Titian's Pastoral Concert: Homage to Giorgione

 Titian’s Pastoral Concert: “Homage to Giorgione” 

Dr. Francis P. DeStefano

The Pastoral Concert, that now hangs in the Louvre, is universally recognized as one of the world’s great masterpieces. Usually dated around 1510-1511, it is surrounded, like other famous paintings of the Venetian Renaissance, by an aura of mystery and enigma. Not only has scholarly opinion been divided about whether to attribute the painting to Giorgione or Titian, but also no one has been able to come up with a plausible explanation of the subject or meaning of the painting.

In this essay I offer a “working hypothesis” that provides an interpretation of the subject and also resolves the question of attribution. I argue that the painting is Titian’s personal homage to Giorgione, his recently deceased mentor and friend. 

Today, it is only with a great leap of imagination that we might be able to understand the grief and sorrow caused by the death of the young Giorgione at the height of his fame and artistic prowess in 1510. During the Renaissance, it was not uncommon for poets and humanists to pen eulogies or panegyrics to recently deceased friends.  Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, noted that Giorgione had exceeded even the venerable Giovanni Bellini in the eyes of the Venetian aristocracy. Vasari understood that the young Giorgione’s death was a tragic loss:

This event happened in the thirty-fourth year of his age; not without extreme grief on the part of his many friends, to whom he was endeared by his excellent qualities; it was also greatly to the loss of the world, thus prematurely deprived of his talents.[i]

Vasari’s opinion was based in part on conversations with two young painters who viewed Giorgione as a mentor. One was Sebastiano, later known as Sebastiano del Piombo, and the other was Titian. 

Before going any further it should be noted that my reading is speculative and unorthodox. As far as I know a painterly homage would be unique and unprecedented in the art of the Venetian Renaissance. Nevertheless, there is no settled or prevailing opinion on the subject of the Pastoral Concert. A Titian homage to Giorgione answers most of the questions that have surrounded the painting. 

“Pastoral Concert” is just a descriptive title attached to the painting long after its creation. The provenance of the painting only goes back to the late seventeenth century when it was catalogued in the collection of Louis XIV. Nineteenth century connoisseurs generally attributed the painting to Giorgione, but in a very influential book of the early twentieth century Louis Hourticq attributed it to Titian based on similarities between elements in the painting and other works known to be by Titian. With some notable exceptions, modern scholars today favor the Titian attribution. 

There is also no agreement on the subject. Most commentators have been content to merely call it a pastoral. In 2001, Paul Joannides noted that:

its association of youth, nudity and music with a richly varied landscape projects an Arcadian ease and sense of nature’s beneficence, a compendium of the pastoral vision.[ii]

Still, Joannides argued that “no solution has proved persuasive,”[iii] and recognized that a mere pastoral vision was not enough. He went on to venture a guess of his own albeit with many qualifiers:

despite the heterosexual message of the forms and technique, and the painter’s reveling in the female body, the apparent concentration of the painting… is on men. The subject, then—although not the message—may be homoerotic. What the painter might be showing is the elegant lutenist courting if not seducing the shepherd…It may be that Titian was responding to the demands of a specific client.[iv]

A few years later in the exhibition catalog of the 2006 Bellini, Giorgione, Titian exhibition jointly sponsored by Washington’s National Gallery and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Jaynie Anderson called the painting “the greatest erotic masterpiece in the history of Western painting,” but also characterized it as a “meditative allegory on the creation of poetry.”[v]

Even though she pointed out that scholars generally gave the painting to Titian, she did express her opinion, originally discussed in her 1996 Giorgione catalog, for Giorgione’s authorship but for some reason relegated it to a footnote.

In his 2007 Giorgione catalog, Wolfgang Eller also gave the “Pastoral Concert” to Giorgione based on its resemblance to his other works.[vi]

It is surprising that a painting showing all of the characteristics of Giorgione’s art was attributed to Titian in the past and still is by many art historians. This is also a good example of the typical incapability of art experts to judge a painting based on its painterly quality…. 

Its atmosphere is so Giorgionesque that is [sic] almost impossible to achieve a still higher degree. This is also applicable to the combined themes of love, music, and nature, whereby the painting, as is typical of Giorgione contains several levels of reality. 

For Eller, the painting is “a depiction in the style of antiquity showing two nobles inspired by two Muses making music.” The subject is “Male Pair in Love in a Landscape.”

However, a Titian homage to Giorgione settles the question of attribution, and explains why all the Giorgionesque elements would be in the painting. It also identifies the four figures in the painting. Let’s take a close look.

Prominently figured in the foreground are two male figures, one elaborately dressed in striking finery, and the other wearing rustic garb. A sitting female nude with her back to the viewer faces the two men. A standing nude woman is off to the left pouring something into a well. There is also a smaller figure of a shepherd with a flock in the right mid-ground. In the background there is a landscape that seems typical of Giorgione.

Most commentators have agreed that the two men are the key figures in the painting. Who are they and what is their relationship? In my reading, there are key elements in the painting that identify the finely dressed man as Giorgione. Indeed, it is possible to say that this painting is a primary source that provides substantiation for much of what Vasari said about Giorgione in his short biography. Here is the way Vasari introduced the young rising star:

This was Giorgio, born in the year 1478, at Castelfranco, in the territory of Treviso…Giorgio was, at a later period, called Giorgione, as well from the character of his person as for the exaltation of his mind….

At the height of his fame Giorgione traveled in the highest circles of Venetian society. Vasari mentioned that he even counted Cardinal Grimani, a Venetian patrician and great art collector, among his patrons. Titian depicts him dressed accordingly in the garb of a young Venetian aristocrat of the time. The cap, the sleeves, and the stockings are characteristic.  More than anything the lute should make one think of Giorgione in the same way that a jar of ointment identifies Mary Magdalen, or a broken wheel identifies St. Catherine of Alexandria. Vasari noted Giorgione’s prowess with the lute:

Brought up in Venice, he took no small delight in love passages, and in the sound of the lute, to which he was so cordially devoted, and which he practiced so constantly, that he played and sang with the most exquisite perfection, inasmuch that he was, for this cause, frequently invited to musical assemblies and festivals by the most distinguished personages. 

