Given the originality of La Schiavona it is not surprising that the portrait evolved slowly while Titian tried out different ideas for it. He altered the sitter’s headdress and the veil on her right shoulder, and deleted a window in the upper-right section of the canvas. The red of her dress can be seen with the naked eye through the marble parapet, which he raised over it and upon which he placed and then erased a skull and a foreshortened dish before resting her hand on it instead. The fictive relief carving of her profile refers to a debate that went back to classical literature about the relative merits of painting and sculpture.32 In the Renaissance Michelangelo became the representative of the greater integrity of sculpture, while Leonardo championed painting as the art that required more intellect. Vasari was tapping into the argument when he gave Giorgione the credit for proving ‘that painting requires more skill and effort and can show in one scene more aspects of nature than is the case with sculpture’. If the contest seems academic to us today, it was one that preoccupied Titian, the most painterly of painters, throughout his career.
On a raised parapet, just to the left of the forehead of the relief profile bust, Titian painted a large V, traces of which can still be detected with the naked eye. The initials V, VV or VVO, which appear on other Venetian portraits of around the same date,33 have been variously interpreted as indicating virtus vincit (omnia), virtue is victorious over everything; vivens vivo, from life by the living; or virtus e veritas, virtue and truth. A single V has also been detected by infrared reflectography in the centre of the parapet of the Man with a Quilted Sleeve.
If La Schiavona in its final version was intended as an illustration of the superiority of painting over sculpture – a painter can imitate sculpture but a sculptor cannot represent a painting – the blue sleeve of the young bearded man known as the Man with a Quilted Sleeve of a few years earlier is a demonstration of the power of painting, as celebrated by Pliny in his stories about the realistic paintings of Apelles, to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. Despite fading and abrasions the thrust of the sleeve into the space of the viewer still startles. The sitter, now identified as a member of the Barbarigo family, was thought to be Ludovico Ariosto, author of the famous romantic epic Orlando Furioso, until in the 1970s a scholar34 observed that the swivel and tilt of the man’s head are consistent with the pose an artist would adopt while portraying his reflection in a mirror and that his projecting chin and under-hung lower lip resemble the two surviving self-portraits from Titian’s old age. Could this arrogant man with the sensuous mouth and the intent gaze be the elusive young Titian? If so, is the portrait of what could be the same man five or ten years older (Munich, Alte Pinakothek) also Titian? In fact the straight nose in both paintings doesn’t quite match the more aquiline shape of the later self-portraits. Whoever the sitter, the richly worked quilted protruding sleeve is an early manifestation of Titian’s lifelong interest in textiles – later he sometimes invented the designs of his own painted textiles – and may have been intended to advertise his virtuoso talent for imitating fine fabrics to the wealthy textile manufacturers of Venice who were potential patrons.
Although Titian flattered his sitters, and it would be anachronistic to claim that he would have thought in terms of what we call ‘psychological insight’, his instinctive understanding of human nature does seem to reveal what W. B. Yeats, a great admirer of Titian, called ‘the personality of the whole man, blood, imagination, intellect running together’.35 It is this quality that makes his portraits stand out in picture galleries, and their lost identities especially frustrating. Writers who would like to link him with the most famous men of letters of his youth have proposed, on more or less shaky grounds, that the Portrait of a Man with a Book (Hampton Court, Royal Collection) might be the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro; and that a Portrait of a Man in the Dublin National Gallery is the humanist philosopher and author of The Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione.36 We can at least put a name to one of his early sitters, the forceful, bull-necked man with long grey hair in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum.37 He is Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma, a physician and prolific writer of, among many other texts, an obscene macaronic poem, Macharonea medicinalis. He served as physician to the Venetian fleet and prior of the Venetian College of Physicians, and, since Giorgione also painted his portrait (the ‘Terris’ portrait, San Diego), presumably numbered Venetian artists among his patients. He sat for Titian in 1520 when he was about fifty, a powerful, confrontational personality.38
Comparing Titian’s Dr Parma with Giorgione’s gentler portrait of the same man, seemingly more introverted, painted about ten years earlier, suggests that Titian in his early thirties was abandoning Giorgionesque moodiness to attempt a more intense engagement with the individuality of his sitters. He was also discovering new ways of modelling and structuring portraits while experimenting with the different formats, scales and dimensions that the great Swiss historian of art and culture Jacob Burckhardt called the most important innovation of the sixteenth century.39 We can see the transition in the marvellously assured pyramidal compositions of the Flora (Florence, Uffizi) and the Portrait of Tommaso Mosti (Florence, Galleria Palatina), both probably several years later than the Portrait of Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma.
In the Man with a Glove (Paris, Louvre), his most famous portrait of the early 1520s,40 everything Titian had achieved in the field of portraiture up to that time – his unrivalled mastery of blacks, whites and flesh tones, the most difficult pigments to manage on an artist’s palette; the modelling with light and shade; the tellingly naturalistic action of the exquisitely painted hands; his interest in the personality and status of his sitters – culminates in one of the most beautiful and intriguing of all Renaissance portraits.41 He borrowed the pose from Raphael’s Portrait of Angelo Doni of about 1507–8, but probably learned more about patrician restraint and exploration of personality from the same artist’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1514–16), now in the Louvre, which he saw during a visit in the winter of 1523 to Mantua where Castiglione, who was at that time in the service of the Gonzagas, kept the portrait in his house. But if Titian’s Man with a Glove was in part an homage to one of the greatest artists of the central Italian High Renaissance – Raphael had died at the age of thirty-seven only a few years earlier – he looked back in order to paint something so new that we would be forgiven for attributing it to Rembrandt.
It is a moot point whether Titian’s paintings of anonymous pretty girls, usually disguised as classical or biblical characters, can be categorized as portraits. The foreign dignitaries to whom some were sold or presented as gifts referred to them simply as ‘women’. Whether the models were prostitutes, courtesans, Titian’s mistresses or perhaps some of them the mistresses of the young men he portrayed, they would have been hung in the bedrooms of men who we can safely guess were less interested in learned allusions than in the realistic depiction of beautiful young faces, skin, hair and bodies. The Venetians were the first Italian