Titian and Workshop
NG 6376 
An Allegory of Prudence

Nicholas Penny, 2008

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume II: Venice 1540–1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2008).

c. 1550–65, perhaps completed later

Oil on canvas, 75.5 × 68.4 cm

Support

The measurements given above are those of the stretcher. The original canvas is of a coarse, open tabby weave with thick and uneven threads: 12 threads to the centimetre in the warp (running vertically) and 10 in the weft. This canvas is lined on to a canvas of medium‐fine tabby weave.

The ragged edges of the original canvas are partly concealed by putty, but it is clear that they do not extend to the left edge of the lining canvas. Cusping is obvious at the upper and lower edges; it may also be discerned at the sides. There are old tacking‐holes (perhaps original) at the lower edge.

The nineteenth‐century deal stretcher with crossbars is stamped I PEEL/LINER. The name ‘Peel’ is not very distinct. A paper label, perhaps removed from an earlier stretcher, is attached to the crossbars. It is inscribed in black ink in what may be an early nineteenth‐century hand: ‘Pope Paul III / Emp Charles V / alphonso duke of Ferara / by / Titian’. There is also a label for the winter exhibition of 1950–1 at the Royal Academy: ‘no. 128’–property of ‘Francis Howard Esq. 19 Limeway Terrace, Dorking, Surrey’.

Materials and Technique

The canvas is prepared with a gesso ground. In all the paint samples taken a first layer of a pale warm brown colour has been found. This is likely to be a priming covering the entire surface.

The composition was extensively revised. X‐radiographs show that the image was originally bordered on three sides (and perhaps completely surrounded) by a painted frame with a sinuous contour (fig. 1). The frame was not exactly symmetrical and was painted with boldly swept lines: it may have been cancelled before it was finished. A sample taken from the right‐hand side of the painting revealed a thick layer of lead white which has been painted over. This might support the hypothesis that a fictive stone frame or cartouche was originally intended.

Changes were made to the face in the centre but there is no evidence that the features were much altered. On the other hand, the profile on the right was originally that of a bearded old man rather than a youth. On the left, another profile was painted over, and in old photographs this is visible to the right of the present profile.

The animal heads were clearly an afterthought. Some of the lower paint layers are apparent in relief: notably, the leafy fringe of a collar just above the wolf’s eyes, and a strong diagonal in the shadow to the left of the lion’s head. The X‐radiographs show broad and vigorous sweeps of paint apparently indicating the folds of a cloak. These pass through the lion’s head and overlap those of both the wolf and the dog. It is not clear whether these preliminary ideas were ever fully executed, and the leafy collar is hard to reconcile with the cloak.

Traces of what is probably vermilion are visible under the brown paint above the cap of the old man. They correspond to a rough patch in the X‐radiograph and may represent an earlier idea for a larger cap.

Red paint is also seen lower right, below the dog’s muzzle, and a sample confirms that it is present also just above the muzzle. This is composed of lead white and red lake and may be the colour intended for the cloak whose folds have been noted.

The red of the robe worn by the old man is composed of lead white, vermilion and red lake. The ruddy brown spots on the young man’s tunic consist of red iron‐earth pigment.

There is no good evidence for the claims made in a recent article that the ‘head of the old man was painted long after the other two’, that the inscription was covered over by the artist and exposed by a later restoration, and that the ‘original version’ represented the three ages of man.¹ Indeed, it is by no means certain that there was an ‘original version’ in the sense of a finished picture which was later altered.

Conservation

After being acquired by the Gallery in April 1966 the painting was cleaned and restored in the following June. The abrasion at the edges and in the face of the old man, also the distracting pentimenti in the latter, were made less obtrusive.

Condition

The central face is in good condition. There is considerable abrasion elsewhere, especially in the face of the old man. Increased transparency has made for some distracting pentimenti.

Attribution and Dating

The painting was never, it seems, questioned as a work by Titian during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Had it been better known in the late nineteenth century, however, its reputation as such might not have survived the competitive scrutiny of the great connoisseurs of that period. It was published as a Titian by Hadeln in The Burlington Magazine for October 1924, after it had been included in a loan exhibition that summer at Agnew’s.² Thereafter, it was accepted by most scholars (including Suida, Tietze, Valcanover, Pallucchini and Wethey).³ Berenson, however, in his Lists of 1957, described it as only in ‘great part’ by Titian,⁴ and he was surely right. Indeed, only the central head is of the quality one would expect, and the head of the young man, puffy and inexpressive, could not be by him. Nor are the animal heads worthy of the artist who painted the puppy in the Vendramin Family (see p. 212) or the hound in the full‐length portrait in the Gemäldegalerie, Kassel,⁵ to mention only two examples.