There are significant signs in this painting, however, that the young man with the lute has recently died. First, the sky in the background is ominous and filled with dark clouds, hardly a background for a peaceful pastoral idyll. For example, there are contemporary versions of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt where dark skies in the background indicate the massacre of the Innocents. Obviously, crucifixion scenes will often feature darkened skies.

Second, the face of the young man with the lute is in shadow. Commentators have wondered and theorized about this deliberate decision on the part of the painter. Scientific examination has shown that the face in shadow is not due to dirt or discoloration. Death can provide a plausible explanation for Titian’s decision. Years later in a Crucifixion altarpiece for the church of San Domenico in Ancona, Titian painted the face of the dying Christ in shadow although his body is well lit. Why else would the most prominent figure in the “Pastoral Concert” have his face in shadow?[vii]

Third, there are no strings on the lute; a very curious omission that only makes sense if the musician will play no more. In the 2006 exhibition catalog entry cited above, Jaynie Anderson discussed the underpainting and noticed that the music had stopped.

Originally the lute player played a smaller instrument, his right hand strumming its chords, before the instrument grew larger and his hand came to rest on it in repose. In rethinking the composition, the artist depicted the silence of music in this meditative poetic picture….

Rather than a temporary meditative silence, the lutenist has strummed his last note. Giorgione is dead. He will play no more.

Finally, the death of Giorgione is also symbolized by the action of the female nude standing at the left. She is pouring something from a pitcher into a well. Scholars have concluded from the position of her hand and arm that she is pouring and not drawing. But who is she?

In a 1957 paper, Philipp Fehl identified the two nude females as wood nymphs who had come to hear the music. He argued that although they were as real as the landscape they represented, they were invisible to the two men.[viii] Two years later Patricia Egan acknowledged Fehl’s insight but went a step further. Rather than nymphs, Egan identified the two females as “Poesia.” Egan showed that Tarocchi cards of the era show poetry or “Poesia” as a female with both a pipe and a pitcher. Egan called her a muse and argued that she had been twinned in the “Pastoral Concert” because her function as bearer of pitcher and pipe had been separated.[ix]

Muses were ubiquitous in the literature and art of the Renaissance.[x]Following Egan, I agree that the nudes are one and the same. Both are the muse of lyric poetry, and by derivation the muse of music. Euterpe, whose name means “giver of delight’,” is the muse of lyric poetry, and the pipe that she is holding usually identifies her. During the Renaissance, muses are usually portrayed as clothed but could also appear in the nude. They represent a higher order of being, and in the Pastoral Concert they are indeed invisible to the two men who seem oblivious to their presence. Edgar Wind referred to the Pastoral Concert when he wrote of the significance of nude and clothed figures in the same painting:

The same 'philosophy of clothes' can be studied in Giorgione's 'Fete Champetre' in the Louvre. The nymphs, distinguished from the musicians by the absence of clothes, are meant to be recognized as 'divine presences', superior spirits from whose fountain the mortal musicians are nourished…[xi]

The presentation of one figure in two guises or roles was not unusual. Rona Goffen referred to a “visual tradition” in her discussion of the two women in Titian’s famous, Sacred and Profane Love, now in the Borghese Gallery:

in the visual tradition, when two figures look alike, they in fact represent the same person, usually in different moments of a narrative, sometimes in different conditions or states of being….[xii]

In my interpretation of the Sacred and Profane Love, I agreed with Goffen that Titian depicted only one woman in two guises and performing two different functions.[xiii]

Vasari noted Giorgione’s skill with love lyrics and music, but in the “Pastoral Concert” Euterpe has departed from him and stands off to the left pouring his spirit out into a well. We recall St. Paul’s statement, as his life was drawing to its end, that he was being poured out like a libation.

At the same time, the seated Euterpe holding the pipe directs her gaze to the young rustic who will be Giorgione’s successor. The young rustic would then be Titian, himself, who deliberately put a number of signs of Giorgione into this painting as a homage to his departed friend. 

The depiction of the front and back of the muse is perhaps the clearest evocation of Giorgione in the “Pastoral Concert.” The most famous anecdote in Vasari’s brief biography of Giorgione concerns the paragoneor contest between sculpture and painting. Vasari related that certain sculptors had claimed a superiority over painting since “sculpture was capable of exhibiting various aspects in one sole figure,” and “from the fact that the spectator can walk round it,” whereas painting “could not do more than display a given figure in one particular aspect.” Vasari noted Giorgione’s counter-argument:

That in one picture the painter could display various aspects without the necessity of walking round his work, and could even display, at one glance, all the different aspects that could be presented by the figure of a man….He declared, further, that he could execute a single figure in painting in such a manner as to show the front, back, and profiles of both sides at one and the same time.

In the “Pastoral Concert” not only do we see the front, the back, and the profile of the muse but we also see her performing two separate functions. Titian could have thought of no better homage to Giorgione than this presentation of the muse. 

While the standing nude symbolizes the passing of Giorgione, the seated nude symbolizes the arrival of Titian.  Here he depicts himself as Giorgione’s social inferior but also as his successor. He wears rustic clothing to depict his humble origins, and it would appear as if he is somehow related to the shepherd and flock in the right mid-ground. But he stares directly at the finely dressed man and their heads almost touch. The men are not rivals but the closest of friends.

