27/05/2009

Old Masters at War

By Theodore K Rabb, The  Times Literary Supplement

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese - great Venetian artists but also great rivals, full of Venetian ruthlessness

Soothed by the waters lapping against the swaying gondolas, ravished by the mist-shrouded views of towers and domes, the visitor to Venice is soon ready to accept her nickname, La Serenissima. But the truth is that there is no place on earth whose fate and achievements owe more to fierce hostilities, to bitter competition, to ruthless struggles for survival and supremacy. Venice is the ultimate Darwinian city. Sharp elbows were second nature to its Renaissance patricians, and throughout the society animosities and feuds were endemic. Even a distinguished man of letters and a cardinal, Pietro Bembo, lost the use of a finger in a street fight over a lawsuit. Lower down the social scale, two factions regularly scheduled violent encounters on the city's bridges. The dark vision of James Fenimore Cooper's Bravo is no travesty of a quarrelsome, intrigue-ridden republic. And the competitive instinct served Venice well as she swept rivals aside to establish her wealth, dominance of the Aegean, rule of northern Italy, and presence throughout the eastern Mediterranean.

What about the arts? Here, surely, the nickname is earned as we contemplate the rich colours, calm figures, charming pets and sunny landscapes that fill Venetian canvases. Yet that, too, is an illusion. It is true that, for the practitioners of some kinds of art history, there are no exemplars of high achievement more worthy of close attention than the Bellinis, Giorgione, Titian or Veronese. Their work yields instructive insights into aesthetic standards, mastery of conception and technique, originality and the elements of creativity. That, however, is to respond to paintings, not to painters. As soon as one tries to understand personalities - how they went about their tasks, what they were aiming to do, how they earned their living, and why they behaved as they did - an entirely different set of questions arises, and the connections with the city's other inhabitants become salient and vivid.

The purpose of the remarkable exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is to elucidate this context: the competitiveness that inspired the achievements of even the greatest artists. An adroitly positioned display of fifty-four canvases convinces us that, in this respect, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were unmistakably Venetian. What is astonishing is that this is the first exhibition to approach them in this way, despite Vasari and modern accounts such as Rona Goffen's pioneering Renaissance Rivals (2002). We know about the protean Picasso, and his uneasy connections with Braque, Matisse and others. But the old masters?

The emblematic story in the relationship of these three artists, mentioned more than once in the exhibition catalogue, took place in early June 1564. One of the rich and powerful charities of Venice, the Scuola San Rocco, was determined to make a splash by commissioning the finest decorations for its magnificent headquarters. Accordingly, a competition was announced for the oval canvas at the centre of the ceiling of the albergo, the room where the Board met. As was customary, the finalists (Tintoretto, Salviati, Zuccaro and Veronese) were asked to come to the albergo with drawings of their proposed entries, which the assembled Board would judge. The four competitors appeared with their drawings, except for Tintoretto, who, when asked for his design, had the cardboard covering the ceiling removed to reveal his finished painting, "St Roch in Glory", in situ. Thanks to an accomplice on the Board, he had been able to install it secretly a few days earlier. To complete his triumph, he offered the picture to the confraternity as a donation, which they were bound to accept (though twenty of fifty-one Board members still voted against it - another reflection of the factions that swirled through the city). The consequences of this episode dazzle us to this day: the vast array of Tintorettos throughout the Scuola, of which he became a member, and particularly the enormous "Crucifixion" in the albergo, which Ruskin and others have considered the finest painting ever made.

