Titian and Workshop
NG 4452 
The Vendramin Family venerating a Relic of the True Cross

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).

Begun c. 1540–3, completed c. 1550–60

Oil on canvas, 206.1 × 288.5 cm

Support

The measurements given above are those of the stretcher. The canvas is heavy, with a distinctive weave that is the subject of a separate section below. There are 17 threads to the centimetre in the weft and 22 in the warp. This canvas is wax‐lined on to a tabby‐weave canvas of medium weight. The pine stretcher (probably dating from 1928) has two vertical bars and one horizontal. It retains a paper label from the exhibition of Italian art at the Royal Academy that took place in 1930 (see below).

There is some evidence of possible cusping in the canvas at the side edges but not at the upper and the lower. All of the edges are ragged but they are effectively concealed by both putty and overpainting. Nevertheless, it is clear that on the left side a few areas of the original canvas and paint extend beyond the edges of the present stretcher, and it is likely that, for reasons discussed below (in the section on Attribution etc.), Titian may have originally planned a composition more than 30 cm longer on this side. The painting is also likely to have been trimmed along the lower edge, where the boy’s feet were presumably not intended to be cut off. There is a band of brown paint between 1.9 and 3.8 cm wide along the upper edge of the canvas concealed with several layers of paint to match the adjacent sky. It is possible that this is the original border such as has been found on many other Italian paintings of the sixteenth century.

Materials and Technique

There are several notable pentimenti in the painting. The head of the youngest adult on the left was originally painted a couple of inches lower and considerably to the left, so that it was cut by the present edge. This original head may have begun to grin through the sky at an early stage because both early copies of the painting and the engraving of 1732 show cumulus clouds in this area which, presumably, were designed to conceal it. In addition, the legs of the middle‐aged bearded man in profile were rapidly sketched with black painted lines to define his pose and action. The lines are now visible beneath his robe. Infrared photography (fig. 3) reveals similar drawing in the arms of this figure and those of the older man. (The diagonal lines, most apparent here at the top left and right corners, indicate retouchings made to conceal stretcher bars.)

During the course of execution changes were evidently made to the angle at which the top of the altar was painted. It seems probable that Titian knew he would be using the area in the lower right‐hand corner for figures, since he left the step in reserve. Nevertheless, the drapery is modified at the point where it tumbles down behind the boy on the extreme right. This boy must have been painted after the boy beside him, not least because his hand was painted over the black of his brother’s shoulder. The youngest boy with the spaniel must have been painted before the other two, but Titian may not originally have planned to put any figures in this position. Boldly painted shapes in the X‐radiograph have not, however, been deciphered.

Samples taken from the painting have revealed a good deal about the preparation of the canvas and the pigments employed.¹ No overall imprimitura was detected and the ground appears to have been a simple one of gesso in animal glue.

The flesh colour is lead white and vermilion, with ochres and (possibly) brownish glazes in the shadows. The plum‐coloured robe of the grey‐bearded man consists of a glaze of natural ultramarine and red lake over an underlayer containing a substantial amount of vermilion. A sample taken from the shadowed area of the sleeve has revealed that there is also a thin scumble of black overpaint in places.

The crimson robe of the central of the three bearded men is a pure red lake mixed with white in the mid‐tones and lights. The very dark tunic of the boy in profile, third from the left, has an upper layer of finely ground black pigment over a deep pink layer composed of red lake mixed with white, probably because it was painted over an adjacent cloak. The grey brocade worn by the boy on the extreme left contains some red lake to give the grey a slightly lilac cast. The sky is of natural ultramarine mixed with white.

The altar cloth, where lightest, consists of lead‐tin yellow combined with white lead and a translucent copper green (probably verdigris); where darkest, it is similar but is covered by a rich green translucent glaze, probably verdigris that has dissolved in the old binding medium. A cross‐section taken of the paint of the altar above the head of the boy holding the dog reveals a cream‐coloured layer covered with a darker grey, below the top layer, confirming that changes were made here but not clarifying what they were.

A Note on the Canvas Type

The canvas has a distinctive damask weave, also known as ‘point twill’ – ‘a type of warp chevron twill based on a point threading with one or more warp points. It usually has a turnover in the weft as well as the warp direction.’² The diagonal pattern with crosses within the squares is one that can be found in linen tablecloths represented in European paintings between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Titian’s own.³

There is no join in the canvas and it is clear that this type of linen, unlike others that were employed by artists in the sixteenth century, was available in widths considerably greater than a metre, something that was presumably advantageous (along with the ornamental texture) in the dressing of a table. The same canvas, or at least a very similar type, was employed by Titian for his portrait of Paul III Farnese with his grandsons (fig. 3, p. 202), now in the museum at Capodimonte in Naples,⁴ which (as argued below) may be of approximately the same date. A related type of canvas was [page 207][page 208][page 209][page 210]used for the National Gallery’s version of Venus and Adonis (NG 34).