There is no more famous account of male friendship than in the biblical story of David and Jonathan. David, the youngest son of Jesse, was called away from his father’s flocks by the prophet Samuel to become the Lord’s anointed. He comes on the scene just as King Saul and his army are being cowed by Goliath, the Philistine giant. David’s defeat of Goliath is one of the most famous scenes in the Bible and Renaissance artists repeatedly depicted it. Saul takes David into his household after the victory, and David and the King’s son, Jonathan, quickly become soulmates:

After David had finished talking to Saul, Jonathan’s soul became closely bound to David’s and Jonathan came to love him as his own soul. Saul kept him by him from that day forward and would not let him go back to his father’s house. Jonathan made a pact with David to love him as his own soul; he took off the cloak he was wearing and gave it to David, and his armor too, even his sword, his bow and his belt. (1 Samuel 18: 1-5)

Saul even offers his daughter to David who at first demurs because of his lowly background: “does it strike you as an easy thing for me to become the king’s son-in-law, poor and of humble position as I am.” (1 Samuel 18:24)

Eventually, Saul comes to regard David as a rival and threat to his throne and plots to destroy him. Jonathan, however, continually intervenes to protect David from his father’s wrath. At one point they even go out into the fields to discuss strategy, something that Titian might have been alluding to by placing his two men in a landscape. 

Finally, both Saul and Jonathan are killed in battle and when David hears the devastating news he memorializes both Saul and Jonathan, but his words about Jonathan might very well reflect Titian’s own feelings about the death of Giorgione:

O Jonathan, in your death I am stricken

I am desolate for you, Jonathan my brother.

Very dear to me you were,

Your love to me more wonderful

Than the love of a woman. (1 Samuel 18: 26)

There are many famous depictions of David during the Renaissance. Indeed, it appears as if Giorgione painted a number of versions some of which scholars believe to be self-portraits. However, I am only familiar with one of David with Jonathan. It is a small painting by Cima da Conegliano that now hangs in London’s National Gallery. Cima was an older contemporary of both Giorgione and Titian and the Museum dates the painting between 1506 and 1510. In Cima’s painting the two young men are walking side by side after the defeat of Goliath whose head is being carried by David. Jonathan wears the fine armor that he will eventually offer to David, but David is dressed much more simply. Their friendship is obvious. 

I am not the first to suggest that the numerous Giorgionesque elements in the “Pastoral Concert” were not put there by Giorgione but by Titian as an act of homage. A similar view was expressed years ago by famed Art historian S. J. Freedberg who believed that the painting gave Giorgione a “momentary posthumous existence.”

The Pastorale represents to us another, more advanced stage of Titian’s relationship to Giorgione: it is no longer imitation, but a demonstration of creation in Giorgione’s style, according to his most advanced precept and in a stature that resembles his. The painting should be, by my calculation, of late 1510 or 1511, just following Giorgione’s death, and it’s as if Titian were determined in it to deny Giorgione’s mortality, perpetuating the life of his idea.[xiv]

In 2001 Paul Joannides made a similar connection but saw rivalry more than emulation.

But it is apparent that the resemblance to Giorgione’s work was part of Titian’s aim: a deliberate invitation to compare the artists in work on relatively small canvasses, as earlier in large public frescoes. …In the Concert Champetre he wished to show that he could compete both with Giorgione’s poetic evocation and with his creation of unity between figures and nature.[xv]

The landscape, the figures, especially the female nudes are reminiscent of Giorgione. It would not surprise me if Titian even used Giorgione’s drawings or cartoons. Rather than competition, I believe that the parallels with the story of Jonathan and David indicate that Titian was offering homage to his departed friend.

Admittedly, in his biography of Titian, Giorgio Vasari mentioned an incident that led to a rupture between the two young artists after a period of early collaboration. Vasari’s biography of Titian only appeared in the second edition of his Lives. We are not sure of Vasari’s sources for the young Titian but in any event he took great pains to show Titian’s early dependence on Giorgione.[xvi]

Having seen the manner of Giorgione, Titian early resolved to abandon that of Giovanni Bellini, although well grounded therein. He now therefore devoted himself to this purpose, and in a short time so closely imitated Giorgione that his pictures were sometimes taken for those of that master…

For example, Vasari notes a painting done by Titian of a member of the Barberigo family, “so well and carefully done that it would have been taken for a picture by Giorgione, if Titian had not written his name on the dark ground.”

But then Giorgione won the contract to do the exterior fresco work on the recently rebuilt Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the commercial center of the German community in Venice. Giorgione did the work on the facade facing the Grand Canal, but for reasons not clear the less visible Merceria side was given to Titian. 

According to Vasari, certain gentlemen friends of Giorgione mistakenly praised him for Titian’s work on the Merceria side and even declared “he was acquitting himself better on the Merceria than he had done on that of the Grand Canal; which remark caused Giorgione so much vexation that he would scarcely permit himself to be seen until the whole work was completed and Titian had become generally known as the painter.”

From that time on Giorgione, according to Vasari, refused to “hold any intercourse” with Titian, and “they were no longer friends.” Even if the story is true, a careful reading casts no reflection on the young Titian or his regard for Giorgione. Of course, it is possible that decades later the older Titian himself related the story to Vasari in an attempt to embellish his already established fame. 

Nevertheless, the evidence in the “Pastoral Concert” indicates that the young Titian sincerely regretted the untimely death of his recently deceased friend and mentor. One final note might help. In his study of the young Titian, Paul Joannides was inclined to accept Hourticq’s opinion that while the “Pastoral Concert” was originally “laid in” around the time of Giorgione’s death in 1510, it was not completed until two decades later.[xvii] To me, this would imply that the painting was never commissioned, and that Titian did it for himself. 

Many have seen that the relationship between the two young men in the “Pastoral Concert” is the key to the painting. Some have even called it  “homo-erotic.” In my opinion the bond between two young warriors, or two young artists, is sufficient to explain the painting. Both Giorgione and Titian were ladies’ men, but in the era of the Renaissance the bond between two young men could be stronger than erotic. Look at the painting and consider again David’s lament on hearing the news of the death of Jonathan.

