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Tiziano. L’epistolario (The letters)
Edited by Lionello Puppi
Afterward by Charles Hope
(review by Marco Carminati)
Alinari Sole 24 Ore, 2012
Isbn 978 88 6302 069 4
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| Tiziano, Sacred and Profane Love, Rome, Galleria Borghese |
We are displaying
hereafter the review by Marco Carminati of the volume Tiziano. L’epistolario (“Titian.
The letters”), edited by Lionello Puppi with an afterword by Charles Hope,
published by Alinari Sole 24 Ore in 2012. The review was included in the Sunday
edition of the Italian business daily “Il Sole 24 Ore”, and notably in its Sunday cultural supplement, on 8 July
2012.
Epistolaries
Tiziano obsessed with money
Alinari 24 Ore published a new, corrected and
enriched edition of the letters, which the painter wrote and received: a
precious testimony of the life, the acquaintances and the weaknesses of the
artist
by Marco Carminati
Art works alone
often do not help us by themselves to fully grasp the personalities who made
them. Observing the most spiritual compositions by Giotto, it would be hard to
imagine that their author was, in fact, a cynical shylock who lent money and
frames extorting exorbitant interest rates. And even more, while we contemplate
the sublime Madonnas of Raphael, the last thing we could think of him is that
Sanzio was an unrepentant womanizer in his daily life, insatiable of sex to the
point that he managed to die of it: Giorgio Vasari tells us that the painter passed
away at the age of thirty-seven for hot amorous excesses.
If the real
understanding of the character of an artist can therefore not be entrusted
solely to his artistic production, what is needed, then, to better gauge the
intricacies of the personalities? The ideal would be that of preserving the writings
of every artist, as it was the case for Leonardo da Vinci, Durer or
Michelangelo. And, in particular, it would be useful to own the letters, as in
the really emblematic case of Tiziano Vecellio.
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| Tiziano, Pesaro Altarpiece, Venezia, Santa Maria dei Frari |
The highly precious letters of Titian have rekindled the limelight. Published in 1977 by Clemente Gandini at the initiative of the Magnifica Comunità di Cadore [note of the translator: a still existing, formerly Mediaeval community of the local institutions of the Cadore region, in the Dolomites] and reprinted several times until 1989, Titian’s letters were sold out since years and could not be found in the book market. Now, finally, the severe editorial gap was filled by the new edition curated by Lionello Puppi and edited by Alinari 24 Ore, at the initiative of the Veneto Region, the Magnifica Comunità di Cadore and the Foundation and Research Centre “Tiziano e Cadore” (Titian and Cadore).
It must be immediately
pointed out that this is not merely a reprint but an important, new critical
edition. For the occasion, the letters of Titian were checked one by one and
amended of any errors of transcription and location. In addition, the epistles
were enriched with new and more specific comments on the historical framework.
And, most significantly, thanks to the critical review, it was possible to include
another ten letters to the corpus assembled by Gandini. So today, adding letters
sent and received by the painter (some of which are lost but well-known thanks
to indirect evidence), the catalogue includes 279 entries. On the top of them,
three new unpublished letters have been added, written by family members of
Titian. With scrupulous care, 15 false letters and receipts have been
identified and excluded from the catalogue. The usual fools have had fun to
produce and pass them off, for the only sake of misleading and deriding the
"experts”.
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| Tiziano, Bacchus and Ariadne, Londra, National Gallery |
In face of the
new correspondence, it is natural we would ask ourselves three questions: How
did Titian write? And to whom? And which personality emerges from this his rich
correspondence?
The
afterword written by Charles Hope answers to the first question. The English
scholar reveals to us that Titian, when he wrote in his own hand, drafted
poorly and in a shaky Italian, to say the least. "Horatio - Titian wrote
to his son on 17 June 1559 - your delay to write to me was a real nuisance to
me." [Note of the translator: the original Italian contains repetitions
and sounds particularly impolite]. When he addresses the immediate family of
the painter, often the style brusquely goes straight to the point and does not
care at all either for the handwriting or the formal correctness of his
writing. But when the correspondence must reach a powerful man on earth, the
music changes abruptly. In these cases (and there are many), Titian let
professionals draft (as Giovanni Maria Verdizzotti), but we also know that some
letters were even written for him by Pietro Aretino. These are letters with elegant
and mellifluous shapes, very similar to those that the artist receives from the
chancelleries of the mighty persons to whom he is addressing.
The rank of
the interlocutors of Titian confirms us the primary role that the Venetian painter
had in the European milieu of the sixteenth century. Titian addresses letters to
and receives them from the Emperors Charles V and Ferdinand of Habsburg, the King
of Spain Philip II, Italian power holders such as Alfonso I d'Este, Isabella
d'Este, Federico Gonzaga, Guidobaldo della Rovere. He wrote to the Doge of
Venice and the Council of Ten, the caesarean administrators and the most
influential cardinals of the Curia (such as Alessandro Farnese) without
forgetting the leading intellectuals (Pietro Aretino). A special place is
occupied by all letters addressed to or received from relatives, like the children
Pomponio and Orazio and his sister Dorothy in particular.
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| Tiziano, Portrait of Carlo V with a dog, Madrid, Museo del Prado |
In all these letters there is much talk on art works, and mention is made of the activities in Titian's workshop at the Biri Grande [Note of the translator: an area of Venice]. But, if we look carefully, these are not the dominant arguments. On the contrary, the really ubiquitous topic is one: Titian’s relentless obsession with money. With him the typical and somewhat stereotyped image of an artist who is free and uninterested in money does not fit at all. From this point of view, the letters appear to us even disconcerting. Titian uses every means to collect, in the first place, the revenues promised to him by customers. But then he gets even suffocating, when he comes to soliciting pensions, sinecures, privileges and canonries for himself and his relatives. He writes and fiddles, sometimes for not paying too much tax to the Serenissima [Note of the translator: Venice], sometimes to curb the insanity of the dissolute son Pomponio, who shows to be a young man with a spendthrift. He does this through prayers, petitions, flattery, insinuations, and cunning stratagems. Using rough tone, if the recipients are members of the family, or plaintive and syrupy ones if the recipients are far more august. Paradoxically, Titian squanders a lot of money in legal fees and dissipates energy, time and serenity in attempts to recover rights that he believes to have acquired and still claims unsolved, particularly those owed to him by the King of Spain, to whom the painter has continued for decades to send art works without seeing a single penny. After having addressed the Spanish monarch a full bunch of imploring letters (they are the most numerous of all the letters), in 1574, at the end of life, Titian makes his last desperate attempt to recover money: he writes to the secretary of Philip II (and copies the letter to his son Horace) listing all works that still need to be paid. But the painter is old and is forced to admit that those twenty-five paintings listed and "sent to his Majesty several times in years are only a part and not all, as I cannot remember them all." By way of obsessively thinking about his money, Titian has finally forgotten his paintings.
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| Tiziano, Pietà, Venezia, Gallerie dell'Accademia |
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