Nevertheless, the painting was believed to be ‘100% Titian’ by both Hendy, the director of the Gallery, and Gould, the curator, responsible for its acquisition in 1966.⁶ The [page 237][page 238]attribution provoked little protest at the time, except from Edgar Wind, who found the ‘literal symmetry’ to be ‘without parallel in Titian’s œuvre’ and wondered whether it might be the work of Cesare Vecelli.⁷ The most recent scholars to have published the painting seem to have no doubts as to its autograph status.⁸

The painting has generally been regarded as a late work, probably of the 1560s, but if the central face is considered in isolation there seems no good reason why it should not have been painted in the 1550s. It compares very well with the bearded head of the full‐length portrait in Kassel, which may date from the 1550s or 1560s.⁹ The rest of the painting is a different matter and a later date is suggested by the head of the young man, which resembles very closely the heads added by an assistant to Titian’s Vendramin Family (as discussed below). There are also similarities between the lion’s head and the giant carved lion masks on the pedestals of the statues in the late Pietà.¹⁰

Lighting from the right is generally rare in paintings made from life by right‐handed artists and is unusual in Titian’s portraiture. A notable exception is the portrait of the Doge Andrea Gritti in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which is designed to be seen from a distance and from below. It was obviously commissioned for a specific setting. The Allegory, also lit from the right, may also have played a part in the decoration of a particular room. Of the works for a specific setting recorded as by Titian by contemporary sources, the best candidate would be the paintings he is said to have made for the attic frieze of the Camerino of Gabriel Vendramin (see pp. 225–6), where a heraldic composition and symbolic subject would certainly have been appropriate.

A Posthumous Pastiche?

One explanation of the very mixed quality of the painting would be that it was an unfinished head left in the workshop at Titian’s death and then later worked up by another artist. If it is accepted that the painting has (or purports to have) an autobiographical character, this explanation seems more likely. In any case we know that at least one pastiche picture of this kind was manufactured, the so‐called Titian and his Friends that was in the collection of Charles I and remains in the Royal Collection.¹¹ The clumsy composition and inconsistent lighting of that picture make it inconceivable that it was Titian’s invention. The two flanking figures are copied from independent portraits by him: the self portrait in Berlin, and a portrait from the Kress Collection in San Francisco of a man who holds a letter inscribed ‘Di Titiano Vicellio singolare amico’. The central figure seems to represent Andrea de’ Franceschi, the chancellor of Venice, and is close to Titian’s portrait of him in the Detroit Institute of Art.¹² Another painting possibly in this category is the strange composition known as Tiziano con l’amorosa (‘Titian and his sweetinge’ or ‘Titian with a courtesan’, as British travellers called it), which enjoyed considerable fame in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was in the Borghese collection. It looks like an unfinished portrait of a courtesan, perhaps of the 1530s, to which a caricature of the frail old Titian has been added.¹³ There was an understandable desire to find painted autobiographical evidence of one of the greatest old masters. Posthumous portraits of Titian were made by Pietro della Vecchia (1602/3–1678), which were soon taken for self portraits.¹⁴

It would be easier to place the National Gallery’s painting in the category of false autobiography if the face of the old man bore more of a resemblance to Titian. In addition, the central head does not seem likely to be a study for – or the start of – a portrait such as Titian would have kept in the studio. The almost tearful eyes and the absence of self‐possession in the expression make this unlikely. Moreover, the X‐radiographs, although clearly revealing that extensive changes were made, do suggest that a triple head was always intended. It may therefore be that Titian accepted the unusual commission for an emblematic painting of this kind, painted the central face and sketched in the other two, but then allowed an assistant or associate to modify and complete it. The youthful face closely resembles those of the children on the left‐hand side of the Vendramin Family. Since these were certainly completed within Titian’s lifetime it is surely likely that this painting also was.

Meaning

The interpretation of the painting, which had been established by the mid‐eighteenth century and seems to have survived unchallenged in the nineteenth, is discussed in a separate section below.

When the painting was first published by Detlev von Hadeln in The Burlington Magazine for October 1924 the subject was identified as the Three Ages of Man and the animal heads were proposed as a ‘symbolical expansion of the idea’, alluding to the ‘subtlety of old age, the vigour of manhood and probably the frivolity of youth’. Hadeln noted a pair of Venetian woodcuts in which a man of forty was associated with a lion and a man of fifty with a wolf, but conceded that in these the younger man was associated with a calf. And in fact in imagery of this sort the dog is associated with age, not youth. The other problem with this interpretation is that it does not explain the prominence of the Latin text, but this was not as visible in 1924 as it is today.

This takes the form of a superscription divided to correspond with the three heads. It reads: ex præte / rito above the old man; præsens prvden / ter agit above the central, middle‐aged man; and ni fvtvrv / actione de / tvrpet above the youth. Together, this may be translated as ‘Learning from Yesterday, Today acts prudently, lest by his action he spoil Tomorrow’. The syntactical oddities are designed to make each part of the sentence accord with the three faces represented below. The faces may thus be taken to symbolise not only the Three Ages of Man but the division of time into past, present and future. The centrality in the inscription of Prudence, Prudenter, accords with the idea that this Virtue both attended to past experience and anticipated the future. Some extra significance may be intended by the alliterations, abbreviations and divisions of the words.¹⁵

Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, then both Privatdozenten at the University of Hamburg, pointed this out in an article [page 239]which appeared in The Burlington Magazine two years after Hadeln’s.¹⁶ They further noted that personifications of Prudence were often given three heads or three faces in addition to the more usual attributes of mirror and serpent. Illustrations of Prudence with a triple face (vultus trifons) can be found in fourteenth‐century manuscript illumination,¹⁷ and an especially elegant example from the second half of the fifteenth century is the Florentine pietra serena relief in the Victoria and Albert Museum inscribed Prudenza (fig. 2).¹⁸