O Jonathan, in your death I am stricken

I am desolate for you, Jonathan my brother.

Very dear to me you were,

Your love to me more wonderful

Than the love of a woman. 

###

6/29/2013

 * I originally wrote these words in May, 2013. This blog post is intended to present the interpretation to new readers and also provide some additional information. Only last year did I discover that art historian Christiane Joost-Gaugier had seen the painting as Titian's homage to the deceased Giorgione back in 1999. **

Initially, this discovery was somewhat embarrassing since I should have found Dr. Gaugier's interpretation earlier. However, it became somewhat comforting to find that I had come independently to a similar conclusion with someone of her stature, knowledge, and experience. Nevertheless, while I agree with much of Dr. Gaugier's analysis, I do have disagreements with some of the conclusions she drew from her insights.

---

[i] Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, selected, edited and introduced by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Vol II, New York, 1967, p. 227. All quotes from Vasari are taken from this source. See pp. 225-233 for the Giorgione biography. 

 

[ii] Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518, Yale, 2001 p. 104.

 

[iii] Joannides, p. 98.

[iv] Joannides, p. 104.

 

[v] David Alan Brown, and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, Washington, 2006. Catalog entry #31 by Jaynie Anderson. 

[vi] Wolfgang Eller, Giorgione Mystery Unveiled, Petersberg, 2007, pp.133-136.

 

[vii] Almost 50 years later Titian would cover the face of the dying Christ in shadow in a “Crucifixion” that now hangs in the church of San Domenico in Ancona.

 

[viii] Philipp Fehl: “The Hidden Genre: a Study of the Concert Champetre in the Louvre,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Dec. 1957), pp. 153-168.

 

[ix] Patricia Egan, “Poesia and the Fete Champetre”, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Dec. 1959), pp. 303-313.

 

[x] See the Muses entry by Penelope in The Classical Tradition, Harvard University Press, 2010.

[xi] Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, New Haven, 1958. P.123, n.1. Wind’s footnote might have been inspired by the Fehl article cited above.

 

[xii] Rona Goffen, “Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love and Marriage,” in The Expanding Discourse, Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, NY, 1992, pp. 112-113.

 

[xiii] I have identified the two women in the “Sacred and Profane Love” as Mary Magdalen: first as a finely dressed courtesan, and second as a repentant sinner in the act of casting off her finery. See earlier posting on this site.

 

[xiv] S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500-1600, London, 1990, pp. 139-140.

 

[xv] Joannides, p. 102.

 

[xvi] Vasari, pp. 233-253 for the biography of Titian.

 

[xvii] Joannides, p. 100.

Titian's Sacred and Profane Love: The Conversion of Mary Magdalen

 

Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love is perhaps the most spectacular work of art in the great collection of the Borghese Gallery in Rome. Early in the last century a collector offered more for this one painting than the appraised value of the entire Museum. This beautiful painting measures over nine feet long and seems to dominate an entire wall in one of the largest rooms.

 

The title “Sacred and Profane Love” was only attached to the painting long after Titian’s death in an attempt to describe the two beautiful fair-haired women in the foreground. One is fully clothed in a sumptuous gown, and the other is semi-nude except for garments that billow around her but only cover her privates. The sarcophagus-like fountain and the figures on the relief have also eluded identification.

 

Like many other famous paintings of the Venetian Renaissance the subject matter of the “Sacred and Profane Love” remains a mystery. Commentators have always noted the resemblance between the two women. Their reddish-blonde hair, snow white skin, rosy complexion, arched eyebrows, and blue-green almond shaped eyes have led some to call them sisters, even twins. [1] Despite the resemblance, there has never been agreement about the subject of Titian’s famous painting. Here is a summary from a 2003 exhibition catalog edited by David Jaffe.

 

“Early descriptions of this painting, one of Titian’s most enigmatic works, give little indication of its meaning or function. In 1648 Ridolfi described it as ‘two women beside a fountain in which a putto looks at himself;’ its current, misleading title is first recorded in 1693…. It has been established that the patron was Niccolo Aurelio (1453-1535), whose coat of arms appears on the fountain. He was a prominent cittadino (the rank below patrician or noble) of Venice, who married a wealthy widow from Padua, Laura Bagarotto, in May 1514. The diarist Marin Sanudo suggests that the union raised eyebrows, no doubt because Laura’s father, and probably also her husband, had been executed by the Venetian state for treason in 1509….”[2]

 

Most scholars have accepted the view, expressed by famed Art historian Erwin Panofsky almost 75 years ago, that the women are versions of a Neoplatonic Venus, one earthly and the other celestial.[3] Panofsky pointed out that the nude represented a higher order of being. 

 

In fact the title of Titian’s composition should read: Geminae Veneres. It represents the ‘Twin Venuses’ in the Ficinian sense and with all the Ficinian implications. The nude figure is the ‘Venere Celeste’ symbolizing the principle of universal and eternal but purely intelligible beauty. The other is the ‘Venere Volgare,’ symbolizing the ‘generative force’ that creates the perishable but visible and tangible images of Beauty on earth;…Both are therefore, as Ficino expressed it, ‘honourable and praiseworthy in their own way.’[4]

 

Panofsky saw Cupid stirring the water in Titian’s fountain and identified it as “an ancient sarcophagus, originally destined to hold a corpse but now converted into a spring of life.” He did not identify the figures on the relief.

 

In 1978 David Rosand elaborated on Panofsky’s interpretation of the twin Venuses.

 

The more exalted Venus is nude--heavenly beauty needs no material adornment--and stands higher in the field, framed against the background sky...in contrast, her more earthly sister is solidly seated and hence actually on a lower level, more immediately enclosed by nature. She is sumptuously dressed in the material splendor of this world, and her attributes pertain to sanctioned human love: the myrtle she holds symbolizes the lasting happiness of marriage.[5]

 

For Rosand “the unbridled force and the accompanying acts of passion and violence” on Titian’s “invented sarcophagus relief” symbolized “bestial love” and “pure lust.”

