Alfonso’s court painter Dosso Dossi and Dosso’s brother Battista – the sons of a land agent to the court – decorated the rooms in the Via Coperta with painted ceilings and friezes. But it was not until Ferrara was at peace with Venice after the spring of 1513 that the duke was in a position to begin to realize his most ambitious project. It was for a small, intimate room that would be a private showcase for the best representatives of the three principal schools of Italian painting: Giovanni Bellini for Venice, Raphael for Rome, Fra Bartolommeo for Florence, all painters whose works he had admired on his travels. The prototype for such a room was Isabella’s studiolo in the ducal castle at Mantua, for which she had commissioned two paintings by Mantegna, one by Perugino and two by Lorenzo Costa, all illustrating subjects from classical antiquity. (She had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Leonardo to contribute a painting. Giovanni Bellini also refused because the terms of her commission did not provide him with enough freedom.) Although Alfonso’s taste was by no means untutored – he had travelled widely and had an even more perceptive and independent eye than his glamorous and domineering bluestocking sister – he was without intellectual pretensions. Nevertheless, like his nephew, Isabella’s son Federico Gonzaga, and his political ally Francis I – and, for that matter, many twenty-first-century tycoon collectors – he was interested in employing top names.
He overlooked Titian in the first instance in favour of the more famous Giovanni Bellini, who agreed to paint the Feast of the Gods. Giovanni took as his source a free translation of a story from Ovid’s poetic calendar, the Fasti, about a feast given by Cybele, goddess of the harvest and fertility, at which Priapus’ attempted rape of the sleeping nymph Lotis is foiled when Silenus’ ass brays and wakes her. (Priapus has the ass killed for interfering with his right to satisfy his sexual appetite.) He conflated two separate episodes of the story (which may be the explanation for a subsequent attempt by another painter to bring the figures more in line with one of Ovid’s originals). The frieze-like arrangement of his feasting Olympian deities may have been intended to conform with Antonio Lombardo’s sculptures. Giovanni set them against a forest with tree trunks extending across the width of the picture, which was later cancelled by repaintings by Dosso Dossi and finally by Titian. But the painting, even after Giovanni had been requested, presumably by Alfonso, to eroticize the goddesses by revising their postures and lowering their necklines, lacks sex appeal.
Giovanni had finished and signed the Feast of the Gods by 4 November 1514 when he received a payment of eighty-five ducats. Three years later Alfonso began to plan a radical rebuilding of the Via Coperta. He was impatient to see, on either side of the Feast of the Gods, a Worship of Venus, which he had commissioned from Fra Bartolommeo, and a Triumph of Bacchus promised by Raphael. An exciting source of subjects was available to him in the first ever translation into Italian of the Imagines (the Eikones in Greek) written in the third century AD by the Greek writer Philostratus.8 The translation by the scholar Demetrios Moschus had been commissioned by Isabella, who had given it to her brother on loan.9 Philostratus described in detail sixty-four paintings he purported to have seen in a house outside Naples. No one in the Renaissance had ever seen antique paintings, and since few if any painters could read Philostratus in the original Greek, Isabella’s translation was a treasure trove of ideas.
Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael sent sketches of their respective subjects. But Fra Bartolommeo died on 31 October 1517 before he could make a start on his painting. Raphael was given an advance payment early in 1518, but then prevaricated. Alfonso hounded him through his agents in Rome, who found it increasingly difficult to make contact with that prince of painters. Alfonso flew into rages. Raphael tried to assuage his anger with gifts of preliminary cartoons for some of his other paintings. But in September 1518 Alfonso instructed one of his agents to find Raphael and advise him that his evasive behaviour was not the proper way to treat a person such as himself and if he didn’t do his duty, and soon, he would regret it. The correspondence continued in January and March of 1520. And then, on 6 April of that year, in the night of Good Friday, Raphael died, probably from overwork, at the untimely age of thirty-seven.
Titian had agreed in the previous year to take over Fra Bartolommeo’s subject and to base his painting on that painter’s sketch and on the description by Philostratus of cupids playing love games in front of a statue of Venus. But, although outwardly more accommodating than the more famous Raphael, he also prevaricated. The success of the Frari Assunta had attracted other commissions, and his studio was crowded with works in progress. When in late September 1519 he had still not delivered the painting he had promised a year and half earlier to begin that very morning the enraged Alfonso instructed his ambassador in Venice, Jacopo Tebaldi, to warn ‘the painter’ that it was high time he finished ‘that picture of ours’. The ambassador had to find Titian as soon as possible and tell him in no uncertain terms that he, the Duke of Ferrara, didn’t like to be disappointed. Tebaldi replied on 3 October that he had been looking for Titian but had been told by his neighbours that he had gone to Padua, promising that on his return he would finish the duke’s picture. A week later Tebaldi informed the duke that Titian had given his word that he would come to Ferrara with the picture, which he would finish in situ once he had seen where it was to hang and in what light. But, he added, he had heard by word of mouth that the reason for the delay was that Titian was working on a painting for the Very Reverend —— and that Titian did not deny the rumour.
The name of the Very Reverend is missing from Tebaldi’s letter, which was later damaged by fire. But we know that it was Altobello Averoldi, the papal legate to Venice and a member of the nobility of Brescia, the gun-manufacturing town on the westernmost edge of the Venetian terraferma. As papal legate Averoldi had made it his business to smooth relations between Venice and Rome after the Cambrai war. Titian had gone to Padua, probably encouraged by the Venetian government, to discuss with him a painting for the high altar of the Brescian church of Santi Nazaro e Celso, of which Averoldi was provost. While Titian was in Padua discussing the Brescian commission Averoldi’s arch-rival, Broccardo Malchiostro, the canon of the cathedral of Treviso, was celebrating the completion of a new chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Annunciate. We don’t know exactly when Malchiostro began the decorations of the chapel, but his choice of Titian to paint an Annunciation for its altar (still in situ) may have been motivated by his intense jealousy of Averoldi – the mutual detestation of the two prelates was such that they had once come to blows during a church service. Malchiostro was in fact generally disliked. His extreme vanity is evident from the frequency with which the Malchiostro coat of arms and initials appeared in the chapel and on Titian’s painting. It was also considered inappropriate that he had Titian paint him as the donor facing worshippers at the altar, rather than in the usual position kneeling in profile. But the awkward and apparently malign figure of Malchiostro lurking outside the columns is evidence not of Titian’s judgement of the canon’s character but of a repainting by another hand after the picture had been attacked by vandals not long after it was finished.
Although Titian, who presumably worked alternately on the Averoldi and Malchiostro commissions, gave less of his attention to Malchiostro’s Annunciation than to the altarpiece for the papal legate, the Treviso altarpiece was his first treatment of its subject and is full of original ideas. The fictive architecture extends the real space of the chapel; the asymmetrical composition anticipates the Pesaro Madonna in the Frari; and the child angel skidding down the elongated perspective of the floor approaches the Virgin from behind, an unusual relationship that was later adopted by Lorenzo Lotto. But the painting doesn’t really work, and looks as though Titian tossed it off in a hurry, probably with assistance.
He was far more inspired by a commission from another foreigner, one that carried a political message that would not have been lost on those who saw it after Titian had completed it in 1520. This was the Madonna in Glory with Sts Francis and Blaise and the Donor Alvise Gozzi (Ancona, Museo Civico) over the high altar of the church of San Francesco in Ancona. Alvise Gozzi was a nobleman and merchant originally from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) who had settled in Ancona and made frequent business trips to Venice, where he must have seen Titian’s Frari Assunta.