Panofsky and Saxl also suggested a source for the animal heads. Giovanni Pierio Valeriano in his Hieroglyphica published in Venice in 1556 proposed as an emblem of Prudence a serpent with three heads – dog, wolf and lion.¹⁹ The source for this monster was given elsewhere by Valeriano as the Hellenistic Egyptian statue of Serapis in the temple near Alexandria described by Macrobius in his Saturnalia (probably composed in the early fifth century)²⁰ and explained as an embodiment of Time: the voracious wolf representing the [page 240]past which devours the memory of all things, the vigorous lion representing the present, the dog representing the future, bounding forward, ever full of deceitful hope.

For Macrobius, Serapis was identified with the sun and hence with Apollo. It is clear from Plutarch, who regarded Serapis as a variant of Pluto, that there was no consensus on this point.²¹ Such controversies, however, need not have had any relevance for Titian’s painting. The connection of the three animal heads with Serapis is mentioned again by Cartari in his Imagini de i Dei de gli Antichi published in Venice in 1571. But Macrobius’s description also had potential as a psychological drama, and in Giordano Bruno’s dialogues De gli Eroici Furori, dedicated to Philip Sidney and published in London in 1585, Maricondo, the pessimist, expresses his despair with reference to these animals – the alan, leon and can haunt him at morning, noon and dusk:
Con l’agro, con l’amaro, con il dolce
L’esperienza, i frutti, la speranza
Mi minacciò, m’affligono, mi molce.
L’età che vissi, che vivo, ch’avanza,
Mi fa tremante, mi scuote, mi folce
In absenza, presenza e lontanza.²² These six staccato lines may be very freely translated into the following four:
Experience is bitter, fruits are sour, hopes are sweet.
The first disturbs, the second disgust, the third assuage.
Stiff‐backed I must the unknown prospect meet
Though trembling to recall the past and battered by the present age.

In this extended sonnet (sonnetto codato) even the compensations of hope are false. Whatever the text adopted in the painting, the character of the central face is more suggestive of Maricondo’s anxieties than of a bland formula for sagacity. The text may have been in circulation before it was published or it may perhaps have been based on an earlier text.

In the following decade Cesare Ripa published his Iconologia which standardised for artists the visual embodiments and attributes of a large range of abstractions. In later editions of this volume Wise Counsel (Consiglio) is equipped with a model of the three animal heads as a ‘simbolo della prudenza’,²³ and although this personification is not frequently found in art it was the subject of a painting by the Venetian Pietro Liberi (1614–1687) now in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, in which a benevolent and a venerable old man, embraced by an eager youth, holds a book to indicate his wisdom, and a small model, rather like a chess piece, of the three animal heads to indicate prudence (fig. 3).²⁴ The picture seems more optimistic, and must also have been much more accessible in its meaning, than Titian’s.

The problem that cannot be solved concerns Titian’s original intention. This, it seems, was not only to show a triple head without the animal heads, but to paint a triple head with a bearded face as the profile on the right. In this connection it is worth mentioning that there was a type of ancient cameo composed of several conjoined heads commonly [page 241]described as a ‘gryllos’ cameo. These were probably known by the mid‐sixteenth century and they seem to have inspired a remarkable drawing by Parmigianino in which profile bearded heads surround a younger, frontal, female one.²⁵ A cameo of banded agate in the Hermitage, featuring four bearded male heads and four unbearded, presumably female, heads (fig. 5), is the most remarkable Renaissance exercise in this mode, but its exact date of manufacture is unknown. In other examples an animal head is joined to the human ones (fig. 4), and there are also examples consisting of conjoined animal heads alone.²⁶ It may be that Titian’s painting originated as a design for such a cameo or was at least inspired by one in the possession of a Venetian collector of ancient gems, such as Gabriel Vendramin.

The Painting as an Autobiographical Document

Panofsky, having (together with Saxl) identified the painting as an allegory of prudence in 1926, expanded on this in subsequent publications, citing, for example, the passage in Bruno quoted above, and he eventually developed a theory that the painting was a personal testament by the artist. This theory has obtained widespread support. It is based on the observation that the profile facing left bears some resemblance to Titian himself in old age, as depicted in the Prado self portrait. The central head he proposed as a portrait of Titian’s son Orazio (born 1525), and the youth as perhaps his young cousin Marco Vecellio (born 1545, died 1611), who also resided with the artist. He suggested that it commemorated legal and financial measures taken in connection with Titian’s estate: notably, the negotiations in the late 1560s for the transfer of the broker’s position in the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi (the sinecure granted him by the Venetian Republic).²⁷

The relative ages of these three members of the artist’s family match the three heads fairly well, but the resemblance between the old man and Titian himself is not conclusive; furthermore, Titian’s eyes in his self portraits are grey, not brown. There can be no certainty that the central face is a portrait of Orazio, who seems in fact to have had a ruddy brown beard,²⁸ and the identification of the youth as Marco Vecellio is entirely speculative.