 

However, the 2003 exhibition catalog disagreed.

 

That the painting reflects Neo-Platonic theories of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ love is untenable. Titian was not versed in such matters, and there is no precedent for the representation of such ideas in Venetian painting…there is nothing didactic about the painting, which is, rather, intensely private in nature.[6]

 

Indeed, it is hard to find representations of Venus that approximate the two women in Titian’s painting. The goddess of Love is rarely portrayed fully clothed. Even when she is portrayed in the nude, she does not have clothing billowing around her.

Perhaps the lack of images was one of the reasons that led Rona Goffen to downplay the two Venus hypothesis and argue that Titian’s painting is primarily concerned with “the reality and the ideality of women in marriage…” The garments of the so-called Profane Love, she wrote,

have been recognized as the traditional dress of a Venetian (and Paduan) bride; white gown, belt, gloves, roses, the myrtle wreath (myrtus coniugalis), and hair loose on the shoulders.…In this case, the bride’s white gown has a red sleeve, red being another bridal color in Renaissance Venice, though it may also be intended to identify her as a widow.[7]

She added that Titian was depicting a new concept in which men would find sensual pleasure inside the marital state with their wives, not outside with courtesans or mistresses. “Titian appreciated the coincidence of chastity and sexuality: they are not antagonistic but sympathetic aspects of her [the bride’s] character….”[8]Goffen was also struck by the resemblance of the two women and argued that they might be more than twins. 

 

Or is this one woman in two guises, embodying two aspects of herself?... in the visual tradition, when two figures look alike, they in fact represent the same person, usually in different moments of a narrative, sometimes in different conditions or states of being….The representation of red and white, and the juxtaposition of their attributes seem to confirm the single identity of the two women, figured as bride and as wife.[9]

I agree with Goffen that Titian followed the “visual tradition” and chose to paint only one woman in two separate guises. However, the only person who could be portrayed at the same time as a well-dressed, even sumptuously dressed, woman, and as a semi-nude figure is Mary Magdalen, whose perceived life was the epitome of sexuality and chastity. Once we can see the two women as the Magdalen, all the other features of the painting fall into place.

 

Aside from the Madonna, Mary Magdalen was the most popular female saint of the Middle Ages. If anything, her popularity only increased during the Renaissance. Writing in the nineteenth century Anna Jameson noted,

 

it is difficult for us in these days, to conceive, far more difficult to sympathize with, the passionate admiration and devotion with which she was regarded by her votaries in the Middle Ages. The imputed sinfulness of her life only brought her nearer to them.[10]

 

Recent studies share Mrs. Jameson’s view of the importance of Mary Magdalen in the life and art of the Renaissance. In 2000 Katherine Ludwig Jansen wrote:  

 

the Magdalen now found herself at the head of the celestial choir of virgins in the litany of saints, and again among the virginal saints as naming practices in Tuscany reveal….Her recuperated virginity signaled fertility; as such, she was invoked as mother, and called upon to intervene in cases of conception, gestation, labor, and delivery, to say nothing of protecting newborn children and expectant mothers.[11]

 

In her study of the Magdalen Susan Haskins noted that Venice “had a long-established tradition of venerating the penitent saint….”[12] In Venice fervent religious devotion went hand in hand with the largest concentration of prostitutes in Europe. In Rona Goffen’s words,

 

Churches, monasteries of nuns, and hospices for repentant (or at least retired) prostitutes were commonly dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalen, including the mid-sixteenth century foundation of the church and hospice of the Magdalen in Venice, called Le Convertite. [13]

The interest in Mary Magdalen naturally found its way into art. In her own inimitable way, Mrs. Jameson pointed out that each region and era had its own particular style. 

 

We have Magdalenes who look as if they never could have sinned, and others who look as if they never could have repented; we have Venetian Magdalenes with the air of courtesans, and Florentine Magdalenes with the air of Ariadnes; and Bolognese Magdalenes like sentimental Niobes; and French Magdalenes, moitie galantes, moitie devotes; and Dutch Magdalenes, who wring their hands like repentant washerwomen. The Magdalenes of Rubens remind us of the ‘unfortunate Miss Bailey;’ and the Magdalenes of Vandyck are fine ladies who have turned Methodists.[14]

 

Jameson’s criticism of the Venetian style is very pertinent. Among the many different ways to treat the Magdalen one is as a richly attired and seductive courtesan contemplating the folly of her life and considering the opportunity that had been opened up to her by the words of Jesus to sin no more.  Often, as in a version by Bernardino Luini, a Titian contemporary, she would be paired with her plainly dressed sister, Martha.  Later, both Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour would also depict contemplative well-dressed Magdalens.

 

Equal in importance would be her depiction as a semi-nude penitent sinner fasting and mortifying herself in a desert. Donatello’s wooden statue is the most famous fifteenth century version of the penitent Magdalen. She is gaunt and haggard, covered almost entirely by the long hair that reaches to her ankles. Early in the next century Quentin Massys could still depict a similar looking Magdalen along with Mary of Egypt, another penitential desert saint.

 

However, in the sixteenth century artists tended to merge both versions of the Magdalen together. It would appear that Renaissance patrons would have none of the gaunt, haggard images and demanded more beautiful Magdalens. She would still be seen with the vestiges of her finery but at the same time tearful, sorrowful, and disheveled with breasts fully or partially exposed.

 

Correggio painted her in this manner as did the contemporary Milanese painter styled “Giampietrino” (identified today as Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, a follower of Leonardo da Vinci). Around this same time Titian painted a “Bust of a Young Woman” [Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena]. In his study of Titian’s early career, Paul Joannides discussed an early Titian usually called a “bust of a Young Woman, and noted that it “is often thought to be a portrait of a courtesan,” and that there is “an obvious link of mood and gesture with Giorgione’s Laura.” Joannides speculated that this early Titian woman might actually be Mary Magdalen.

