In the Holy Family with a Shepherd (London, National Gallery), and more obviously in the later Three Ages of Man (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland), the sun rises above the plain where the Piave winds downstream towards the lagoon in the far distance. In remoter parts of the Veneto there are still clusters of homely farm buildings very like those Titian liked to incorporate in his landscapes, often reusing the same group of buildings for different paintings. Those in the background of Tobias and the Angel Raphael are the same as the buildings in the Baptism of Christ (Rome, Pinacoteca Capitolina) and similar to those in his woodcuts of the Triumph of Christ and Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea. The buildings in the Sleeping Nude in a Landscape (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie) reappear in the Noli me tangere (London, National Gallery) which Titian set on a plateau overlooking the plain. The two landscapes in Sacred and Profane Love (Rome, Galleria Borghese) evoke the same place in the golden light of sunset with the same buildings in reverse order, looking north, back towards the lakes and Alpine foothills above Serravalle and Ceneda.22
Titian’s landscapes inspired a succession of artists from Poussin and Rubens to Constable and Turner, as well as writers trying to explain or capture their magic in words. Constable, who sometimes improved his compositions by borrowing Titian’s trees, saw ‘the representative of nature’ in every touch of his landscapes. The Milanese painter and writer Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo wrote that Titian, so loved by the world, was hated by jealous nature.23 Ridolfi began his biography of Titian with praise for his ‘conquest’ of nature,
who had before considered herself insuperable, was now conquered and gave in to this man, receiving laws from his industrious brush, with the appearance of new forms in his work that rendered the flowers more beautiful, the meadows more brilliant, the plants more delightful, the birds more charming, the animals more pleasing, and man more noble.
The concept of great art as triumphant over nature was a borrowing from Vasari, who had in turn borrowed it from Aristotle, and was one of the commonplaces of Renaissance critical theory. We may have more sympathy with the early nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt who used the word ‘gusto’ to evoke a quality of Titian’s landscapes that impressed him: ‘a rich taste of colour is left upon the eye, as if it were the palate, and the diapason of picturesque harmony is felt to overflowing. “Oh Titian and Nature! Which of you copied the other?”’ And he added: ‘We are ashamed of this description, now that we have made it, and heartily wish somebody would make a better.’24
Perhaps the most successful translation of Titian’s painted landscapes into words was written in the early 1540s by his closest friend and most sensitive critic, the writer, journalist and failed painter Pietro Aretino, in a letter about a visit he had recently made to an idyllic countryside. Although the place he had visited was actually Lake Garda, the landscape he described could, as Aretino knew better than anyone, have been painted only by Titian, the greatest master of the alchemical art of transforming real, raw nature into high art. Aretino painted in words the abundance of flowers, the trees, songthrushes escaping from their branches ‘to fill the sky with harmony’, racing rabbits, a church, a wine press, the ring of a lake ‘fit to be worn on the right hand of the world … I walked for miles, but my feet didn’t move, behind hares and hounds, around clumps of mistletoe and netted partridges. Meanwhile I thought I saw something that I might have, but did not, fear: beyond the dense undulating mountains, and hills full of game, were a hundred pairs of spirits obedient to the power and magic of art.’25
The city is about 7 miles in circumference; it has no surrounding walls, no gates which are locked at night, no sentry keeping watch as other cities have for fear of enemies; it is so very safe at present, that no one can attack or frighten it. As another writer has said its name has achieved such dignity and renown that it is fair to say Venice merits the title ‘Pillar of Italy’, ‘deservedly it may be called the bosom of all Christendom’. For it takes pride of place before all others, if I may say so, in prudence, fortitude, magnificence, benignity and clemency; everyone throughout the world testifies to this. To conclude, this city was built more by divine than human will.
MARIN SANUDO, THE CITY OF VENICE, 1493–15301
Great men built Rome, but Venice was built by gods.
JACOPO SANNAZARO, FROM THE OPERA LATINA, 15352
Titian had often heard about Venice from the men in his family who travelled back and forth on government business. Nothing, however, can have prepared a boy of only nine or ten3 who had never seen any city for the one that even today out-dazzles all others. He was met off the boat at the Rialto by an uncle4 who had agreed to care for him while he served his apprenticeship. We can imagine a lanky boy, from a cramped house in a small village in the mountains, his provincial clothes creased from the long journey, taking it all in with that disarmingly hawkish gaze: the massive doorways to the Gothic buildings, the towering masts of ships, the women teetering by on their platformed shoes. And we can assume that the uncle was kind to him – it was a close family – and that when Conte was in Venice a year or two later he saw to it that his grandson lacked for nothing.
Venice in 1500 was the wealthiest, most glamorous, most sophisticated, most cosmopolitan, most admired – and most hated – metropolis in Europe, centre of the only empire since ancient Rome to be named after a city rather than a dynasty. After a century of successful conquests on the mainland, or terraferma, the Venetian land empire stretched nearly as far Milan to the west, across Friuli and the Istrian Peninsula, while the sea empire extended as far as Cyprus on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. Copies of the bell tower in the Piazza San Marco, and images of St Mark, are still to be seen throughout the far-flung Venetian domains. The Venetian arsenal, the greatest industrial complex in the world, pioneered methods of prefabricated construction that, at its peak, could assemble galleys at the rate of one every few hours. The round-bottomed trading ships of the Most Serene Republic sailed to and from ports in the Levant, in the western Mediterranean, and through the straits of Gibraltar to Portugal, England and Flanders.
All commodities that passed through the Adriatic had to pass through Venice: pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, sugar; drugs, dyes, pigments; wheat, fortified wines, raisins, dates, oil, meat, caviar, cheeses; slaves as well as falcons, leopards and other exotic animals; wax, linen, leather, wool, raw and finished silk; iron, gold, silver, jewels; precious marbles and antique sculptures. Venetian long-haul trade, according to a late fifteenth-century estimate, brought in on average a 40 per cent return on investment. Since the middle of the fourteenth century the Venetian gold ducat had been the most stable, in value and weight, and most welcome currency in the Mediterranean basin. Imitated all over the world from Europe to India, its appearance remained unchanged until the fall of the Republic; and the treasury of San Marco in the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi at the foot of the Rialto Bridge was so famous that it was a priority for visiting VIPs on sightseeing tours. Venice, floating in its protective ring of shallow water at the head of the Adriatic, was the entrepot of the world.
A French diplomat, Philippe de Commynes, who was in Venice in 1494 as the envoy of the French king, left us with one of the most famous of the many descriptions of the city as Titian first saw it. The worldly Commynes was as amazed as any modern tourist to see ‘so many steeples, so many religious houses, and