When he was in Venice Titian worked from time to time on the San Nicolò ai Frari altarpiece, which he had grabbed from Paris Bordone, and for which he thriftily reused the panel on which he had begun the Bathing Scene for Alfonso d’Este. The informal grouping of the saints recalls those in the more successful Gozzi altarpiece, but he didn’t actually finish the upper part of the painting, and then with the help of an assistant, until the early 1530s when he transformed it into the Madonna in Glory with Six Saints (Vatican City, Pinacoteca Vaticana).10 He did, however, make a start on a more compelling commission, the second from his old patron Jacopo Pesaro, who wanted another celebration of his victory over the Turks in 1502 – the highpoint in his otherwise unmemorable career – this one for the altar, which had recently been granted to the Pesaro family, in the left nave of the Frari. It was a demanding and unusual order, and not well paid – the instalments Titian received over the seven years it took him to complete the painting amounted to only 102 ducats. But it gave him a second opportunity to show in the prominent church dominated from the high altar by his Assunta. Judging by the outcome, which was in its different way as innovative and subsequently influential as the Assunta, the Pesaro Madonna was often on his mind in the next seven years, during which he made three radical changes to its composition. In April and June 1519 he acknowledged his first two payments of ten ducats each from ‘Monsignor the Bishop of Baffo [Baffo was short for Paphos] of the House of Pesaro’. Since it was his usual practice to begin work on a painting after he had received a down payment, we can assume that he made a start on the altarpiece that summer, or at least by 22 September 1519 when he issued a receipt for six ducats to cover the costs of the canvas and stretcher.
In October Titian arrived at long last in Ferrara with two assistants and his unfinished painting for the duke – the court expense account records that his journey from Venice cost four lire. He spent the better part of the next three months there, as the fog of winter settled on the city, completing the Worship of Venus in situ. Ferrara is only ninety kilometres south of Venice but in those days it seemed another world. With a population of no more than 30,000, some 2,000 of whom were employed by the court, it was much smaller but not much less cosmopolitan, prosperous or busy than Venice. Alfonso’s father, the spendthrift Duke Ercole I, had trebled the size of his city, adding to the old, cramped medieval centre a spacious garden suburb complete with orchards, religious establishments, palaces, villas, a hunting park, a racecourse and some twelve new churches, all enclosed in a massive circuit of defensive walls. A tributary of the Po curved around the gloomy fourteenth-century castle, in which two of the duke’s brothers, following a plot to assassinate him, were imprisoned for life in windowless dungeons. Over the coming years, Titian, arriving by barge towed upstream along the Po with his precious cargos of canvases, rolled and packed in specially built crates wrapped in waxed cloth, would become accustomed to the sight of the walls and towers of Ferrara looming across the fields from the port of Francolino. But coming as he did from a city with no court and no need of a castle or walls, his first visits to the best-defended court in Christendom must have been something of a culture shock.
The Francophile Este modelled their court on the royal courts of Burgundy and France. Although Ferrara might have seemed provincial by comparison, it was a lively and important centre of artistic activity, learning, literature, theatre, music and other courtly pleasures. Life there was a round of expensive and showy entertainments of the kind that were discouraged in Venice by sumptuary laws and by perpetual reminders to refrain from conspicuous consumption in the name of God and country. The courtiers of Ferrara, by contrast, were required to dress lavishly; clothes, indeed, were a courtier’s single biggest investment. They went jousting and hunting with cheetahs, leopards and panthers. They played real tennis, gambled on the horses and feasted at banquets where course after course of delicacies was served between dancing, concerts performed by Alfonso’s orchestra of thirty musicians and theatrical productions. Alfonso’s gluttonous cardinal brother Ippolito, who liked to be watched by an audience while he stuffed himself, died in 1520, aged only forty-one, of excessive consumption of roasted crayfish and vernaccia wine. After his death an inventory of his possessions itemized more than one hundred carnival disguises.11
Alfonso d’Este gave Titian his first opportunity to satisfy the courtly taste for large painted fables about the sexual exploits of the pagan gods and goddesses. It was a demand that did not exist in Republican Venice, where the preference of private patrons was for pretty girls whose classical disguises were really beside the point. And Titian, who had no previous experience of aristocratic courts, and whose imagination was uncluttered by the first-hand study of the Roman antiquities that was supposed to be an essential part of a Renaissance painter’s education, brought an unprecedented freshness and vitality to the inventions he devised for Alfonso’s pleasure, using colour and movement rather than narrative to shape his monumental figures. Without having seen or read the originals he unearthed the very spirit of the antique sculptures and stories in a way that established the interpretation of classical myths for subsequent artists, and especially for his most ardent follower, Rubens. The more experienced and conventionally educated Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael would doubtless have produced magnificent paintings for the duke. But they might have looked academic in comparison with Titian’s wholly original, dramatically exciting representations, which continue even today to remind us that those old myths spun by the writers of ancient Greece and Rome lasted as long as they did because they were cracking good stories.
Titian was not the only groundbreaking artist employed by Alfonso’s court in the 1520s. Another, the pioneering Netherlandish composer Adrian Willaert, the European master of the new polyphony, is today of interest only to specialists. But the Ferrarese poet and dramatist Ludovico Ariosto12 is still read, and his vast epic poem, Orlando Furioso (Mad Roland), first published in 1516 when the poet was in the service of Ippolito, remains the most romantic and entertaining of all the many versions told over the centuries of the tale of the Carolingian knight who was driven mad by his unrequited love for the princess Angelica. Ariosto, however, paid homage to his employers by making Ruggiero, the virtuous warrior and supposed founder of the Este dynasty, the true hero of his story. The poem is so close in spirit to Titian’s poetic paintings that Ridolfi invented a tradition according to which the painter-poet and the poet-painter enjoyed an intellectual partnership: ‘Thus, painting fulfils the function of mute poetry, and poetry acts as loquacious painting.’ He described an illustration of their companionable relationship, which he claimed would have decorated the catafalque to a plan (never realized) for Titian’s funeral, in which Alfonso, with attendant pages, sat listening to Ariosto read aloud while watching Titian paint at his easel.
The poet and painter must have met at least by 1522 or 1523 when Titian portrayed Ariosto as one of a group of prominent men in a canvas, now lost, for the doge’s palace.13 But, although Ariosto may well have advised Titian and the duke about subjects and sources, he did not mention Titian in writing until the third and final edition of Orlando Furioso, revised with Bembo’s help and published in 1532, in which ‘the honour of Cadore’ is listed – along with Mantegna, Leonardo, Giovanni Bellini, the Dossi brothers, Michelangelo and Sebastiano – as one of the greatest artists of the time.14