In January 1520, after eighty-six days in Ferrara finishing the Worship of Venus, Titian returned to Venice. No sooner was he home again than Alfonso began making further demands on his time through Tebaldi. Titian’s studio was crowded with works in progress. He was working concurrently on the altarpieces for Brescia, Ancona, the Frari and probably Treviso, as well as a number of portraits,3 and, so the duke hoped, his Bacchus and Ariadne. But when Alfonso requested him to put down his brushes and arrange for a set of glasses to be made in Murano for the ducal table, Titian ordered the glasses and fixed on a price. The duke wished to know if the furnaces on Murano were capable of producing as well as glass the brightly painted tin-glazed pottery known as majolica ware. By 28 January Titian had prepared the design of a trial vase, which was successfully fired and shown to Tebaldi. On 5 and 11 February Titian and Tebaldi went to Murano where they drew up a contract for twelve vases to be delivered within eight days along with the glasses. The production of majolica had ceased in Ferrara during the Cambrai war, and Alfonso, determined to revive a craft that was particularly dear to his heart, turned to Titian for help. Titian found a master potter and sent him to Ferrara. Then it seemed that there was no artisan in Ferrara who could be trusted with gilding the frame of the Worship of Venus. Titian persuaded an old, experienced master gilder he knew in Venice to go to Ferrara and gild the frame as well as the majolica jars in which the duke’s spices were to be stored. So far Titian had accepted such distractions with good humour. He did not, however, conceal his irritation when he heard that an incompetent person had applied to his Worship of Venus a coat of varnish that had obscured and in places damaged its surface. He agreed to come to Ferrara to restore the painting, but there is no evidence that he did so.
Meanwhile, it reached the ear of the duke that a curiosity and talking point in Venice was an exotic animal imported by Giovanni Cornaro who kept it in his beautiful palace on the Grand Canal at San Maurizio. Alfonso wrote to his ambassador on 29 May:
Messer Jacomo. Take care to speak immediately to Titian and tell him to do me a portrait as soon as possible and as though it were alive of an animal called gazelle, which is in the house of the most honourable Giovanni Cornaro. It should fill the entire canvas. Attend to this matter diligently and then send it to us immediately advising us of the cost. And remember to send those spice jars, which were supposed to be sent to us some days ago.
Tebaldi and Titian hastened to Palazzo Cornaro only to learn that the gazelle was dead and its body had been thrown in the canal. They were however shown a painting by Giovanni Bellini in which he had incorporated a portrait of the gazelle, and on 1 June Titian offered to make a copy of it for the duke. If Alfonso accepted the suggestion Titian’s gazelle has disappeared, and the Bellini painting, of which there is no record, was presumably lost in the spectacular fire that destroyed the Cornaro palace in 1532.4
Although Titian was compliant enough to run such errands for the duke, the summer passed with no sign of the paintings he had agreed to provide before leaving Ferrara. Alfonso lost patience. On 17 November he wrote to Tebaldi:
Messer Jacomo. See to it that you speak to Titian, and tell him from us that when he left Ferrara he promised us many things, and up to now we have not seen that he has kept any of them, and among others he promised to do for us that canvas which we especially expect from him [the Bacchus and Ariadne]: and because it does not seem to us worthy of him that he should fail to keep his promises, urge him to behave in a way that will not give us cause to be saddened and angered with him, and to make sure above all that we have the above-mentioned canvas quickly.
Titian replied through Tebaldi that he had not received the canvas and stretcher or the measurements for the Bacchus and Ariadne and had therefore assumed that the duke no longer wanted it, but that once he had the necessary materials and information he would finish it by the next Ascension Day, which would fall in May.
Tebaldi knew perfectly well that Titian was playing for time while working instead on the papal legate’s altarpiece for Brescia. It was common knowledge that he had finished one of the panels, a depiction of St Sebastian that was the talk of Venice. Tebaldi, who was not a high-ranking diplomat for nothing, wisely made a joke of it, telling Titian that his delaying tactics were every bit as clever as his paintings but that he might as well confess that having tasted priests’ money he had lost interest in working for a mere duke. Titian replied that on the contrary he would do anything to please the duke; he would go so far as to make forged money for him. He would never leave the service of the duke, neither for priests nor for friars. He would stand day and night with paintbrush in hand to serve him. But, yes, it was true that he had worked very hard on the St Sebastian, which is in fact one of the few figures for which detailed preparatory drawings, in pen and brush, survive (Frankfurt am Main, Städelsches Kunstinstitut). He considered it to be the finest thing he had done up to that time, and itself worth every soldo of the 200 ducats he had been offered for the entire altarpiece.
Tebaldi decided that that he’d best see this great work for himself. In Titian’s studio he found himself among a crowd of admirers gazing at a painting of a muscular, twisting figure that was unprecedented in Venetian art, and which later became one of Titian’s most celebrated and copied paintings. He had used as his model a side view of the famous Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön, of which he would have had a reduced plaster copy in his studio, and may also have seen a sketch of Michelangelo’s powerful Rebellious Slave, which had itself been inspired by the Laocoön. Whereas Florentine painters had achieved anatomical accuracy through dissections of human bodies and study of classical models, Titian, using only sketches and reduced models, had rivalled the greatest antique and contemporary sculpture in paint without seeing the originals in Rome. It was also moderately daring at a time when it was beginning to be considered indecorous to use pagan models for Christian subjects.5 Tebaldi sent the duke the following description:
The body is tied to a column6 with one arm high up, the other low down. The whole figure writhes in such a way as to display almost all of the back. In all parts there is evidence of suffering, and all from one arrow that sticks in the middle of the body. I am no judge, because I do not understand drawing, but looking at the limbs and muscles the figure seems to me to be as natural as a corpse.
On 1 December Tebaldi reported to the duke that he had told Titian that he was throwing it away by giving it to a priest who would only take it off to Brescia. Privately Titian may have agreed. Averoldi had ordered a triptych, a format that had gone out of fashion in sophisticated artistic centres and was wasted on Titian, whose genius was for integrated composition. Nevertheless, when Tebaldi made the shocking, but perhaps not entirely unexpected, proposal that Titian should sell the St Sebastian to Alfonso and secretly replace it with a copy for Averoldi, Titian pretended to hesitate. The duke was excited by the thought of possessing a painting that had attracted so much admiration; and on 20 December, after further circuitous conversations with Titian, Tebaldi was able to convey the news that Titian had agreed to the scam, saying, ‘The Duke may demand my poor life of me, and although I would not carry out this swindle [truffa] against the Papal Legate for any man in the world, I would gladly do so for His Excellency if he were to pay me 60 ducats for the St Sebastian.’ Sixty ducats, he couldn’t resist adding, was a bargain considering that the Averoldi altarpiece, for which, as he had previously had occasion to mention, he was to receive 200 ducats, would consist of three figures and the St Sebastian was worth all of them.
Three days later Alfonso came to his senses. He had had more than enough experience of the consequences of offending the papacy and realized that the risk of aggravating Pope Leo, whose sights were set on attaching Ferrara and its hinterland to the Papal States, by swindling his legate in Venice was simply too great. He ordered Tebaldi to convey to Titian that he had changed his mind about cheating the legate:
having thought