The improbability of Panofsky’s identifications has been pointed out by Peter Meller,²⁹ who proposed instead that the painting might include a portrait of Bernardino Tomitano, a professor of philosophy at Padua whose woodcut portrait published by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini in 1630 does bear a striking (but not a certain) resemblance to the central face here.

Cohen has recently proposed that the painting is an allegory ‘not of prudence but of sin’. Noting that sins were commonly personified as animals, she proposes that the animals here recall the leopard, lion and wolf (standing for Luxuria, Superbia and Avarizia) which impede Dante’s escape from the dark wood in the opening stanzas of the Inferno.³⁰ This interpretation would only be tenable if the inscription could be ignored (she proposes that it belongs to an earlier version of the painting). Like Panofsky’s interpretation, it presupposes that the painting is some sort of personal message – for Cohen, indeed, a confession. The autobiographical emphasis would imply that the painting was entirely autograph, which is hard to believe. It is surely more likely that the painting was commissioned.

The Painting as Political Document

In the inventory of Crozat’s collection the painting was simply described as depicting three heads, but in the catalogue of the sale of the Duc de Tallard in Paris in 1756 Pierre Rémy, the expert responsible for the entries on the paintings, proposed that the central head was a portrait of Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, presumably on account of a slight similarity to the portrait by Titian (known also in numerous copies) of this notable patron of his.³¹ The old man was identified as Pope Julius II, presumably because of the cap and white beard and because the ferocious gaze suited the warrior pope’s reputation. The young man was identified more tentatively as the emperor – ‘on croit que c’est le portrait de Charles V, étant jeune’. If this theory was not Rémy’s, it may perhaps be attributed to Mariette, because we know that the latter supplied the equally ingenious but fanciful interpretation of another painting by Titian in the Tallard sale – that of the full‐length portrait in Kassel, which he proposed as a portrait of Dieudonné de Gozon.³²

The painting was thus seen as a political allegory reflecting the dilemma of the dukes of Ferrara, who, in common with other Italian princes, had to decide whether to support the emperor or the pope. The lion symbolised the duke’s courage, the wolf the pope’s rapacity, the dog ‘la fidélité dans les engagements’, all of which rendered the painting ‘infiniment curieux & intéressant’. The fury of Julius II had, notoriously, threatened the survival of the duchy of Ferrara, although this was actually because of the duke’s allegiance with France. In Lucien Bonaparte’s sale the painting was catalogued as The Triple Mask – ‘the portraits of three of the leading characters of that period; viz. the Emperor Charles V, Pope Julius II, and Alfonso Grand [sic] Duke of Ferrara’.

Someone may have pointed out that Julius II died in 1513, six years before Charles V was elected emperor, because when the painting was exhibited at the British Institution ‘Julius II’ was changed to ‘Paul III’. This merely exchanged one problem for another because Alfonso I d’Este died in 1534, the year of Paul Ill’s election, but a date about then was obviously better suited to the style of the picture than one before 1513. The same title was used – perhaps merely for convenience – in the Carnarvon sale in 1918. The reference to Paul III may also suggest that someone was thinking of Titian’s unfinished portrait of Paul III with Alessandro and Ottavio Farnese at Capodimonte (fig. 3, p. 202),³³ for there too we find men of three different ages, and in their relationship political tension and personal rivalry have long been detected.

There are many instances of a political interpretation being given to Italian Renaissance paintings.³⁴ In the case of the Titian the interpretation must have been influenced by the use of animals in the eighteenth century to symbolise the great European political powers and by the emblematic devices of political caricature. It is not entirely anachronistic to suppose that political allegories could have been made in the Renaissance – there is, for example, a drawing by Amico Aspertini of King Louis XII of France stealing the tiara of Pope Julius II, whose purse is raided by King Ferdinand II of Aragon, and it involves animals as well: the Imperial eagle, the French cock, the dove of the Holy Ghost. And in 1512 the Bergamasks in Venice celebrated the expulsion of the French from their city by processing with a cock (for France) holding an eel (for Milan) in its mouth, impaled on a pike.³⁵

A precondition for the acceptance of the political interpretation was a neglect, even among the learned, of Renaissance emblems. As Panofsky pointed out, Bernard de Montfaucon in his great compendium L’Antiquité expliquée seems even to have forgotten the passage in Macrobius on the animals of Serapis.³⁶ And that Ripa was less frequently consulted is suggested by the fact that by 1765 the meaning of Pietro Liberi’s picture in Dresden had been forgotten.³⁷

Function

When Hadeln published the Allegory in 1924 he suggested that it had been made as the cover for a portrait.³⁸ The timpano – a stretched canvas cover for a painting – seems to have been a Venetian innovation, and was popular in northeast Italy from about 1520. A full discussion of the subject can be found in the first volume of my catalogue of sixteenth‐century Italian paintings.³⁹

It seems likely that the Allegory was intended as some sort of cover, but no portrait has been identified as its pair – with the possible exception of Titian’s self portrait in the Prado (this idea, first published by Dülberg, has been repeated by others⁴⁰). However, the Allegory is slightly smaller in size than its present stretcher and even if the canvas were originally slightly larger it could have been so only by a very small amount (see the account of the cusping and tacking‐edge given in the section on Support), which means that it would always have been too short to cover the Prado painting.

