Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/435

Rh and in the personal tendency of each to look after practical success and " the main chance " rather than to work out aspirations and pursue ideals. Titian had a favourite villa on the neighbouring Manza Hill, from which (it may be inferred) he made his chief observations of landscape form and effect. The so-called Titian's mill, constantly discernible in his studies, is at Collontola, near Belluno. A visit was paid to Rome in 1546, when he obtained the freedom of the city, his immediate predecessor in that honour having been Michelangelo in 1537. He could at the same time have succeeded the painter Fra Sebastiano in his lucrative office of the piombo, and he made no scruple of becoming a friar for the purpose; but this project lapsed through his being summoned away from Venice in 1547 to paint Charles V. and others in Augsburg. He was there again in 1550, and executed the portrait of Philip II., which was sent to England and proved a potent auxiliary in the suit of the prince for the hand of Queen Mary. In the preceding year Vecelli had affianced his daughter Lavinia, the beautiful girl whom he loved deeply and painted various times, to Cornelio Sarcinelli of Serravalle; she had succeeded her aunt Orsa, now deceased, as the manager of the household, which, with the lordly in come that Titian made by this time, was placed on a cor responding footing. The marriage took place in 1554. She died in childbirth in 1560. The years 1551 and 1552 were among those in which Titian worked least assiduously, a circumstance which need excite no surprise in the case of a man aged about seventy-five. He was at the council of Trent towards 1 555, of which his admirable picture or finished sketch in the Louvre bears record. He was never in Spain, notwithstanding the many statements which have been made in the affirmative. Titian's friend Aretino died suddenly in 1556, and another close inti mate, the sculptor and architect Sansovino, in 1570. With his European fame, and many sources of wealth, Vecelli is the last man one would suppose to have been under the necessity of writing querulous and dunning letters for pay ment, especially when the defaulter addressed was lord of Spain and of the American Indies; yet he had constantly to complain that his pictures remained unpaid for and his pensions in arrear, and in the very year of his death (February) he recites the many pictures which he had sent within the preceding twenty years without receiving their price. In fact, there is ground for thinking that all his pensions and privileges, large as they were nominally, brought in but precarious returns. It has been pointed out that in the summer of 1566 (when he was elected into the Florentine academy) he made an official declaration of his income, and put down the various items apparently below their value, not naming at all his salary or pensions. Possibly there was but too much reason for the omission. In September 1565 Titian went to Cadore and designed the decorations for the church at Pieve, partly executed by his pupils. One of these is a Transfiguration, another an Annunciation (now in S. Salvatore, Venice), inscribed " Titianus fecit fecit," by way of protest (it is said) against the disparagement of some persons who cavilled at the veteran's failing handicraft. He continued to accept com missions to the last. He had selected as the place for his burial the chapel of the Crucifix in the church of the Frari; and, in return for a grave, he offered the Franciscans a picture of the Pieta, representing himself and his son Orazio before the Saviour, another figure in the composition being a sibyl. This work he nearly finished; but some differences arose regarding it, and he then settled to be interred in his native Pieve. Titian was ninety-nine years of age (more or less) when the plague, which was then raging in Venice, seized him, and carried him off on 27th August 1576. He was buried in the church of the Frari, as at first intended, and his Pieta was finished by Palma Giovane. He lies near his own famous painting, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. No memorial marked his grave, until by Austrian command Canova executed the monument so well known to sightseers. Immediately after Titian's own death, his son and pictorial assistant Orazio died of the same epidemic. His sumptuous mansion was plundered during the plague by thieves, who prowled about, scarce controlled.

Titian was a man of correct features and handsome person, with an uncommon air of penetrating observation and self-possessed composure, a Venetian presence worthy to pair with any of those " most potent, grave, and reverend signers " whom his pencil has. transmitted to posterity. He was highly distinguished, courteous, and winning hi society, personally unassuming, and a fine speaker, enjoying (as is said by Vasari, who saw him in the spring of 1566) health and prosperity unequalled. The numerous heads currently named Titian's Mistress might dispose us to regard the painter as a man of more than usually relaxed morals; the fact is, however, that these titles are mere fancy-names, and no inference one way or the other can be drawn from them. He gave splendid entertain ments at times; and it is related that, when Henry III. of France passed through Venice on his way from Poland to take the French throne, he called on Titian with a train of nobles, and the painter presented him as a gift with all the pictures of which he inquired the price. He was not a man of universal genius or varied faculty and accomplishment, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; his one great and supreme endowment was that of painting.

Ever since Titian rose into celebrity the general verdict has been that he is the greatest of painters, considered technically. In the first place neither the method of fresco painting nor work of the colossal scale to which fresco painting ministers is here in question. Titian's province is that of oil painting, and of painting on a scale which, though often large and grand, is not colossal either in dimension or in inspiration. Titian may properly be regarded as the greatest manipulator of paint in relation to colour, tone, luminosity, richness, texture, surface, and harmony, and with a view to the production of a pictorial whole conveying to the eye a true, dignified, and beautiful impression of its general subjectmatter and of the objects of sense which form its constituent parts. In this sense Titian has never been deposed from his sovereignty in painting, nor can one forecast the time in which he will be deposed. For the complex of qualities which we sum up in the words colour, handling, and general force and harmony of effect, he stands unmatched, although in particular items of forcible or impressive execution not to speak of creative invention some painters, one in one respect and another in another, may indisput ably be preferred to him. He carried to its acme that great colourist conception of the Venetian school of which the first masterpieces are due to the two Bellini, to Carpaccio, and, with more fully deve loped suavity of manner, to Giorgione. Pre-eminent inventive power or sublimity of intellect he never evinced. Even in energy of action and more especially in majesty or affluence of composition the palm is not his; it is (so far as concerns the Venetian school) assignable to Tintoretto. Titian is a painter who by wondrous magic of genius and of art satisfies the eye, and through the eye the feelings, sometimes the mind.

Titian's pictures abound with memories of his home-country and of the region which led from the hill -summits of Cadore to the queen -city of the Adriatic. He was almost the first painter toexhibit an appreciation of mountains, mainly those of a turreted type, exemplified in the Dolomites. Indeed he gave to landscape generally a new and original vitality, expressing the quality of the objects of nature and their control over the sentiments and ima gination with a force that had never before been approached. The earliest Italian picture expressly designated as "landscape" was. one which Vecelli sent in 1552 to Philip II. His productive faculty was immense, even when we allow for the abnormal length of his professional career. In Italy, England, and elsewhere more than a thousand pictures figure as Titian's; of these about 250 may be regarded as dubious or spurious. There are, for instance, 9 pictures in the London National Gallery, 18 in the Louvre, 16 in the Pitti, 18 in the Uffizi, 7 in the Naples museum, 8 in the Venetian academy (besides the series in the private meeting -hall), and 41 in the Madrid museum.

Naturally a good deal of attention has been given by artists, connoisseurs, and experts to probing the secret of how Titian managed to obtain such astonishing results in colour and surface. The upshot of this research is but meagre; the secret seems to be not so much one of workmanship as of faculty. His figures were put in with the brush dipped in a brown solution, and then altered and worked up as his intention developed. The later pictures were-