The most interesting problem of attribution, for historians of the vagaries of taste, and perhaps the most contentious in the whole of Italian Renaissance art18 concerns a painting recently described as ‘the greatest erotic masterpiece in the history of Western painting’19 but which was dismissed by some of the leading connoisseurs of the late nineteenth century as too feeble to be by either Giorgione or Titian. Despite the negative academic judgements of the Concert Champêtre, its quality was defended by the independent-minded Walter Pater,20 and it inspired painters on both sides of the Channel, from Watteau to Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, although in different ways. Manet took it as the model for his slice-of-life Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1863. It was the subject of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet ‘For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione’ (1849) about the sadness of a moment of perfect bliss that must pass with time. Two naked women and two fully clothed men make music in an Arcadian landscape on a late summer’s day. The naked women may be nymphs, personifications of the landscape and therefore invisible to the men,21 who do not look at them. Whoever painted it, this mysterious, erotic, beautiful picture is an epitome of what we think of as ‘Giorgionesque’. Nevertheless, since 1976 the Concert Champêtre has been given to Titian by a majority of scholars,22 partly on the grounds that technical investigation has revealed a large number of the changes of plan that were characteristic of Titian’s working method.
There is in fact no undocumented Venetian painting that looks like Giorgione or Titian or both – or in some cases not very much like either – that has not been the subject of prolonged scrutiny and sometimes bitter debate. But any amateur art lover who tries to follow the ins and outs of all the arguments is at risk of drowning in oceans of spilled ink. There are even some art historians who say that there is really no point in speculating about the dates or attributions of the disputed early paintings, and particularly the Concert Champêtre, without comparing them to the first of Titian’s works about which we know for certain exactly when, where and for whom they were executed. They are the frescos still in the Scuola di Sant’Antonio in Padua, where Titian worked in the spring and early summer of 1511.
Often the high and broad trees produced by nature in the fearful mountains tend to please spectators more than the cultivated plants, pruned by learned hands in ornamented gardens … And who doubts that a fountain that naturally comes out of living rocks, surrounded by a little greenery, is more pleasant to human minds than all the others made with art from the whitest marble, resplendent with a lot of gold?
JACOPO SANNAZARO, ARCADIA, 15041
On 1 December 1510 Titian received a visit from a certain Nicola da Stra, the guardiano, or chief executive, of the Confraternity of St Anthony in Padua, who had come with a proposal that no young artist in those lean times could afford to refuse. A programme of frescos depicting miracles performed by St Anthony, patron saint of Padua, was under way in the recently built chapter room on the upper storey of the confraternity. Titian, for a fee of twelve ducats, including an advance of twenty-four lire, the rest to be paid in instalments, agreed to contribute a fresco depicting the miracle of St Anthony’s jawbone (a fragment of which was preserved in a jewelled reliquary in the basilica of St Anthony). Stra would reserve for it the first large space to the right of the entrance to the new hall. The relevant entries in the confraternity account book for the next months are the earliest surviving records in which Titian’s name appears.2
Padua was the left bank of Venice and cultural jewel of the Venetian land empire. The Venetian intellectual elite were educated at its university, which was financed by the central government and was one of the oldest in Italy. The city’s Roman remains – including the first-century AD amphitheatre that is now the site of the Arena Chapel – bore witness to the ancient civilization that had flourished there at a time when Venice was a wilderness of mud banks inhabited by fishermen. The miracle-working St Anthony, a disciple of St Francis, was, and is, one of the most popular of all Christian saints. His shrine, the basilica of St Anthony, known simply as Il Santo, had been begun the year after his death in Padua in 1231, and has been visited ever since by pilgrims from the far corners of Christendom. The confraternity, which is adjacent to the Santo, was well endowed, with a distinguished membership. So the commission to contribute a fresco carried considerable prestige.
Although Titian had recently demonstrated his prodigious talent for creating dynamic figures in fresco on the façade of the Fondaco, the confraternity must have taken advice before employing an artist still in his early twenties. Jacopo Pesaro, his former and future patron and a prominent devotee of St Francis, would have given him a warm reference. Pietro Bembo, who had known Titian from the days in Giovanni Bellini’s studio, kept a house in Padua with his father Bernardo where they made their collection of coins, medals, antiquities and plaster casts of antiquities available for study by artists. The confraternity must also have consulted that fascinating Renaissance man and distinguished Paduan Alvise Cornaro. Cornaro, after enjoying a dissipated youth, regretted his wasteful life, wrote a treatise advocating moderation and sobriety and made a fortune as a technologist and agricultural reformer – ‘holy agriculture’, as he called it. (Tintoretto portrayed him in robust old age.) A man of wide-ranging interests and abilities – his passion for classical architecture would later encourage the young Palladio – he kept open house to gentlemen farmers, scientists, architects, writers, sculptors and painters. Titian, during his stay in Padua, frescoed the exterior of his house near the Santo.3
The choice of an up-and-coming Venetian artist was also an expedient political gesture of loyalty to the Venetian government at a time when Padua was under a cloud of justified suspicion. Since taking control of the town in 1405 Venice had ruled there with a relatively light hand. But Padua had betrayed that trust. Members of the old governing aristocracy continued to harbour imperialist sympathies and some had advocated joining the League of Cambrai against Venice. Their chance had come on 6 June 1509, only a few weeks after the catastrophic Venetian defeat at Agnadello, when the remains of the League were welcomed into Padua, which declared itself an independent republic under the protection of the emperor Maximilian. The occupation lasted for forty-two days before the city was recaptured on 17 July by Venetian forces under the command of the brilliant soldier (and future doge) Andrea Gritti, with the help of Venetian loyalists in the city. The siege of Padua was one of the most violent actions of the Cambrai war, not least because of the use of a terrifying novelty known as ‘Greek fire’ which stuck to the bodies of its victims and could not be extinguished by water. The recovery of the city was celebrated in Venice with a magnificent procession led by the doge, which remained a regular event in the Venetian calendar for centuries to come. And when on 15 September a League army once again reached the walls of Padua the city was so well defended that after two weeks of bombarding the walls with heavy artillery Maximilian abandoned the siege and retreated towards the Alps.
When Titian started work in the confraternity in April 1511, Padua and Treviso and the swathe of territory between them were the only mainland possessions still in Venetian hands. Some leading imperialist partisans had been singled out by the Venetian government as examples and had been executed by hanging, their families fined or imprisoned and their property confiscated. Padua was a garrison city and headquarters for the duration of the war of the Venetian light cavalry, the stradiotti. The gates were guarded and the streets patrolled by able-bodied Venetian conscripts of all classes and occupations – patricians and their servants, peasants, guild members, even the entire crews of merchant galleys were given incentives by the government