In addition, it may be remarked that although the Allegory does have some of the characteristics of a portrait cover – text, formality of design, cryptic and emblematic content – it seems odd to use a painting of heads as a cover, or as a sliding lid, or as a painted reverse for a portrait (and no examples are known). Covers were not only made for portraits, and Panofsky suggested that the painting may have served as the door of a cupboard in Titian’s own home.⁴¹

Previous Owners

No. 157 in the posthumous inventory, compiled on 30 May 1740, of the collection of Pierre Crozat was a painting on canvas measuring ‘deux pieds deux pouces et demy de haut sur deux pieds trois lignes de large’ and representing ‘trois têtes d’homme dont les trois phisionomies ont rapport aux trois animaux qui sont au‐dessous d’eux’.⁴² This must have been NG 6376. The measurements translate as 71.7 × 65.7 cm, which are somewhat smaller than those of the painting today, but it was on a different stretcher and was perhaps also partly concealed by its frame.

Pierre Crozat (1665–1740), known as ‘Crozat le Pauvre’ (to distinguish him from his brother Antoine, ‘Crozat le Riche’), was an immensely wealthy banker and one of the greatest collectors of the eighteenth century, indeed one of the most avid and discriminating of all collectors of drawings and prints and of engraved gems (he owned the gryllos cameo [page 243]discussed earlier, see p. 241, fig. 5). His collection of more than four hundred old master paintings seems mostly to have been formed before 1726. He is known to have visited Venice in 1715 and had many contacts with Venetian artists and dealers. But a Venetian picture of this kind could have found its way to northern Europe at an earlier date or indeed have been acquired in Rome, where Crozat went in 1714 to negotiate on behalf of the Duc d’Orléans (as discussed on p. 463) over the acquisition of the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden. The painting was given a high valuation (2,000 livres) in the inventory of Crozat’s collection but many paintings were valued more highly (the version of Titian’s Danaë now in the Hermitage, for instance, at 12,000 livres).⁴³

The painting is not mentioned in later catalogues and inventories of the Crozat collection, much of which was bought en bloc in 1770 by Catherine the Great. Instead, it found its way, with thirteen other paintings, into the collection of the last Duc de Tallard.⁴⁴ Little is known about the formation of this collection, which also included paintings that had belonged to the Prince de Carignan (sold in 1742), the Maréchal d’Estrées (who died in 1737) and the Comte de Morville (who died in 1732), but it seems likely that it was developed greatly after the death in 1728 of the duke’s father, Marshal of France under Louis XIV and Ministre d’État under Louis XV.

Our knowledge of Tallard’s collection derives chiefly from the elegantly printed, detailed catalogue of his posthumous sale which took place in Paris over a period of ten days between 23 March and 3 April 1756. There were 204 paintings, most of them Italian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was a collection in the taste of Rome, and indeed of the Palais Royal, distinguished from those formed by other rich collectors of that period in Paris, almost all of which were, as the author of the introduction to the catalogue observed, filled with ‘ces petits Tableaux Flamands et Hollandois’. The notable Dutch and Flemish pictures that were included in Tallard’s collection were not small; they included Rembrandt’s Saskia van Uylenburgh in Arcadian Costume and Rubens’s Watering Place, both now in the National Gallery (NG 4930 and NG 4815); the collection also included Style of Murillo NG 1286, Poussin NG 39 and (as a Dürer) the Master of Saint Giles NG 4681.

The Duc de Tallard’s cabinet was noted also for the elegance of its arrangement (there was nothing, the introduction to the catalogue claimed, of the confusion of a shop), with sculpture in bronze and marble, fine furniture and porcelain supporting and punctuating the display of paintings, all of which were in ‘riches bordures du dernier gout’.⁴⁵

The Allegory, lot 84, was, as explained above, given a long entry expanding on its historical significance. It fetched 660 livres, a fairly high price – slightly more than Rembrandt’s portrait of Saskia, considerably more than Veronese’s Finding of Moses, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and far more than Giorgione’s Virgin and Child, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, but less than three rare pieces of Chinese porcelain of olive colour, and much less than a Cleopatra by Guido Reni or a pair of famous pastels by Rosalba Carriera purchased on behalf of ‘Madame La Dauphine’, who presented them to the king of Poland for the collection in Dresden.⁴⁶

