TITIAN
c.1490-1576
Saint Sebastian
Oil on canvas
190 x 95.5 cm
Signed lower left: TICIANVS
Engraved: Raphael Sadeler (1560 Antwerp - 1632 Venice)
PROVENANCE
Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua c. 1530;
Possibly Earl of Arundel;
Heinemann Collection (c.1960-1990);
Sale: Christie's New York: Thursday, May 31, 1990, Lot 114 (as Studio of Titian);
Private Collection, New York
LITERATURE
Mary L. Cox & Lionel Cust, “Notes on the collections formed by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, K.G.”, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 101, August 1911, pp. 278-286, noted on p. 284;
Mary F.S. Hervey, The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, Cambridge 1921, No. 360, p. 488;
David Rosand, “Titian’s Saint Sebastians”, Artibus et Historiae, 1994, no. 30, pp. 23-39;
Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, Complete Edition, Vol. I, London 1969, p. 156, as variant of no. 134, Earl of Arundel Inventory of 1655;
Daniela Ferrari, Le Collezioni Gonzaga: L’Inventario dei beni del 1540-1542, Milan 2003, no. 1297;
Paul Joannides, “Titian and the Extract”, Studi Tizianeschi, no. IV, Milan 2006, pp. 135-148;
Peter Humfrey, Titian, The Complete Paintings, London, 2007, p. 127;
Alessio Geretti (ed.), Il Potere e la Grazia. I Santi Patroni d’Europa, exh. cat., Rome 2009, p.196-197, ill. p.90
EXHIBITIONS
Il Potere e la Grazia. I Santi Patroni d’Europa, Palazzo Venezia, Rome 7 Oct 2009 - 31 Jan 2010
This painting’s recent cleaning has revealed it as an outstanding example of the artist’s most challenging pieces of realism. Its closest counterpart is the standing St. John the Baptist in the Gallerie dell’ Accademia in Venice, whose proportions are the same before it was expanded on the right. Both paintings are signed in the same way ‘TICIANVS’, which the painter discontinued after the 1520s, but used consistently up to and including the Este Bacchanals. The image was subsequently incorporated in a larger composition, the San Niccolò Madonna and Child with Saints in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome, but its creation belongs to an earlier phase in his career.
The present painting is manifestly the source of the engraving by Raphael Sadeler (right) who was in Venice at the turn of the century and published numerous prints after Titian.
One of the results of the pursuit of virtù that accompanied the attempt to revive classical civilisation, that had been suppressed when the Church effectively determined the primacy of faith over reason in order to maintain its hegemony over the faithful, was the empirical understanding of representation. Although little survived up until the renaissance of Greek and Roman painting, the monuments of classical art were still very much in evidence, and reminders of the superiority of the artisans of that distant time. The sixteenth century is also effectively the beginning of the period when religious imagery is transformed into an artistic exercise, and collected for purposes that are no longer solely associated with a destination in a church. The acquisition of realistic imagery that was achieved by Giorgione, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo was a famous milestone in the difficult path towards the reconstruction of a two-dimensional representation, and was itself one of the miracles of modern times. This was not yet based on an optical interpretation, because despite Venice being the principal centre of glassmaking, it was used universally as a part of the range of luxury goods rather than for any reflecting possibility - and the impurities in the medium itself made optical experimentation impossible. The manipulation of colour and shade that these Venetian artists achieved was an incredible advance that was admired throughout Europe, and made it ever more desirable to have an example of the work itself.
Vasari made particular mention of the St. Sebastian in the S. Niccolò altarpiece which this Saint anticipates, (Vite, 1568) dwelling on the Saint himself ‘San Sebastiano ignudo, ritratto dal vivo e senza artificio niuno che si veggia essere stato usato in ritrovare la bellezza delle gambe e del torso, non vi essendo altro che quanto vide nel anturale, di maniera che tutto pare stampato dal vivo, così è carnoso e proprio, ma con tutto ciò è tenuto bello...’ Ludovico Dolce dwelled on it too, as did Titian’s rival Pordenone, saying ‘in quel nudo abbia posto carne e non colori’, so anticipating what Scannelli would say a century later of Caravaggio’s naturalism ‘che non potria dimostrare più vera carne quando fosse vivo’ (Microcosmo della pittura, Cesena 1657, p. 199). Recalling the Renaissance ambition that was to achieve a counterfeit of nature, this was an important step in this direction, and there was much demand for it from Titian. In 1520, Alfonso d’ Este was told that Titian was prepared to sell to the Duke a panel depicting Saint Sebastian, the design of the lower right hand section of the Averoldi polyptych, so following the muscular Michelangelo-esque design of the figure of the saint in the altarpiece painted (1522) for S. Nazaro e Celso in Brescia, and still in situ. It is clear that the genre of the single saint - and let us remember that even in the fifteenth century the polyptychs had individual compartments for each saint - were in demand, from Titian’s hand, because they displayed such mastery of form that they rivalled the antique and were so extraordinary that their interest transcended the mere symbolism of the subject they represented. It was, for Vasari ‘senza artificio alcuno’ as real as it could possibly be, and it conveyed