Where the exhibition is concerned, however, this is merely one of many dramatic instances of the aggressiveness of the city's artistic community. One might have thought that Titian, by far the oldest of the trio on display in Boston, and famous throughout Europe by the time the others emerged in the late 1540s, would have been above such contrivances. But no. The Boston show begins with his training in the studio of Giovanni Bellini (two Bellinian panels are the only works not by the three protagonists), to show how, from the start, he added movement and emotion to his artistic inheritance. We then jump thirty years to the period of nearly four decades when he overlapped with Tintoretto and Veronese. By then, his competitive instincts were well honed. A perfect example is the altarpiece he painted for San Giovanni Elimosinario, a small church near the Rialto. This was newly built, and while Titian was out of the city in the 1530s, one of his contemporaries, Pordenone, began to decorate the interior, notably with a large portrait of three saints which survives to this day. Titian's altarpiece was not just a pious gesture, but an attempt to outshine Pordenone. Decades later, he intruded into Veronese's church, San Sebastiano, with a St Nicholas that is still the first painting the visitor sees.

Small wonder that Titian kept a sharp eye on Tintoretto and Veronese as they began to compete for commissions. Their talent was obvious, and in Tintoretto's case married to a naked ambition and an ability to work at furious speed that clearly alarmed the older man. Veronese was a gentler figure, so it was not surprising that, when tenders went out for the decoration of the ceiling in the new Marciana Library, Titian made sure that Tintoretto was excluded and that Veronese won the prize for the best contribution. This story, too, appears more than once in the catalogue, and it is interesting to see how differently the contributors view Tintoretto's aggression. For the show's curator, Frederick Ilchman, an expert on Tintoretto, adjectives such as "assured", "bold", "defiant", even "brazen", reflect a profound admiration. Patricia Brown, by contrast, dryly notes that, after installing some paintings for the Duke of Mantua, Tintoretto "characteristically . . . sought (without success) to replace the court artist . . . with himself". And Linda Borean refers to him as the "enfant terrible" of the trio. In other words, there was no escaping Tintoretto's overabundant creative presence. Mark Twain spoke of being taken aback by the "acres of Tintorettos" in Venice, but recognition of his genius was, and is, unavoidable.

A major merit of the Boston exhibition is that it tames this hyperactivity in order to show its effects. Thus the installation of a ceiling canvas once owned by Aretino in the Museum's own ceiling gives one a sense of Tintoretto's range but serves also as a reminder of how the artist could rub people up the wrong way. Aretino bought the painting while Titian was away from Venice, but did not repeat the mistake after experiencing his friend's fury on his return to the city. One can also imagine what Titian must have said when he saw how Tintoretto had refashioned one of his own most famous works, an expansive "Presentation of the Virgin", now in the Accademia, which showed the little girl climbing a long stairway. The younger man's version, in the church of Madonna dell'Orto, was tight, angled and dramatic, dominated by the staircase, and with an entirely different feel to it. Tintoretto may have been a difficult colleague, but the results of the rivalries he relished were paintings of grace, elegance, power and insight.
 
It seems invidious to pick out just a few of the juxtapositions that the show uses to illuminate its central themes, but one cannot do equal justice to some two dozen revelatory pairings. A few will have to do. Perhaps the most striking is what Frederick Ilchman calls the nude and the mirror. The Titian prototype, Washington's "Venus with a Mirror", provides the catalogue cover and the emblem of the entire show. Hung next to it is Veronese's extraordinary response, also "Venus with a Mirror", from Nebraska. Where Titian has the half-nude goddess seen from the front, Veronese has her in almost the same pose, but seen from the rear. The result is an awkwardness in the twist of her head that seems almost painful, yet it is clear that Veronese's aim was to demonstrate his comparable mastery of lush flesh and crimson drapery. Tintoretto's nude with a mirror is Susannah, and we do not see her reflection, but we do see the full body, drapery and a creamy, shadowed skin that proclaims itself the equal of anything Titian or Veronese could produce.