 

Perhaps more likely is that she is a Magdalene in a Mary and Martha, the subject represented in Milan in the work of Bernardino Luini and his circle and one that would certainly have appealed to Titian, allowing him to contrast female types. But without further evidence no suggestion can be more than speculative.[15]

 

Joannides was certainly correct to see the resemblance of Titian’s early “courtesan” to Giorgione’s “Laura.” Despite the almost unanimous opinion of contemporary scholarship, the “Laura” could very well be Mary Magdalen. In Giorgione’s painting the young woman wears a courtesan’s robe, but it has parted to reveal her breast. However, her white rolled up veil is a symbol of a virtuous woman, and the laurel leaves behind her are a symbol of marital fidelity. [16]

 

Ultimately, Titian became the most prolific and famous painter of Mary Magdalens. His half-length depictions of a beautiful, full-figured semi-nude show her long red hair around her body but parted to reveal bared breasts. She looks upward with her jar of ointment beside her. The words of Susan Haskins are especially relevant considering the way in which Titian was able to combine the courtesan with the penitent prostitute. 

 

In sixteenth-century Venice, the name of the Magdalen became synonymous with the feminine sex at two distinct social levels of purchased sex: at the superior stratum that of the courtesan…her link was a literary one in a period when…women’s beauty, love and sexuality were lauded. But at the lower level, that of the common prostitute, she represented…the model of repentance and conversion.[17]

 

Titian’s famous Magdalens were all completed after the “Sacred and Profane Love.” In this early rendition he separated the Magdalen into her two guises. The clothed woman is the courtesan contemplating the error of her ways. The semi-nude woman is the newly converted Magdalen who, according to the apocryphal legends, would spend the last 30 years of her life fasting and mortifying herself in a desert outside of Marseilles. 

Rona Goffen believed that the clothed woman in the “Sacred and Profane Love” was a bride attired in what could have been Laura Bagarotto’s own wedding gown, but she did point out that the woman could also be a splendidly dressed seductress.

Although the bride’s attire is appropriate for a wedding, the folds and fabric of the gown are exploited to emphasize the sensuality of the figure. Such sartorial eroticism may have been an innovation for bridal imagery, one perhaps more commonly associated with pictures of the “other woman,” such as Palma’s composition of c. 1515 in Vienna.[18]

Courtesans were noted for their sumptuous attire and Venetian moralists complained that married women in their finery were often indistinguishable from courtesans.

 

We notice the woman’s beautiful red hair. Mary Magdalen was usually depicted as fair-haired. We see the same flowing red hair in Titian’s many other Magdalens, as well as in the “Noli Me Tangere.” The red color of her sleeve is also an attribute. Her right hand holds a sprig of wild rose, another symbol of the Magdalen. Her left hand rests on a container that could hold her jewels and perfumes. Both hands are gloved. Mary Magdalen was the patroness of all those engaged in producing female luxury items such as perfumes and gloves.

 

Finally, there is her pose and posture. Some believe that she is looking at the viewer but to me she seems to stare off into the distance rapt in contemplation of a life changing decision. If the painting was hung high on the wall as it is in the Borghese, it would be even more difficult for the observer to make eye contact.[19] Some observers also believe that the seated woman’s spread legs are sensual and erotic--something that would also fit this most famous seducer of men. Personally, I can’t see it and it appears to me that she is about to fall to her knees.

 

On the right we see the semi-nude Magdalen of the apocryphal legends. Mrs. Jameson’s description of the typical penitent Magdalen would not have appealed to Titian. 

 

When exhibited to us as the patron saint of repentant sinners, Mary Magdalene is sometimes a thin wasted figure, with long disheveled hair of a pale golden hue…sometimes a skin or a piece of linen is tied round her loins, but not seldom her sole drapery is her long redundant hair.[20]  

 

Much later in his life Titian joked of his Magdalens that he liked to portray them at the beginning of their fasting rather than as thin, wasted figures. Joking aside, in the “Sacred and Profane Love” Titian could actually be portraying the moment of conversion. 

 

In representing the Magdalen as a beautiful young woman, the artist was also reflecting the desires of his wealthy Venetian patrons. In 1531 Titian received a request from Duke Federico Gonzaga of Mantua for a Magdalen that he could use as a gift for a friend.

 

I would like you to make me a St. Magdalen, as lachrymose as can be…and that you make every effort to make it beautiful, which for you will not be remarkable as you cannot do otherwise, when you really want to…I wish to send it to be given to the most illustrious Lord Marchese del Guasto [del Vasto]…making it so that it appears an honorable gift, being sent by me to a Lord such as that marchese…[21]

The semi-nude, converted sinner in the “Sacred and Profane Love” has the same flowing red hair as well as the red and white apparel of the courtesan. Moreover, scholars have wondered why the clothing and appearance of this figure seem so much like the Magdalen in the “Noli Me Tangere”. 

Finally, in her left hand she holds aloft the jar of oil that is the single most recognizable symbol of Mary Magdalen. Anna Jameson noted that practically every depiction of her includes this element.

 

In all these subjects the accompanying attribute is the alabaster box of ointment, which has a double significance; it may be the perfume which she poured over the feet of the Saviour, or the balm and spices with which she had prepared to anoint the body. Sometimes she carries it in her hand, sometimes it stands at her feet, or near her; frequently, in later pictures, it is borne by an attendant angel. The shape varies with the fancy of the artist…but always there—the symbol at once of her conversion and love, and so peculiar that it can leave no doubt of her identity. [22]

 

I admit that I have never seen it smoking in the manner that Titian depicts it here but sometimes things should be left, as Mrs. Jameson said, to the “fancy” of the artist.

