Harper Press £30 ☎ £24.99 inc p&p
Rating:
Sometimes, in the strange world of biography, an odd rule applies: the less that is known, the longer the book. In a funny way, it is almost as if words were being employed to fill a vacuum.
Sheila Hale’s new biography of the great 16th Century Venetian painter Titian is more than 800 pages long. It is scholarly, erudite, panoramic, endlessly inquisitive and as clear as can be.
It successfully illuminates fascinating areas of European history, the rise of Protestantism, the clash of empires, the growth of Venice, the pursuit of beauty.
Detail falls on detail, detail on detail. Early on, a couple of lovely pages tell you, for instance, where all the different pigments in Venice came from at that time: malachite from Hungary, earth colours from Siena, lapis lazuli from the mountainous caves of what is now Afghanistan, crimson from the tiny bodies of female insects imported from India.
The pursuit of beauty: Titian's character remains deep within his works, such as Venus Of Urbino (pictured)But where is Titian? He can be spotted in there from time to time, but chiefly as a successful businessman, beavering to make money through his brush and paints, then using it to invest in land and property. Of his inner life – and much of his outer life, too – we are left knowing nothing.
This is because there is plenty of information still available concerning his business accounts, but precious little about his thoughts. These, and much else, are lost to history.
He is, says Hale, ‘a silent artist’. There is plenty to know about Michelangelo and Leonardo, but Titian is largely absent from his own biography.
‘His surviving correspondence is mostly about business matters, and most of his letters were ghosted for him . . . None of his literary acquaintances ever mentioned his views about anything except painting.’
This means many of the bit-part players in the book are brilliantly vivid, while Titian himself, although onstage throughout, is doomed to lurk, dimly lit, in the background.
Scholarly, erudite, panoramic, endlessly inquisitive and as clear as can be
Take his best friend, the gossipy rogue Pietro Aretino, ‘journalist cum press baron, master of aphorism and hyperbole; pornographer, flatterer and blackmailer; playwright, satirist, versifier, bisexual libertine, connoisseur of art . . .’
If Titian was the silent artist, Aretino was the noisiest writer ever, issuing witty, scabrous, self-publicising pamphlets and letters throughout his life, full of gossip, scandal and outlandish opinions.
‘A man prolongs his life precisely in proportion to the extent that he satisfies his desires,’ he once said, adding that if he didn’t have 40 lovers a month his health would suffer.
The manner of his end was marvellously appropriate: at a dinner party, he laughed so much at a joke that he leaned right back in his chair, keeled over, hit the floor and died.
But what of the silent artist? Hale credits Aretino with knowing more than anyone else about him, yet when Aretino came to publish a bestselling collection of letters written to him by famous men and women, he included only two by Titian, ‘presumably because they were of no literary merit’.
So Hale’s method in constructing his portrait is to paint the background in as much detail as possible, in the hope that the remaining silhouette will prove accurate.
What, then, can be definitely known about Titian? The answer is precious little. Throughout the book, dread phrases such as ‘continues to be the subject of fierce scholarly debate’ and ‘will never be solved to the satisfaction of all scholars’ crop up at regular intervals.
Titian's Sacred And Profane Love. Sheila Hale's new biography of the great 16th Century Venetian painter is more than 800 pages longEven his date of birth – either 1488 or 1490 – will never be solved to the satisfaction of etc, etc. He came from a relatively prosperous family of timber merchants who lived in the mountains to the north of Venice. His father seems to have been a nice man, but one ‘whose goodness of soul did not yield to a sublime intellect’, in the words of a catty relative.
At the age of ten or so, Titian was sent to Venice to study painting, then taken on as an apprentice by Gentile Bellini, who told him he would never make a painter. He swiftly proved Bellini wrong, and by his mid-20s had become the most celebrated artist in Venice.
He had a slightly hooked nose, a bony face and a fierce gaze. His self-portraits tell us that much. And what of his character? ‘A very famous man and excellent in art, as well as religious, respectable and honest,’ wrote one cardinal, unhelpfully.
From Aretino, we learn that he was competitive and a lively conversationalist, and from his business correspondence that he was unusually, perhaps even obsessively, interested in money, and a bit of a procrastinator.
He was married twice, his first wife, Cecilia, having died. At one point, Hale refers to ‘Titian’s second wife, a shadowy figure who was probably the mother of his daughter Lavinia’, which reveals quite how many gaps there are.
At times, one can sense this scrupulous biographer’s frustration at the limited amount of information at her disposal. In painting terms, it is as if a sitter has gone missing from the studio after the artist has managed to sketch only the vaguest outline of his body.
And what of his love life? Titian’s female nudes are sexier than anything that came before, and most that came after, provoking the priggish Victorian John Ruskin to huff that his portrait of Mary Magdalen is ‘coarse of feature, with much of the animal in even her expression of repentance . . . a woman markedly and entirely belonging to the lowest class’.
But even though Titian employed nude models in his studio, there are, irritatingly, no reports of marital infidelity.
A meticulous biographer such as Hale is in consequence drawn into the push-me, pull-you world of speculation.
Generally, she acknowledges that he stayed on the straight and narrow, but then she will be driven to daydream: ‘He may, like his great modern admirer Lucian Freud, have needed to sleep with his models before painting them. But we will never know which, if any of them, shared his bed.’
In fact, I’m not sure that even this sentence is strictly accurate: as far as I know, Freud managed to resist the charms of at least two of his models – Lord Goodman and Andrew Parker Bowles – before painting them, and it’s hard to believe that Her Majesty was anything less than entirely upstanding when he painted her back in 2001.
There is one area of Titian’s personal life, however, about which we can be reasonably well informed, thanks mainly to solicitors’ letters.
He had two sons: Orazio, who looked after his complicated business affairs, and Pomponio, or ‘poor Pomponio’, as Hale calls him, who allowed himself to be pushed by his father into the Church, proved a dead loss, and, as a result, became increasingly resentful of Titian, eventually claiming he had ruined his life. For the last eight years of Titian’s life, the two of them spoke only through lawyers.
This was, says Hale, the painter’s greatest personal tragedy. Titian died, still at work, in his late 80s, his paintings becoming wilder, broader, more expressive and darker. He has often been compared to Shakespeare both in his range and his depth; and, as with Shakespeare, the only true route to his inner life is through his works.
But paintings are necessarily more oblique in revealing private thoughts and emotions than poems or plays. We are left wondering.
Of two of Titian’s greatest portraits, of Pope Paul III and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Hale observes that they allow us to ‘see more at a glance about the characters’ than we could learn ‘from a hundred pages of written history’.
For all its many virtues, her biography of the painter is an example of the same phenomenon. His character lies buried deep within his works; the rest is silence.
