TITIAN'S LAST HOPE

TITIAN'S LAST HOPE: his Pieta in the Accademia in Venice

In 1576, the last year of Titian's life, the studio he shared with his son in Venice was robbed and paintings were stolen.  Small wonder, then, when he was painting a possible tomb image for himself in that year, that he was seeking reassurances. The Pieta, a large, substantial painting that originally
was meant to be placed on the right side of the nave of the Frari Church in Venice, nearly directly
across from the Pesaro Altarpiece (also painted by Titian,) is a painting of longing and desire.
The positions of the main figures in the drama map out that longing in a diagonal line that reaches from the bottom right to the upper left.

The line moves right to left and below to above because that is the direction the viewer's gaze
would move along the nave of the Frari toward the main altar where Titian's Assumption of the Virgin makes a climactic statement above the head of the viewer. Titian knew exactly the perfect
moment where his Assumption painting fit into the arch of the choir architecture in that church,
and he wanted his tomb to be placed exactly there, as if somehow it would guarantee that, in his own afterlife, he would see Mary in heaven with God exactly as he had painted them, set in a perfect archway.

He also knew that his Pieta would mirror the perfect diagonal of the painting he had painted
and had installed across the nave earlier in 1526, where the figure kneels in a diagonal that includes St. Peter and Mary and runs from left to right, below to above:

Both diagonals take the viewer's eye in the direction of the altar and both mimic the movement of the
viewer who comes from the entrance of the church towards the altar. (David Rosand realized the connections of these paintings to each other and to the nave in his Painting in Cinquecento Venice, Yale, 1982, pp. 58-69, but the diagonal diagrams are my own.)
All of this planning was Titian's own, as all of the connections are with paintings by him in that Franciscan church.  In the Accademia, where the painting now hangs, this context is lost. (His Pieta
was removed from the Frari in 1814.)

The choice of subject, Pieta, for a painting about his own death, even before he knew he
was dying, speaks of Titian's own competition with the greatest artist of his lifetime, Michelangelo.
He must have known that Michelangelo sculpted his self-portrait into one of his Pietas, the one
for his own tomb, in the figure of Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathaea (see our blog entry on that
Pieta.) Titian wanted his own face in his Pieta, too, and he inserts himself into the holy scene as the
figure of St. Jerome:

St. Jerome is seen in a 3/4 view from the back but the profile of the figure is close to that of a self-portrait by Titian of 1560, with the same white hair and beard. Titian as St. Jerome kneels before Mary and Christ and reaches out with his left hand to grasp the left hand of Christ.

The image of Christ on Mary's lap reminds the viewer of another debt to Michelangelo, in the reversed form of one of his other Pietas, the one in St. Peter's, Rome, made in 1498 for the first chapel on the right of the nave.

Titian takes the body of Christ in that sculpture and paints it in the opposite direction from the Christ of Michelangelo (the head is to the right of the viewer in the Titian rather than to the left,) but the body drapes over the lap of Mary in much the same way and the arm of Christ closest to the viewer falls limply in much the same way. In the Titian painting Christ's face is more visible from below, as Mary's hand seems to prop it up for the viewer and for St. Jerome. Titian's Mary turns towards her son more than Michelangelo's Mary, but the regard for her dead child is still present as is the larger-than-life lap that holds him.
         Like Michelangelo in his tomb Pieta, Titian desires as an artist to put himself in a position to help the sainted figures. Michelangelo holds up and holds onto both Christ and Mary in his sculpture and his self-portrait stands above them. In his self-portrait as St. Jerome, Titian takes a humbler role, kneeling to the side and looking up at them. He takes Christ's hand as if to help him in his hour of need.

Both artists are also anxious about making sure the viewer knows they are the author of the works.
In the St. Peter's Pieta, Michelangelo carves his name on the strap across Mary's chest, his signature
front and center.

Titian does not copy his predecessor in this regard, but he, too, wants to make sure the painting for his tomb features himself. The Saint Jerome as the artist is his signature in a sense since he would assume the contemporary Venetian viewer would recognize his face. But that wasn't enough for him in the age of anxiety in which he lived, and in the year of his death by the plague, 1576.
           TITIAN paints THREE portraits of himself into his tomb monument.
1) The Saint Jerome is the most obvious. He presents himself to the holy pair not just as obsequious
worshipper but as a man of honor, an old man nearing death as he nears them in his approach. He paints himself as he imagines his own body coming towards them in the afterlife to ask for forgiveness for being human. He offers his work to them at the same time, as Michelangelo does in his four Pietas, as an offering or sacrifice in order to ensure good treatment after death. The deities are both altar presences in the actual church of the Frari and afterlife presences in the imagination of the artist as he contemplates his own death.

2) Titian paints himself and his son kneeling and worshipping an image of Mary up on a cloud
in the sky as part of a play within a play, a painting within a painting at the bottom right of the
Pieta painting, just behind his own self-portrait as St. Jerome:
 

Just in case we missed his self-portrait as St. Jerome, he paints himself again, as family donor paying

homage with his son, Orazio, to another Pieta in heaven. The panel of this image leans up against a sculpted lion's head with eyes afire, mouth open and teeth showing, carved as a bas-relief into the base of a statue of the Hellespontine Sibyl holding a cross:

Because the panel leans towards this lion head, the painter appears almost to be kneeling and praying
to the wild animal, the mouth of death.
















His fear of what happens after death intensifies when we
see the lunging person of Mary Magdalene on the left of the Pieta.
(Here, too, Titian is improving on Michelangelo's tomb Pieta where Michelangelo sets Mary Magdalene on the left side of the group of four. This sculpted Magdalene, as finished by his pupil, merely kneels and hold the leg of Christ; she seems rather static when compared to Titian's Magdalene.)

 




































In Titian's Pieta Mary Magdalene runs with her right arm out, left leg forward, open-mouthed, screaming out her horror at Christ's death and showing physically the emotion of the artist in thinking about death. Through her unleashed pain he can express his own terror of the unknown in the loss that is death.

He may have seen Niccolo dell'Arca's terracotta Magdalene in Bologna for this interpretation, but

he moves her further forward into space to convey the sense that she is running away from the reality of mortality.

3) The third self-portrait that Titian places in this painting has been hidden under paint for
centuries and is still invisible to the naked eye. It was revealed only in the x-rays made of the
painting for the Titian show in Washington, D.C. in 1990. (See the catalogue for that show,
Titian, Marsilio Editori, Venice, 1990, especially pp.127-129 in Giovanna Nepi Scire's article,
"Recent Conservation of Titian's Paintings in Venice.")

Between the head of Mary and head of Christ in the x-rays Titian had originally painted a self-portrait facing Mary.

The x-ray shows a face in 3/4 profile identical to the nose and eyes in Titian's 1560 portrait of himself
shown here.

In this position the artist had originally conceived of his place between the two holy figures that
corresponds more closely to the position of Nicodemus' Michelangelo in the Pieta made for his tomb.

 

In the end Titian chose to put on the painted surface his self-portrait as Jerome to the right of the Madonna and Christ, but his original intent is still there, hidden under the paint forever. Was this self-portrait covered over so that the artist could know forever there would be a painted image of himself hidden between the two deities? One that hardly anyone else would have known about? A secret act of homage but also an act that countered his own paranoia at being wiped out, or damaged in the self-images that were actually visible? He would not be robbed again; he made sure the third self-portrait was the charm.

He looks up at the Virgin Mary in his bending, imploring St. Jerome, but his face points to the hidden self-portrait next to Mary where he could make sure his value as an artist could not be taken away and where he hoped to find true immortality.