TITIAN AND THE CULTURE OF MID-CENTURY ROME: THE VENETIAN AMID THE RUINS

Abstract

The Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488-1576), called Titian, spent eight months in Rome from 1545 to 1546 at the court of Pope Paul III Farnese. His time there was marked by the creation of a suite of highly praised portraits of the male members of the Farnese family, as well as with the Danaë for the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and a lost Ecce Homo for Paul III himself. His time at the papal court brought Titian into contact with the glories of ancient Rome as well as contemporaries like Michelangelo, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Giorgio Vasari, who would later write critically of the Venetian painter’s encounter with the Central Italian artistic tradition in the 1568 edition of the Lives of the Artists. Scholarship on Titian has generally assigned limited importance to the artist’s Roman sojourn based on the understanding that this experience had relatively little impact on his stylistic development. This approach, however, obscures significant shifts in the artist’s artistic and business practice that took place in the first half of the 1540s, catalyzed by his “Farnese turn” on the one hand, and his Roman experience on the other. This dissertation uses Titian’s time in Rome as a lens onto the larger frame of his activity in the early part of the decade in order to reveal the fresh artistic and entrepreneurial strategies with which he responded to the pressures of a changing patronage base, a growing family, and financial concerns. During this period, Titian recruited his portraits—the type of work for which he received the most contemporary praise—as mobile social agents that could perform work on his behalf among a network that included Pietro Aretino, Pietro Bembo, Giovanni della Casa, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, among others. The artist’s experience of Rome itself reveals further areas of resistance and experimentation which have been undervalued in previous research, including his first effort at painting on slate, his engagement with a developing canon of self-representation, and his rhetorical employment of style as calling-card in his competition with Michelangelo and other Central Italian artists. Titian’s response to the uncertainty and transition he faced in the first half of the 1540s reveals itself in this investigation as far more creatively charged than has previously been recognized.