oldest authorities, Dolce and Vasari, are at one in fixing t.i.tian's birth between 1488 and 1490--in other words, about 1489.

So far, then, all is clear, and as we know from later and indisputable evidence that t.i.tian died in 1576, it follows that he only attained the age of eighty-seven and not ninety-nine. Whence, then, comes the story of the ninety-nine years? From none other than t.i.tian himself, and to this piece of evidence we must next turn, following out a strict chronological order.

In 1571--that is, three years after Vasari's second edition was published--t.i.tian addresses a letter to Philip the Second of Spain in these terms:[158]

"Most potent and invincible King,--I think your Majesty will have received by this the picture of 'Lucretia and Tarquin' which was to have been presented by the Venetian Amba.s.sador. I now come with these lines to ask your Majesty to deign to command that I should be informed as to what pleasure it has given. The calamities of the present times, in which every one is suffering from the continuance of war, force me to this step, and oblige me at the same time to ask to be favoured with some kind proof of your Majesty's grace, as well as with some a.s.sistance from Spain or elsewhere, since I have not been able for years past to obtain any payment either from the Naples grant, or from my ordinary pension. The state of my affairs is indeed such that I do not know how to live in this my old age, devoted as it entirely is to the service of your Catholic Majesty, and to no other. Not having for eighteen years past received a _quattrino_ for the paintings which I delivered from time to time, and of which I forward a list by this opportunity to the secretary Perez, I feel a.s.sured that your Majesty's infinite clemency will cause a careful consideration to be made of the services of an old servant of the age of ninety-five, by extending to him some evidence of munificence and liberality. Sending two prints of the design of the Beato Lorenzo, and most humbly recommending myself,

"I am Your Catholic Majesty's

"most devoted, humble servant,

"t.i.tIANO VECELLIO.

"From Venice, the 1st of August, 1571."

Here, then, is t.i.tian himself, in the year 1571, declaring that he is ninety-five years of age--in other words, dating his birth back to 1476--that is, some thirteen years earlier than Dolce and Vasari imply was the case. A flagrant discrepancy of evidence! In similar strain he thus addresses the king again five years later:[159]

"Your Catholic and Royal Majesty,--The infinite benignity with which your Catholic Majesty--by natural habit--is accustomed to gratify all such as have served and still serve your Majesty faithfully, enboldens me to appear with the present (letter) to recall myself to your royal memory, in which I believe that my old and devoted service will have kept me unaltered. My prayer is this: twenty years have elapsed and I have never had any recompense for the many pictures sent on divers occasions to your Majesty; but having received intelligence from the Secretary Antonio Perez of your Majesty's wish to gratify me, and having reached a great old age not without privations, I now humbly beg that your Majesty will deign, with accustomed benevolence, to give such directions to ministers as will relieve my want. The glorious memory of Charles the Fifth, your Majesty's father, having numbered me amongst his familiar, nay, most faithful servants, by honouring me beyond my deserts with the t.i.tle of _cavaliere_, I wish to be able, with the favour and protection of your Majesty--true portrait of that immortal emperor--to support as it deserves the name of a cavaliere, which is so honoured and esteemed in the world; and that it may be known that the services done by me during many years to the most serene house of Austria have met with grateful return, to spend what remains of my days in the service of your Majesty. For this I should feel the more obliged, as I should thus be consoled in my old age, whilst praying to G.o.d to concede to your Majesty a long and happy life with increase of his divine grace and exaltation of your Majesty's Kingdom. In the meanwhile I expect from the royal benevolence of your Majesty the fruits of the favour I desire, with due reverence and humility, and kissing your sacred hands,

"I am Your Catholic Majesty's

"most humble and devoted servant,

"t.i.tIANO VECELLIO.

"From Venice, the 27th of February, 1576."

This is the last letter we have of t.i.tian, who died in August of this year, according to his own showing, in his hundredth year.

Now what reliance can be placed on this statement? On the one hand, we have the evidence of two independent writers, Dolce and Vasari, both personally acquainted with t.i.tian, and both agreeing by inference that the date of his birth was about 1489. Both had ample opportunity to get at the truth, and Vasari is particularly explicit in recording the exact date when he visited t.i.tian in Venice and the age the painter had then reached. Yet five years later t.i.tian is found stating that he is ninety-five, and not eighty-two as we should expect! Perhaps the best comment is made by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who significantly remark immediately after the last letter: "t.i.tian's appeal to the benevolence of the King of Spain looks like that of a garrulous old gentleman proud of his longevity, but hoping still to live for many years."[160]

