Titian's Pietro Aretino

X A V I E R F. S A L O M O N

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APPARITIONS Titian’s Portrait of Pietro Aretino Francine Prose

“I should like to paint portraits which would appear after a century to people living then as apparitions.”

—Vincent van Gogh to Wilhelmina van Gogh, June 5, 1890

One: The Docent When the handsome, good-humored docent tells the museumgoers from Dallas that they are looking at Titian’s portrait of the writer Pietro Aretino—a poet, art critic, essayist, journalist, and playwright—he fears, having learned from experience, that their interest will be, at best, polite.

So instead, the docent (a postdoc researching the restoration of Renaissance masterpieces) says, “This is Titian’s portrait of the famous blackmailer Pietro Aretino.”

A blackmailer. Now that’s something. Two of the women emit little murmurs of excitement and vague apprehension, and the tourists inch toward the painting, as if to inspect, at no risk to themselves, a certified Renaissance criminal.

The docent could have said, “This is Titian’s portrait of his best friend, who during his lifetime was an immensely popular and influential author whose collected letters gained him an international reputation. A loudmouth, a shameless flatterer, an egomaniac, and a pornographer, a man gifted or cursed with prodigious talents and energies, with uncontrolled libidinous appetites.” But that might have pushed things too far, dialed the frisson up to a shock and caused the visitors to edge away from the painting.

The young man explains that Aretino had a talent for uncovering and monetizing the secrets of the powerful and rich. Given the era’s penchant for 11

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In how many ways have I seen you portrayed? In marble, in low-relief, lifesize, in cameos, small; in medals, in gold, silver, copper, brass, lead, and wax.

In painting, by the hand of the admirable Titian, by Sebastiano del Piombo, and by other esteemed painters in more than thirty places; in infinite ways printed, even on the small boxes for combs, in copper, in boxwood, in pearwood, large, bronze, and small; you are in all the stories, recorded in all the books, and loved, feared, revered, honored in every place.57

Fig. 12 Titian Federico Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, 1529 Oil on panel 491⁄4 × 39 in. (125 × 99 cm) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (P000408)

Titian’s portraits of Aretino are, understandably, the most celebrated images of the writer. The painter produced three documented independent portraits of Aretino, who also appeared in auxiliary roles in two other works

by Titian. At least two of Titian’s portraits were conceived as instruments to seek patronage and present the image of Aretino in courtly contexts.

In 1527, only a few months after Aretino moved to Venice, he was portrayed for the first time by Titian. On June 27 of that year, Titian wrote a letter to Federico Gonzaga to accompany his portraits of Girolamo Adorno and of Pietro Aretino.58 When the portraits reached Mantua (by July 8), the marquess wrote to Aretino to thank him for the two most beautiful portraits by Titian which you have sent me through your servant, which are very precious to me, because of the desire I had to own a work made by hands as expert as those of the most excellent aforesaid Titian, but also because one of those paintings portrays such a learned man as you are, and in the other I could contemplate the image of a person that was so beloved to me as Girolamo Adorno.59

Gonzaga further promised to send Titian a gift to thank him for the portraits and, along with the letter, sent Aretino a costly outfit as a present. The Titian portrait was no doubt intended to strengthen the relationship between the writer and the Marquess of Mantua, at a time when Aretino’s future was uncertain.

Years later, in September 1551, Marcolini referred to the first portrait Titian had painted of Aretino, stating that it was in Mantua “among the princes portrayed in beautiful fashion.”60 This portrait represented Aretino as the elegant courtier and was probably not much different, in terms of the sitter’s costume and accessories, from the portrait engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi (see fig. 6) in Rome a few years earlier. The most complete description of this painting dates from more than a century after its creation, 43

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when, in his biography of Titian, Carlo Ridolfi recalled the portrait as showing Aretino “with a black cap on his head embroidered with plumed tassels held by a gold medal with the motto FIDES, which had been given to him by the Duke of Mantua, and in his right hand he held a crown of laurel.”61 Though generally considered lost, the portrait painted for Federico Gonzaga likely survives in fragmentary and damaged form in Basel (fig. 13).62 Cut on all sides, the canvas no longer shows Aretino’s hand and laurel wreath, but the features of the sitter are directly comparable with the Raimondi print of a few years earlier. Aretino is dressed in black and wears a feathered cap decorated with a gold medal, over a cloth cap known as a scuffiotto. German in origin, scuffiotti are worn tight over the head, and Aretino was known to have particularly liked them. In 1524, he ordered two of them from Mantua.63 It has been suggested that, soon after portraying Aretino for Federico Gonzaga, Titian painted another portrait of the writer, this one for Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici. However, there is no evidence that it ever existed (though scholars continue to mention it). On October 13, 1533, the cardinal wrote to Aretino to send him a gold chain as a gift, but the letter does not mention Titian or any works by him.64 A nineteenth-century misinterpretation of a passage by Vasari in his Life of Titian seems to have suggested the existence of a portrait that was never painted.65 Titian’s last portrait of Aretino (fig. 14)—painted almost twenty years after the first one and for the ruler of an Italian state—is, however, well documented.66 In his letter of September 1551, Marcolini wrote: “Here Titian displays his skills without parallel, in the portrait, which is, among kings and emperors, in the guardaroba of the Duke of Florence.”67 Intended to help obtain further patronage from the Medici family, the portrait was meant as a gift for Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, the son of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, Aretino’s old benefactor. The writer planned to send a set of two portraits by Titian to the duke: one of himself and one of the duke’s father.

However, this plan to curry favor with Cosimo seems to have encountered a number of obstacles. Aretino wanted Titian to base his portrait of Giovanni on a death mask of him that he owned. Before September 1545, however, when Titian left for Rome, the painter had completed the portrait of Aretino for the duke and never painted the pendant portrait of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere. Aretino was irritated with his friend for his failure to complete the commission. During the same month—October 1545—the writer sent letters

Fig. 13 Titian Pietro Aretino, 1527 Oil on canvas 23 × 181⁄3 in. (58.5 × 46.5 cm) Kunstmuseum, Basel (1351)

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Fig. 14 Titian Pietro Aretino, 1545 Oil on canvas 381⁄16 × 301⁄2 in. (96.7 × 77.6 cm) Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (1912 n.54) Fig. 15 Gian Paolo Pace Giovanni de’ Medici dalle Bande Nere, 1545 Oil on canvas 383⁄16 × 351⁄16 in. (97 × 89 cm) Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (934)

to both Titian and Cosimo I. To the duke, he complained that Titian’s greed had prevailed over his friendship, explaining that he had wanted Titian to paint a portrait of Cosimo’s father but that Titian, enticed by the promise of papal patronage, had left for Rome without completing the commission.68 Aretino promised to send a portrait of Giovanni and took the opportunity to remind the duke that he had sent him his portrait by Titian before promptly criticizing it: “Certainly it breathes, its wrists pulse, and its spirit moves, as I do in life. But if the money that I gave him had been more, in truth the draperies would have been shiny, soft, and stiff, as satin, velvet, and brocade are.”69 Aretino’s criticism of the portrait was equally acerbic in his letter to Titian: “I am angry with you” because of the portrait that was “rather more sketched than finished.”70 47