Nearby, alongside one another, are three versions of the Supper at Emmaus. Titian's was famous for the exactitude of the objects on the table - almost Dutch in their precision - and for its shimmering tablecloth. For much of its history it was called "The Tablecloth". When Tintoretto painted his version, he kept the column behind Christ's head to emphasize his central position, but he realized he could not match Titian's mastery of the objects on the table, and instead of a dog on the floor he put a cat. To make his mark, though, he set the figures in almost violent motion. Gone was the stunned surprise as Christ was recognized; instead there is movement, action and outflung arms. Veronese, gentler and more approachable, left the column in place, but now focused all attention on a heaven-gazing Christ. He makes more of an effort than Tintoretto did to render the tablecloth, but the stamp he puts on the subject is the figure of a little girl, looking out at the viewer and embracing the inevitable dog.

Similar competitive dialogues pervade the exhibition. There are three St Jeromes in the wilderness. Three women with just a touch of drapery face grave peril: two Lucretias and an Andromeda facing a remarkable Veronese monster who would do a horror movie proud. In every case there are echoes of predecessors' compositions and conceptions. The same is true of depictions of children with large dogs, of portraits, of figures in armour, of floating saints and divinities, and of goddesses as symbols of love and fertility. The show has both Titian's "Venus and Adonis" and Veronese's "Venus and Mars", embodiments of the female form clinging to a lover, but not the third in the trio, Tintoretto's "Origins of the Milky Way", in which a nude Juno arises from the same red drapery as Jupiter approaches with the baby Hercules.

The artists' competitiveness did not end with their deaths. Alongside the catalogue essays by Ilchman and Brown on the rivalry and the forms of their patronage is an essay by Linda Borean on the collectors who bought the trio's works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is a story that shows how patrons' preferences, crossconnections and reputation affected the fate of the paintings over the decades that followed. And it is, in essence, brought up to date by Nicholas Penny's meticulous and comprehensive catalogue of the Venetian paintings of 1540-1600 in the National Gallery in London. The three artists and their imitators take up nearly 300 pages in a 440-page publication, a massive compilation - and a testimony to their continuing appeal.

There are, of course, other major figures at the National Gallery in London, notably the Bassanos, Paris Bordone and Palma Giovane. Yet Palma's "Mars and Venus", seen in the wake of the Boston exhibition, looks primarily like an extension of the themes laid out there. Nevertheless, on their own terms the National Gallery paintings offer a sumptuous window on to Venice's Golden Age. Penny's catalogue provides not only a complete understanding of the physical presence of each painting, but also of its content. The erudition is encyclopedic and the illustrations lavish; excellent reproductions of drawings, details, analogous works and sources add conviction to the arguments. If one were to single out an entry, it would have to be the thirty pages on Titian's "Vendramin Family", which are so rich in information about the identities of the subjects, their clothes, the different hands that worked on the canvas, the nature of the composition and its details, the meaning of the work in the family's history, and the fate of the painting in subsequent centuries, that they transform one's understanding of the picture.

Readers will find their own pleasures in this assemblage, but I was struck, in particular, by the discussions of provenance. Here, the history of reputations and collecting comes to life. The British aristocracy of course looms large, as does the twentieth-century erosion of their holdings, to the notable benefit of the gallery. But there are also glimpses of Philip II of Spain, Queen Christina of Sweden, and members of other royal families, not to mention the Bonapartes. In one journey, Bassano's "Road to Calvary" entered the English royal collection and then departed when it served as a bribe. Such details crop up regularly, and make The Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings a treasure-house for browsing and understanding some of the gallery's most memorable canvases.

At the end of this immersion in the art of Venice's Golden Age, a pair of images remains in the mind. Both are in the Boston show, but their subject matter is unique: two self-portraits by Tintoretto. The first, done in his late twenties, shows the burning, piercing intensity that characterized the artist's confrontations, triumphs and urge to outdo his contemporaries. Here was someone impervious to the dismay that his self-confidence might provoke. The second, which closes the show, is of the old man, around seventy, who had outlived both Titian and Veronese. There is only sadness in the eyes, a sadness that seems to suggest how impossible it was for an artist of such drive and ambition ever to achieve lasting personal satisfaction, or indeed serenity.