 

Both the Magdalens sit on a sarcophagus--like fountain that further serves to connect them. The wild rose bush in front is also a traditional symbol of Mary Magdalen. A sarcophagus--like fountain is a puzzle in itself but the relief, which Peter Humfrey called “Titian’s own invention,” has also eluded identification. Guesses have been made but in the 2003 exhibition catalog David Jaffe noted that the “significance or otherwise of the reliefs on this ‘fountain of Venus’ remains elusive… [23]

 

There are three scenes on the relief and although they are somewhat obscured, we can now see that they deal with other great sinners. On the far right two nudes stand on each side of a tree. The figure on the left is Eve portrayed in her usual full-frontal nudity. Adam is on the other side of the tree. To their left we see an act of murderous violence that must represent the story of Cain and Abel, the first incident of sin after the Fall.

 

On the other side of the relief we can plainly see a horse led by one man, but the rider appears to be falling off. The fallen rider can only be St. Paul, one of the few sinners capable of being mentioned in the same breath as Mary Magdalen. Baldassar Castiglione compared the two sinners.

You must remember also that St. Mary Magdalen was forgiven many sins because she loved much, and that she, perhaps in no less grace than Saint Paul, was many times rapt to the third heaven by angelic love…[24]

Anna Jameson provided an example of the relationship of Mary Magdalen and St. Paul in Raphael’s St. Cecilia now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna.

 

[Mary Magdalen] stands on the left, St. Paul being on the right of the principal figure; they are here significant of the conversion of the man through power, of the woman through love, from a state of reprobation to a state of reconcilement and grace. St. Paul leans in deep meditation on his sword.[25]

 

This explanation of the relief brings up the question of why Titian deliberately chose to use a fountain that looked like a sarcophagus. What kind of a sarcophagus can it be that has a spigot through which water gushes freely? The angel (we can now call it an angel rather than a Cupid) stirring the waters reminds us of the Biblical pool of Bethesda but that story only reminds us of Baptism.

 

In Baptism the converted sinner is immersed in the waters and dies to sin. The waters are living and flowing, a sign of new life and regeneration. Writing of Eudes de Chateauroux, a thirteenth century cardinal-bishop and prolific theologian, Katherine Jansen pointed out that Eudes had compared the tears of Mary Magdalen to an “overflowing fountain in the middle of his Church in which sinners are able to wash away their sins.”

 

Eudes’ image of Mary Magdalen as a fountain, then, functioned similarly….Tears, of course, had functions other than liquefaction in the medieval symbolic economy. As Eudes implied in the passage cited above they also served as baptismal water washing away the stain of sin, and restoring the contrite weeper to the condition of purity and innocence.[26]

 

With the two figures and the centrally located sarcophagus done, we can complete the puzzle by filling in the landscape. On the left behind the seated courtesan the landscape is dark and surmounted by a city. In his study of Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” John Fleming showed that the city in the background of that famous painting was a place of spiritual danger: a place deliberately left behind by the saint in the desert.[27]

 

I have argued elsewhere that the city in the background of Giorgione’s Tempest is also a place of danger both physical and spiritual.[28] In one of his versions of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Joachim Patenir also used the same motif by showing the city from which the Holy Family had fled under dark clouds that dissipated as they traveled away. In Titian’s painting a young rider on horseback gallops towards perdition.

 

There are also two unexplained rabbits in the left landscape. It could be that Titian just liked rabbits, but rabbits were also symbols of lust and sensuality. However, the white rabbit pursued by a hound in the landscape behind the converted Magdalen is a symbol of chastity and purity.[29]

 

The landscape on the right is bright and peaceful. Sheep graze contentedly and there is a church in the background. What would a church be doing in a painting devoted to Venus?

 

As mentioned above, no one has written more on the “Sacred and Profane Love” than the late Rona Goffen. [30] She never saw Mary Magdalen in the “Sacred and Profane Love,” but practically every argument she made in “Titian’s Women” about Titian’s later Magdalens could easily be applied to the “Sacred and Profane Love.” 

 

Goffen absolved Titian of any intent to create a “lubricious” image in his later Magdalens. She pointed out that even though he and his patrons wanted beautiful images, their devotion to her as an intercessor was sincere.[31] Indeed, Goffen noted that later in his life Titian admitted that he regarded the Magdalen as a personal intercessor. 

The “Sacred and Profane Love” might not have been Titian’s first attempt to portray Mary Magdalen in her two guises. In 2001 Paul Joannides noticed the similarity of the painting to a lost fresco painted by Titian in 1509 in his collaboration with Giorgione on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. However, he thought it was strange that Zanetti’s seventeenth century copies of the Fondaco figures were related to a depiction of Judith,

This seems to mean that the two figures, one certainly, the other probably, nude were placed above the Judith, and thus above the cornice. Zanetti's wording is ambiguous since his print contains at least part of the second figure... Indeed, it may be that this passage has been confused by some misprint. If, however, the two women were placed directly above the Judith it is evident that significant figural decoration continued into the storey above her-if only in the center, of the façade-and it is probable that the figures embodied some meaning, since they would have been seen in conjunction with Judith. The nude, apparently pointing upwards, might have represented hope; the other, looking down perhaps to children, possibly Charity--but this is to reach the limits of the speculative.[32]

 

If the two women in the “Sacred and Profane Love” are seen as Mary Magdalen, there would be little need to speculate about the reason why one of the most famous women of the Old Testament might have been placed below a famous one of the New Testament on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Moreover, just like Mary Magdalen, Judith dressed herself in her most alluring garb in order to seduce her victim.

 

The two heads in Zanetti’s etching do resemble the two women in the “Sacred and Profane Love.”  It would certainly be interesting to speculate on the contribution of Giorgione and the Fondaco frescos to Titian’s painting. Giorgione did the section that faced the Canal, but Titian did the section that faced the Merceria. In his study of Titian’s early years, Paul Joannides argued that in 1508/9 the young Titian still was deficient in drawing skills. In that case it is hard to imagine him with the skill necessary for the intonaco work of a fresco cycle. Only Giorgione’s name was mentioned in the original contract, and it is quite possible that he was responsible for the entire iconographical scheme and the intonaco drawings.