The buyer of the Allegory was marked in a copy of the catalogue in the National Gallery as Menabuoni, who was also recorded as the purchaser of a tondo of the Virgin and Child by the young Raphael, a Magdalen by Feti, a Temptation of Saint Anthony by Annibale Carracci, a pair of Bassanos and a portrait by Mor.⁴⁷ The Chevalier Menabuoni’s cabinet in the Hôtel de Limoges in the Rue des Vieux Augustins was described in the year following the sale by Dézallier d’Argenville, who adds the information that Menabuoni was a member of the ‘Académie des Arcades de Rome’. This was repeated by Hébert in 1766 in his Dictionnaire pittoresque et historique.⁴⁸ The collection was ‘fort curieux en Tableaux, Bronzes, Estampes, Médailles, Pierres gravées, &c’. The only old master paintings listed were those which Menabuoni had purchased in 1756, but he also owned a ‘cerf couché de grandeur naturelle’ painted by Oudry, which he is likely to have acquired at an earlier date. In addition, he owned drawings and ‘études’ by Oudry.⁴⁹ Illuminated manuscripts are also mentioned, and a sequence of five hundred portraits of famous men drawn very carefully (‘dessinés très‐proprement’) from portraits in the Uffizi. This hints at a connection with Florence where the Feti and the Annibale Carracci seem to have been exhibited in 1767.⁵⁰ Menabuoni is mentioned as a resident of Florence by the Antiquario Fiorentino in 1771. And it is in Florence that the collection of Giovanni Gasparo Menabuoni (also apparently previously known as Menabuoi) was sold or offered for sale ‘Chez M. Vincent Gotti’ in 1786 with a catalogue raisonné. Since the Titian is not included we may presume that it had been sold in either France or Florence.⁵¹

The painting next emerges in the collection of Lucien Bonaparte, the Emperor Napoleon’s brother. It is not included in the list of Lucien’s pictures compiled shortly after his arrival in Rome in 1804, nor is it included among the etchings after his paintings made in Rome but published by him in London in 1812.⁵² This suggests either that it was a relatively late arrival in the collection or that it was not considered an especially valuable item. Since it was sent to London and catalogued by Buchanan at the end of 1814 as a ‘chef‐d’œuvre, painted at the best time of Titian’,⁵³ it is unlikely to have been acquired in Rome, because works in this category were not allowed to be exported. Many of Lucien’s paintings, however, came from Florence and that seems the most likely source. The painting was offered for sale in London on 16 May 1816 as no. 167 and was bought in at 250 guineas. It was illustrated in the Galerie des tableaux du prince Lucien Bonaparte, which seems to have been published in 1822, preparatory to the Paris sale held between 25 December 1823 and 15 January 1824, where it was no. 28. It is not clear what sort of sale this was or whether the annotations indicate the offering price, the reserve price or the sale price, but 8,000 francs is written next to no. 28 in the copy now in the Louvre. Its purchaser must have been Samuel Woodburn, who subsequently offered the painting for sale in March 1826.⁵⁴

NG 6376 was bought from Woodburn in 1826, or soon afterwards, for, or by, George Hamilton Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen (1784–1860), scholarly diplomat and statesman, then known as ‘Athenian Aberdeen’ on account of his travels, much later First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister (1852–5), and more than anyone responsible for ensuring that Eastlake became director of the National Gallery.⁵⁵ He certainly owned the painting by 1828, when he lent it to the British Institution’s exhibition. Aberdeen’s taste in pictures was probably fairly conventional⁵⁶ but he was certainly attracted by historical portraiture and historical subjects, and not averse to riddles and peculiarities. He bought, for 500 guineas, the portrait of Anton Francesco degli Albizzi by Sebastiano del Piombo, which was sold by Robert Heathcote at Phillips on 5 April 1805 (lot 52, ‘the portrait of Lorenzo di Medici, the Outline by Michael Angelo … a most astonishing performance. Such magnificence could only be produced by the joint efforts of these two celebrated artists, by whom painting is here carried to the zenith of perfection’),⁵⁷ and he owned the great Van Dyck portrait of Paola Adorno, Marchesa di Brignole Sale, now in the Frick Collection, New York (in his day believed to be of the Duchess of Savoy).⁵⁸ Among other pictures that he is recorded as purchasing are The Doge and Court of Venice returning from the Ceremony of Wedding the Adriatic attributed to Jacopo Tintoretto (for 100 guineas at Richard Westall’s sale on 9 March 1813)⁵⁹ and Interior of the Inquisition (for £10 4s. at Jones’s auction house, Dublin, 14 May 1812).⁶⁰ This last is one of the few old master paintings to remain at his Scottish seat, Haddo House (now National Trust for Scotland). He also owned the very curious picture of a ‘wild boy’ then attributed to Veronese.⁶¹ Of the paintings that remained with the family until quite recently, the two most distinguished were an Adoration of the Shepherds by Veronese now on loan to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,⁶² and the Butcher’s Shop by Annibale Carracci now in the Kimbell Art Gallery, Fort Worth.⁶³

Presumably Lord Aberdeen kept the Titian in London, at least in 1828, when it was lent to the British Institution. It may have been transferred to Haddo in the middle of the century. It passed in succession to the 5th Earl (d. 1864), the 6th Earl (d. 1870) and the 7th (later created 1st Marquess of Aberdeen and Tamair), who lent it in 1883 to the exhibition in Edinburgh of Old Masters and Scottish National Portraits. There it was noted by the Chronique des Arts as ‘un des plus beaux morceaux de peinture de toute l’exposition’,⁶⁴ but it seems not to have been known to any of the connoisseurs who might have inspected the picture in London. It was still in the family’s possession on 2 October 1901 but its sale seems already to have been discussed.⁶⁵

The 7th Earl was appointed Lord‐Lieutenant and Governor‐General of Ireland in 1886. He was Governor‐General of the Dominion of Canada from 1893 to 1898 and Viceroy of Ireland 1905–15. But high office brought him few rewards, and his philanthropic and other ventures, as well as his wife’s charities, seem to have been extravagant. They coincided with the agricultural depression and when he died in 1934 the family estate in Scotland had shrunk to 15,000 acres, from the 75,000 he had inherited.⁶⁶ It is not clear when the Titian was sold but the painting was in any case the property of Alfred de Rothschild by 1917.