something even disturbing about the model himself. The S. Niccolò altarpiece was probably not completed until the mid 1630s, and the restoration undertaken in the 1960s revealed behind the paint surface a modified pose for St. Sebastian; his head turned towards the Madonna. This was in line with the woodcut that Titian himself designed and probably cut. It shows a more ‘heroic’ pose developed from the original St. Sebastian pose, which in fact goes back, like the present picture, to much earlier in Titian’s career. For the pose of this painting is a repetition of the early (1510/11) saint in the St. Mark altarpiece, painted for S. Spirito in Isola, and now in S. Maria della Salute, of which Vasari commented that many people took to be by Giorgione. It is a design that had evident appeal because it allowed for the representation of the human form ‘al naturale’, and other artists apart from Titian took advantage of this possibility of ‘sexing up’ a religious theme with a feast for the eyes; as Sebastiano del Piombo did in the organ shutters at San Bartolomeo di Rialto, now in the Accademia, Venice. The prime motivation for this enjoyment of the naked human form came clearly from the life-size frescoes of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, that Giorgione had started in the first decade of the century, and Titian had also contributed to. It would be another century before Francesco dell’ Antella would have painted on the facade of his Florentine palazzo the design of Caravaggio’s nude Sleeping Cupid, but this realization that it was possible to have a real image of the human form, with all the sensuality that that implied, was attractive to a century that had quite a lot of life to live.
Prof. Joannides believes that the S. Niccolò altarpiece, which repeats the design of the St. Sebastian in the present work, cannot have been completed before the mid 1530s: it is signed Titianus and the nature of this signature implies that this St. Sebastian was delivered before the altarpiece itself was finished. Prof. Rosand associates the picture with a version documented in 1530 as an unsolicited gift to the Duke of Mantua: ‘On 6th August 1530 the Mantuan envoy in Venice, Benedetto Agnello, reports that Titian is quite disconsolate over the death of his wife, who was buried the day before’. This explains the delay in the completion of certain pictures he was making for the Duke [of Mantua] a portrait of Cornelia Malaspina, and a ‘quadro delle nude...qual sarà una bella cosa’ and which he hopes to have ready within the month. Then, he turns to a picture already delivered “Esso Maestro Ticiano desideraria sapper come il Sr nostro è restato ben sodisfatto del S. Sebastiano, che li ha mandato ben chel dica che sia cosa da donzena, al respetto de laltro dono chel farà del quadro de le nude, et che solamente lo ha donato per un intrattenimento, et per segno della servitù chel porta a sua Excellentia”. The implication is that this was a picture for a private patron, (the Duke of Mantua), such as we have argued for the present work, a development of the design that had such success in the St. Mark altarpiece now in S. Maria della Salute, Venice. The technique already demonstrates the colouristic fluency that became a hallmark of the artist’s style, as well as a facility with the landscape setting that would be followed by Jacopo Bassano (1515-1592) who would be much taken with Titian’s mastery.
Titian returned on several occasions to the theme of Saint Sebastian as a single figure on its own: perhaps the first was the very muscular Michelangelo-esque example referred to above, where the Saint is shown bound to a tree, in the Resurrection Polyptych, at S. Nazaro e Celso, Brescia, which is signed TICIANUS FACIEBAT 1522. Here the saint is depicted in a single panel matching another on the other side of the central resurrection scene with the donor and St. Nazarius and St. Celsus. Quite exceptionally, there are preparatory drawings by Titian associated with this design in Berlin and in Frankfurt, Städelsches Museum. The composition aimed to demonstrate the artist’s tremendous ability in conveying a complex pose of the human form, whose three-dimensionality is emphasized also by the oblique column on which the Saint rests his right foot: but in many ways the more restrained contraposto of the original pose of the St. Mark altarpiece (S. Maria della Salute, Venice, c. 1508/09) was returned to in later interpretations. The practice of returning to earlier inventions in Titian’s career is demonstrated by the recollection, in the woodcut of Six Saints produced after the S. Niccolò altarpiece (Vatican, Rome: after 1535) where the column end of the Brescia composition is combined with a pose that has more to do with the very latest example that comes from Titian’s hand, the painting in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, so much so that Dr. Tamara Fomiciova, writing in 1967, considered that it might have been the model that stayed in Titian’s studio for a long period as the basis of other designs. This is, like the work that is the subject of this study, is a life-sized canvas (although originally started as a half-length and later enlarged by Titian himself). It remained in Titian’s house, being acquired after his death by Cristoforo Barbarigo, from which it was acquired in 1850 by the Hermitage along with the contents of the Galleria Barbarigo in Venice. Long regarded as a bozzetto or sketch because of its unfinished state, it is one of the last works of the painter, with a tempestuous impasto akin to that of the Flaying of Marsyas now in Kromeriz, Czech Republic.