 

Titian’s painting and the Fondaco figures might have had the same patron. The discovery of the coat of arms of Niccolo Aurelio on the sarcophagus/fountain in the nineteenth century definitely established the connection of that Venetian official to the “Sacred and Profane Love.” According to Paul Joannides, Niccolo Aurelio

 

was also involved, naturally, with the Serenissima's artistic policies: he signed the payment order to Giorgione for the frescoes on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. It could be that he had some responsibility for planning Giorgione's (and Titian's) schemes, but whether or not this is so, Niccolo must have been in contact with both Giorgione and Titian and would have been in a position to order works from them.[33]

 

Niccolo Aurelio married Laura Bagarotto in 1514 and if there was ever a sinner in need of repentance it was this widow from Padua. In 1509 her father, Bertuccio Bagarotto, a professor at the famed university of Padua, as well as her husband, Francisco Borromeo, had been accused of treason by the Venetian government for collaboration in the fall of Padua during the War of the League of Cambrai. The husband most likely died in 1509, and the father was hanged in the Piazza di San Marco, an execution that his wife and daughter were forced to witness. Laura’s goods, including her substantial dowry, were confiscated.

Subsequently, Laura campaigned for the restoration of the family’s good name as well as for the restoration of her dowry, estimated at over 2000 ducats. Her marriage to Niccolo Aurelio in 1514 must have been an important step in her rehabilitation since her dowry was only restored the day before the marriage to Aurelio. Finally, in 1519 her deceased father’s name was also cleared. 

Until recently it had been thought that Laura’s own coat of arms could be seen in the empty plate near the nude Woman. Goffen accepted the Aurelio-Bagarotto marriage as the occasion of the painting but believed that the painting could not be a portrait of Laura Bagarotto, since no bride would have been depicted in the same manner as either woman in the painting. Neither could it be a traditional marriage portrait since the husband was not included. 

However, in his 2003 study Joannides indicated that a close examination of the painting had only revealed a “random group of lines” in the plate. He concluded:

This development has not yet been fully absorbed in the literature, but what it means is that there is no hard evidence that the painting was commissioned in connection with the marriage—although it might have been—no evidence that connects the painting either with the experience or the appearance of Laura Bagarotto…[34]

Nevertheless, one would like to think that Niccolo was honoring his new wife or seeking to aid in her rehabilitation with this painting. On her part, Laura Bagarotto, given the ups and downs of her own life, might have looked to the Magdalen as a patron. On that fateful day in 1509 she lost both her father and her patrimony. If she had not been a woman, she might have lost her own life. Five years later her dowry was restored on the eve of her marriage to a prominent Venetian official. Eventually, she would provide the aging Niccolo with a beloved daughter and then a male heir. Who can doubt that she had prayed to the Magdalen, the patron saint of all women hoping for a family?

 ###

Francis P. DeStefano

Fairfield, CT

9/9/2011

---

[1] Julianne Kaercher: “Female Duality and Petrarchan Ideals in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love,” unpublished M.A. thesis, Bowling Green State University, May 2009. 

[2] Titian, exh. cat. ed. David Jaffe, National Gallery, London, 2003, pp. 92-95.

[3] Erwin Panofsky: “The Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and Northern Italy (Bandinelli and Titian),” in Studies in Iconology, Naturalistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1939, reprinted 1962, p. 152.

[4] Panofsky, op. cit. p. 152.

[5] David Rosand, Titian, New York, 1978. p. 80.

[6] Jaffe ed. Titian, pp. 92-95.

[7] Goffen, op. cit., pp. 112-113.

[8] Goffen, op.cit., pp.115-116.

[9] Rona Goffen: “Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love and Marriage,” in The Expanding Discourse, Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, NY, 1992, p. 115.

[10] Anna Jameson: Sacred and Legendary Art, Boston, 1895, Vol. 1, p. 344.

[11] Katherine Ludwig Jansen: The Making of the Magdalen, Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages, Princeton, 2000, p. 306.

[12] Susan Haskins: Mary Magdalen, Myth and Metaphor, NY, 1994, p. 286.

[13] Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women, 1997, p. 185.

[14] Jameson, op.cit. pp. 352-3.

[15] Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518, Yale, 2001. p. 96.

[16] For the veil and laurel see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, and Giovanna Nepi-Scire, eds. Exh. Cat., Giorgione, Myth and Enigma, 2004, pp. 197-8. The catalog does not identify “Laura” as Mary Magdalen.

[17] Haskins, op.cit., p. 286.

[18] Goffen, Titian’s Women, p. 39.

[19] Titian knew how to establish eye contact. In the Frari’s Pesaro altarpiece, the eyes of the young boy who looks out of the picture follow the viewer wherever he stands. 

[20] Jameson, op.cit., p. 348.

[21] Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women, p.181.

[22] Jameson, op.cit. p.347.

[23] Jaffe ed., Titian, p.94.

[24] Quoted in Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women, p. 171.

[25] Anna Jameson, op. cit. 351.

[26] Jansen, op. cit. 211.

[27] John V. Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis, Princeton, 1982.

[28] Francis P. DeStefano, “Giorgione’s La Tempesta,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Venice on 4/9/2010. For the paper see http://www.giorgionetempesta.com.L

[29] For rabbits see Lucia Impelluso, Nature and Its Symbols, Los Angeles, 2003, p. 238.

[30] She published her original research in an article in 1992, and basically repeated it the next year in a collection entitled, “Titian 500”. Subsequently, Goffen’s research formed the basis of the section on the “Sacred and Profane Love” in her magisterial 1997 study, “Titian’s Women.”

[31] See Goffen, Titian’s Women, pp. 172-181.

[32] Joannides, op. cit. 186.

[33] Joannides, op. cit. 186.

[34] Joannides, op. cit. 187.