Exactly! The occasion could well be improved by a little timely exaggeration well calculated to appeal to the sympathies and "infinite benignity" of the monarch, and if, when the writer had actually reached the respectable age of eighty-two, he wrote himself down as ninety-five, who would gainsay him? It added point to his appeal--that was the chief thing--and as to accuracy, well, t.i.tian was not the man to be over-scrupulous when his own interests were involved. But even though the statement were not deliberately made to heighten the effect of an appeal, we must in any case make allowances for the natural p.r.o.neness to exaggerate their age which usually characterises men of advanced years, so that any _ex parte_ statement of this kind must be received with due caution. Where, moreover, as in the present case, we have evidence of a directly contradictory kind furnished by independent witnesses, whose declarations in this respect are presumably disinterested, such _ex parte_ statements are on the face of them unreliable. The balance of evidence in this case appears to rest on the side of the older historians, Dolce and Vasari, whose statements, as I hold, are in the circ.u.mstances more reliable than the picturesque exaggeration of a man of advanced years.

I claim, therefore, that any account of t.i.tian's life based solely on such flimsy evidence as to his age as is found in this letter to Philip the Second is, to say the least, open to grave doubt. The whole superstructure raised by modern writers on this uncertain foundation is full of flaws and incongruities, and I am fully persuaded the future historian will have to begin _de novo_ in any attempt at a chronological reconstruction of t.i.tian's career. The gap of thirty-five years down to 1511 may prove after all less by twelve or thirteen years than people think, so that the young t.i.tian naturally enough first emerges into view at the age of twenty-two and not thirty-five.

But we must not antic.i.p.ate results, for there is still the evidence of the later writers of the seventeenth century to consider. Two of these declare that t.i.tian was born in 1477. The first of these, Tizianello, a collateral descendant of the great painter, published his little _Compendio_ in 1622, wherein he gives a sketchy and imperfect biography; the other, Ridolfi, repeats the date in his _Meraviglie dell' Arte_, published in 1648. The latter writer is notoriously unreliable in other respects, and it is quite likely this is merely an instance of copying from Tizianello, whose unsupported statement is chiefly of value as showing that the "centenarian" theory had started within fifty years of t.i.tian's death. But again we ask: Why should the evidence of a seventeenth-century writer be preferred to the personal testimony of those who actually knew t.i.tian himself, especially when Vasari gives us precise information with which Dolce's independent account is in perfect agreement? No doubt the great age to which t.i.tian certainly attained was exaggerated in the next generation after his death, but it is a remarkable fact that the contemporary eulogies, mostly in poetic form, which appeared on the occasion of his decease, do not allude to any such phenomenal longevity.[161]

Nevertheless, Ridolfi's statement that t.i.tian was born in 1477 is commonly quoted as if there were no better and earlier evidence in existence, and, indeed, it is a matter of surprise that conscientious modern biographers have not looked more carefully at the original authorities instead of being content to follow tradition, and I must earnestly plead for a reconsideration of the question of t.i.tian's age by the future historians of Venetian painting.[162]

If, as I believe, t.i.tian was born in or about 1489 instead of 1476-7, it follows that he must have been Giorgione's junior by at least twelve years--a most important deduction--and it also follows that he cannot have produced any work of consequence before, say, 1505, at the age of sixteen, and he will have died at eighty-seven and not in his hundredth year. The alteration in date would help to explain the silence of all records about him before 1511, when he would have been only twenty-two and not thirty-five years old; it would fully account for his name not being mentioned by Durer in his famous letter of 1506, wherein he refers to the painters of Venice, and it would equally account for the absence of his name from the commission to paint the Fondaco frescoes in 1507-8, for he would have been employed simply as Giorgione's young a.s.sistant.

The fact that in 1511 he signs himself simply "Io tician di Cador Dpntore" and not _Maestro_ would be more intelligible in a young man of twenty-two than in an accomplished master of thirty-five, and the character of his letter addressed to the Senate in 1513 would be more natural to an ambitious aspirant of twenty-four than to a man in his maturity of thirty-seven.[163]

Such are some of the obvious results of a change of date, but the larger question as to the development of t.i.tian's art must be left to the future historian, for the importance of fixing a date lies in the application thereof.[164] HERBERT COOK.

THE DATE OF t.i.tIAN'S BIRTH

_Reply by Dr. Georg Gronau. Translated from the "Repertorium fur Kunstwissenschaft," vol. xxiv., 6th part_

In the January number of the _Nineteenth Century_ appears an article by Herbert Cook under the t.i.tle, "Did t.i.tian live to be Ninety-Nine Years Old?" The interrogation already suggests that the author comes to a negative conclusion. It is, perhaps, not without interest to set forth the reasons advanced by the English connoisseur and to submit them to adverse criticism.

(Here follows an abstract of the article.)