An account of ‘Mr Alfred’, a Trustee of the National Gallery, will be found in an appendix (pp. 472–5). The painting was sold shortly after his death by his principal heir, the Countess of Carnarvon (rumoured to have been his illegitimate daughter), at Christie’s on 31 May 1918 as lot 157. It was purchased by ‘Roberts’ for 28 guineas (£29 8s.). Roberts was acting for Francis Howard of Dorking, Surrey (or so we must deduce from the ‘F. Howard’ written beneath the name Roberts in the National Gallery’s copy of the catalogue). Francis Garraway Howard (1874–1954), known as ‘Tudie’, who had been responsible for organising loan exhibitions at prominent London galleries between 1909 and 1914,⁶⁷ was an American‐born socialite and philanderer remarkable for his good looks. He became director of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1912 and moved to the Grafton Gallery in 1921. In addition to dealing and collecting for himself, he acted as adviser for Benjamin Guinness and acquired many of the Elizabethan portraits at Ditchley Park. He was the father of Brian Howard (1905–1958), the minor poet and flamboyant homosexual.⁶⁸ He was certainly fortunate to acquire NG 6376 for such a low sum. The Aberdeens knew that the painting was of value, for it was insured, according to an inventory of 1899, for £2,000.⁶⁹ It was, it would seem, not a painting to Rothschild’s taste. Perhaps he acquired it as an investment or as part of a group, and it was taken straight from store to the saleroom after his death. It was, however, careless to let it sell at such a low price.

The painting was borrowed for an exhibition at Agnew’s in the summer of 1924, and the firm’s books reveal that it was valued, presumably for insurance, at £9,000.⁷⁰ Howard died in 1954 and his collection of pictures – old masters and historical portraits – was sold at Christie’s on 25 November 1955. There were 55 old masters and 66 historical portraits. The Titian, lot 44, was by far the most valuable item in the first category (or in the second, to which it also had some claim to belong). It was bought by Legatt for 11,000 guineas (£11,550) together with an American partner, probably David Koetser. The National Gallery’s Board of Trustees had authorised the director to bid, but the condition of the painting caused him some anxiety and it was also thought unwise to compete in the saleroom against what was rumoured to be determined opposition.⁷¹ In February 1958 an application to export the picture from London to Switzerland was made, with a valuation of £20,000. An objection was made on account of the interest expressed in it by the National Gallery of Scotland and the application was withdrawn. In February 1966 another application was made, this time with a valuation of 2,100,000 Swiss francs (then equivalent to about £173,000). In April 1966 the painting was presented to the Gallery by David and Betty Koetser. David Maurits Koetser was the son of Henry Koetser, an art dealer who had moved to London in 1923. After working in London, at first in partnership with his brothers and then independently, David Koetser moved to New York in 1939. In 1966 he decided to [page 245]retire to Switzerland for reasons of health and the presentation of this picture was connected with this reconsideration of his professional position. He soon resumed dealing, based in Zurich. The collection of old master paintings that he owned together with his wife was formed into a foundation in their name, and was loaned, and eventually bequeathed, to the Kunsthaus in that city.⁷²

Provenance

See above for a full account. Pierre Crozat before his death in 1740; Duc de Tallard before his death in 1756; lot 84 in the Duc de Tallard’s posthumous sale, 23 March–3 April 1756, where bought by Giovanni Gasparo Menabuoni of Paris and Florence; Lucien Bonaparte by 1814; no. 28 in Bonaparte’s sale of 25 December 1823–15 January 1824, Paris; with Samuel Woodburn in London by March 1826; the 4th Earl of Aberdeen before 1828; by descent to the 7th Earl; still his property in 1901; Alfred de Rothschild, by 1917; on his death on 31 January 1918 inherited by Almina, Countess of Carnarvon, by whom sold at Christie’s on 31 May 1918, lot 157, where bought by ‘Roberts’ for Francis Howard. Howard’s posthumous sale 25 November 1955 (lot 44), where bought by Legatt. Presented in April 1966 by David and Betsy Koetser.

Drawings

A drawing in the Uffizi Galleries of an old man with a book and an owl, wearing a heart on a chain, which has been attributed to Titian by some scholars (including Hadeln in his study of Titian’s drawings), evidently represents Good Counsel (as recognised by Caldwell in 1973⁷³) and has thus been connected with the National Gallery’s painting; but the attribution (as acknowledged by Tietze in 1944⁷⁴) is not well founded, nor is there any real connection between the appearance of the old man in the drawing and the old man in NG 6376.