The reasoning, as will have been seen, is not altogether free from doubt. It has been usual hitherto in historical investigations to call in question the a.s.sertions of a man about his own life only when thoroughly weighty reasons justified such a course. Is the evidence of a Dolce and of a Vasari so free from all objection that it outweighs t.i.tian's personal statement? Before answering this question it should be pointed out that we possess two further statements of contemporary writers on the subject of t.i.tian's age, statements which have escaped the notice of Mr. Cook. One is to be found in a letter from the Spanish Consul in Venice, Thomas de Cornoga, to Philip II., dated 8th December 1567 (published in the very important work by Zarco del Valle[165]).

After informing the king of t.i.tian's usual requests on the subject of his pension, and so on, he continues: "y con los 85 annos de su edad servira a V.M. hasta la muerte."

Somewhere, then, in the very year in which t.i.tian, according to Vasari, was "above seventy-six years of age," he seems to have been eighty-five, according to the report of another and quite independent witness, and if so, he would have been born about 1482.

We have then three definite statements:

Vasari (1566 or 1567) says "over 76"

The Consul (1567) " "85"

t.i.tian himself (1571) " "95"

This new information, instead of helping us, only serves to make still greater confusion.

The other piece of evidence not mentioned by Mr. Cook was written only a few years after t.i.tian's death. Borghini says in his _Riposo_, 1584: "Mori ultimamente di vecchiezza (!not, then, of the plague?), essendo d'eta d'anni 98 o 99, l'anno 1576." ... This is the first time that the traditional statement as to the master's age appears in literature. In this state of things it is worth while to look closer into the evidence of Dolce and Vasari to see if they are not after all the most trustworthy witnesses.

It is always held to be a mistake to take rather vague statements quite literally, as Mr. Cook has done, and to build thereon further conclusions. When Dolce says that t.i.tian painted with Giorgione at the Fondaco, "non avendo egli allora appena venti anni," he is only trying to make out that his hero, here as everywhere, was a most unusual person (the whole dialogue is a glorification of the master). For the same reason he makes the following remark, which we can absolutely prove to be false:--the a.s.sumption (he says) "fu la prima opera pubblica, che a olio facesse." Now at least one work of t.i.tian's was, then, already to be seen in a public place--viz. the "St. Mark Enthroned, with Four Saints," in Santo Spirito, afterwards removed to the sacristy of the Salute. In other points, too, Dolce can be convicted of small errors and misrepresentations, partly on literary grounds, partly due to his desire to enhance the praise of t.i.tian.

Vasari, again, should only be cited as witness when he speaks of works of art which he has actually seen. In such a case, apart from slips, he is always a trustworthy guide. Directly, however, he goes into biographical details or questions of chronology accuracy becomes nearly always a secondary matter. t.i.tian's biography offers an excellent and most instructive example of this. Vasari mentions first the birth and upbringing of the boy, then he speaks of Giorgione and the Fondaco frescoes, and goes on: "dopo la quale opera fece un quadro grande che oggi e nella salla di messer Andrea Loredano.... Dopo in casa di messer Giovanni D'Anna ... fece il suo ritratto ...; ed un quadro di Ecce h.o.m.o, ..." and he goes on, "L'anno poi 1507...." If it had not been that one of these pictures, once in the possession of Giovanni D'Anna, had been preserved (now in the Vienna Gallery), and that it bears in a conspicuous place the date 1543, it would be recorded in all biographies of t.i.tian that he painted in 1507 an "Ecce h.o.m.o" for this Giovanni D'Anna.

If one goes further into Vasari's account we read that t.i.tian published his "Triumph of Faith" in 1508. "Dopo condottosi Tiziano a Vicenza, dipinse a fresco sotto la loggetta ... il giudizio di Salamone. Appresso tomato a Venezia, dipinse la facciata de' Grimani; e in Padoa nella chiesa di Sant' Antonio alcune storie ... de fatti di quel santo: e in quella di Santo Spirito fece ... un San Marco a sedere in mezzo a certi Santi." We now know on doc.u.mentary evidence that the Vicenza fresco (which was destroyed later) dated from 1521, and similarly that the frescoes at Padua were painted in 1511, whilst the date of the S. Mark picture may be fixed with probability at 1504.

These examples prove how inexact Vasari is here once more. But it may be objected, supposing that he is inaccurate in statements which refer back, can he not be in the right in a case where he comes back, so to speak, straight from visiting t.i.tian and writes down his observation about the master's actual age? To be sure; but when we find that so many other similar notices of Vasari are wrong, even those that refer to people whom he personally knew, we lose faith altogether. In turning over the leaves of the sixth volume of the Sansoni edition of Vasari, in which only his contemporaries, some of them closely connected, too, with him, are spoken of, we find the following incorrect statements:--

P. 99. Tribolo was 65 years old (in reality only 50).

P. 209. Bugiardini died at 75 (really 79).