Exhibitions

London 1828, British Institution ; Edinburgh 1883, Old Masters and Scottish National Portraits (335); London 1924, Agnew’s ; London 1950–1, Royal Academy Loan Exhibition (209); London 2003, National Gallery (34); Madrid 2003, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Frame

The painting is in a carved and gilt wood frame with a prominent oak‐leaf wreath moulding with hollows at either side, pearls at the sight edge, and leaves on a back ogee moulding. The wreath runs from a ribboned centre on each side. The frame, probably Italian and of the late sixteenth or seventeenth century, came from the Gallery’s stock. It was reduced (by cutting at the ribbons) to fit the painting, and toned to the instructions of Philip Hendy soon after the painting was acquired by the Gallery in 1966.⁷⁵

Appendix
Triple Heads in Renaissance Venice and Padua

A likely source for Titian’s painting as it was completed must, as mentioned above, be Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica of 1556. It has also been suggested that the artist may have been inspired by the woodcut illustrations of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the allegorical romance published by the Aldine Press in Venice in 1499. A triple human head occurs in the illustration of a herm facing page y, and a triple animal head occurs in the illustration on the opposite page – both are shown carried in procession in succeeding illustrations (pp. y I verso and y II recto). Artists certainly used the Hypnerotomachia (Garofalo’s Pagan Sacrifice, NG 3928, is a case in point) and that Titian may have referred to it when painting this Allegory is suggested by the leafy collar in the X‐radiograph, which, as Madlyn Kahr pointed out, resembles the leaves in the woodcut.⁷⁶ This connection is uncertain, however, for the heads on the herm are all of the same age, and the animal heads are not distinctly characterised, thus the Hypnerotomachia would have been at best a supplementary source.

The Saturnalia of Macrobius was familiar to Renaissance scholars and the account of the triple‐headed attribute of Serapis which it contained was influential in many different ways, chiefly, perhaps, because it was adopted by Petrarch in his Latin epic Africa.⁷⁷ But in Petrarch the animal with three heads is an emblem of Time. It probably also had this general significance when it was combined with Fortuna on the reverse of Giovanni Zacchi’s medal of Andrea Gritti in 1536.⁷⁸ Before Valeriano we cannot assume that the connection with Prudence would have been made, nor in fact can we be certain that the triple face or triple head (vultus trifons or tricipitium) was invariably the emblem of Prudence.

It is important to emphasise this because Manfredo Tafuri, in a brilliant and influential account of Venice in this period, has proposed that the popularity of triple heads in Venetian art reflects ideals widely shared by the Venetian patriciate.⁷⁹ But there seems no good reason why these ideals should not have been given explicit rather than cryptic expression. Moreover, there is little real consistency between the images cited, and in some cases other interpretations of their meaning are more likely.

The three best‐known examples of the use of such heads in Venice are the triple boy’s head in the centre of the highest of the marble steps of the Virgin’s throne in the altarpiece by Fra Antonio di Negroponte of the mid‐fifteenth century in S. Francesco della Vigna; the miniature triple head on the ledge of the portrait of a young man attributed to Giorgione and now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; and the helms crested with three heads supported by the spears held by soldiers dressed all’antica which are carved in high relief at either end of the second floor (the higher of the two piani nobili) of the Palazzo Trevisan in Canonica (between S. Marco and S. Zaccaria) built in the early decades of the sixteenth century. The first of these examples features three identical faces and may in fact be a Trinitarian symbol (such as is certainly the case with the three heads in the tympanum of the Tabernacolo della Mercanzia in Orsanmichele in Florence, also cited by Tafuri as an emblem of Prudence). Also, it seems odd to consider these three heads in isolation when other, similar, single heads of children occur elsewhere on the throne – heads that would be difficult to associate with Prudence. In [page 246]the case of the Palazzo Trevisan carvings, the device must surely have been adopted as a reference to the family name.⁸⁰

For the purpose of the Allegory of Prudence the most intriguing of the earlier triple heads in Venice are those that were carved, in the early sixteenth century, in the Istrian stone pilasters which flank the main entrance of Palazzo Vendramin at S. Fosca (fig. 6). Whereas Tafuri asserted that these heads (like those on Palazzo Trevisan) represented the Three Ages of Man – something earlier denied by Arasse – it must be admitted that the bearded head does not look old, and the difference between the other two is not marked.

There was also an ‘imagine plastica di una figura tricipite’ on the façade of the Dondi palace in Padua. One is also incorporated on the façade of Alvise Cornaro’s Odeo – in this case certainly derived from the woodcut in Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (Valeriano was close to Cornaro).⁸¹

For Tafuri the idea of the tricipitium is also reflected in other artistic representations of the Three Ages of Man, notably Giorgione’s Three Philosophers, and other striking representations of the Three Ages were made in Venice during this period, notably the warriors of three generations who support Doge Alvise Mocenigo’s sarcophagus, carved by Pietro Lombardo for SS. Giovanni e Paolo in the 1490s, and the frontal head of a young man, perhaps representing Saint John, between a pair of profile busts, apparently of Christ and an older bald and white‐bearded apostle, in the panel by Giovanni Agostino da Lodi in the Accademia. This last painting may well be relevant for the form, if not the meaning, of Titian’s painting.⁸²

Notes