The earliest uses of a canvas of this type that I have encountered (although I have not undertaken a systematic survey) are the portrait of Charles V by Parmigianino’s workshop currently on the art market in New York and Correggio’s Leda in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, both of the early 1530s.⁵ Most other examples known to me date from the last decades of that century – in paintings by Giovan Battista Tinti in Parma, Giuseppe Vermiglio and Ambrogio Figino in Milan, Giovan Battista Trotti in Pavia, Vincenzo and Bernardino Campi in Cremona, Giovanni Girolamo Muziano and Domenico Cresti (‘il Passignano’) in Rome.⁶ Despite its use by Titian, however, this canvas type does not seem to have enjoyed special favour in Venice, although in Spain, where it was much used by El Greco (most notably for his Burial of Count Orgaz), it came to be known as a ‘mantelillo Veneziano’.⁷

Conservation

The painting was, it seems, restored a little more than a century after it had been made. Payment of £2 is recorded for ‘mending’ the picture in 1651 (see below). In March 1682 (modern 1683) a larger payment was made to Parry Walton for ‘lineing, primeing and mending’ it. This may have been the first lining. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in a letter of 5 September 1786 to the Earl of Upper Ussory concerning the dispatch of one of the earl’s paintings to the restorer Benjamin Vandergucht, noted that Titian’s picture had been greatly damaged by cleaning and retouching (presumably undertaken relatively recently): since it had ‘been cleaned and painted upon’ Reynolds described it as ‘hardly worth the name of a good copy’.⁸ More than thirty years later, on 18 May 1818, this verdict was repeated (with hyperbole added to compensate for lack of genuine knowledge) by Benjamin West in a conversation with Joseph Farington during the time when the painting was on loan to the British Institution: ‘He sd. that picture was totally ruined by a Frenchman who was employed to clean it. He painted over it & substituted His heavy colours for the charming tints of Titian. Nothing remains of the original but a candle stick & part of the upper corner of the right hand of the picture.’⁹ In conversation with Samuel Rogers, West went further, to claim that only the flame of the candle remained of Titian’s paint.¹⁰ If it had indeed been ‘painted over’ it would, presumably, have been impossible for West to be so sure about how much had been lost. But Farington seems to have supposed that he spoke with authority.

Farington’s diary for 1818 was published in James Greig’s edition in November 1928, not long before the National Gallery began to negotiate for the purchase of the picture, and it was at the Gallery’s instigation that Lionello Venturi wrote to The Times to refute rumours concerning the picture’s disastrous condition . ¹¹ It was, in fact, at the Gallery’s suggestion that the painting had been relined (with glue) by ‘Morrill’, and cleaned and restored by ‘Dyer’, in the Gallery’s ‘repairing studio’ in the spring and summer of 1928. Although the Gallery would probably not have known of West’s opinion then, they would have been familiar with Waagen’s observations in 1854¹² and those of Crowe and Cavalcaselle in 1879, to the effect that some areas were damaged.¹³ Morrill’s relining had involved the scraping off of a layer of dark paint on the back of the original canvas, thought perhaps to have been applied as a precaution against damp.

The painting was treated for blistering in 1939, 1945, 1947 and three times in 1960, chiefly in the robes of the older men, in the clothes of the boys on the right, and in the sky to the left. A report of May 1948, signed by Philip Hendy, recommended relining and cleaning, but another of 21 January 1952 did not consider action to be so urgent. In February 1961 the painting was relined with wax resin. It was cleaned and restored between October 1973 and February 1975.

Condition

The more thinly painted parts of the picture are worn, probably as a result of past lining and from cleaning presumably in the treatment of about 1770 or that of 1683 (or in both). The losses, generally small but numerous, can be seen in fig. 3. The salient points of the canvas weave are visible in parts of the sky and in other thinly painted areas such as the fur‐lined sleeves. The orange tunic of the boy on the extreme right has suffered badly from flaking. There is a miniature crackle over all the dark areas of the plum robe of the eldest of the three men, and there are many losses in this area and much repainting beside his left sleeve. A patch of dark brown bubbles in the marble of the altar behind the boy with a spaniel may be a result of poor drying but also suggests singeing from an iron during lining. In the robe of the second eldest man (in profile) spots of darkened retouching are evident (easily confused with the artist’s underdrawing, now visible because the red paint covering it has both increased in translucency and faded in colour). The drapery that hangs from the altar at the extreme right of the painting does not retain all of its rich, deep green glaze. The mauve stripe in this fabric may once have been richer in colour.

The best‐preserved areas are for the most part those most solidly painted, notably the heads of the three adults and that of the boy with a spaniel. In some thickly painted areas of flesh, however, there are distracting wrinkles – notably in the face of the boy on the extreme left and in an area above the oldest man’s left hand.

Attribution, Style, Setting, Dating

As is explained in the next section, the painting was described in 1569 – that is, within Titian’s lifetime – as by his hand. In the early twentieth century there seems to have been an idea that the painting was by Tintoretto.¹⁴ Since then, the attribution to Titian has never seriously been challenged and, although it was sometimes correctly observed in more recent times that the picture is not entirely Titian’s work, Pallucchini and Wethey regarded it as wholly by him in their monographs and Gould did so too in his catalogue.¹⁵

Sir Abraham Hume included the painting in his monograph in 1829 as ‘probably the first assemblage of portraits ever painted by Titian’, but by ‘first’ he perhaps meant ‘finest’ rather than ‘earliest’.¹⁶ Scholars have generally favoured a date after 1550 for the painting. Crowe and Cavalcaselle placed it in about 1559, and Phillips, Ricketts and Benson concurred.¹⁷ However, when the painting was identified by Georg Gronau as of the Vendramin family in 1925 an earlier date had to be considered.¹⁸ In fact, all the best passages in the painting are consistent with Titian’s work in the early 1540s. The mobile, rapidly painted features of the youngest boy and his spaniel are close in their handling to the child’s face and her pet in Titian’s portrait of Clarice Strozzi of 1542 (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie), while the bold modelling and penetrating look of the central bearded man are found also in the portrait of Pope Paul III without a cap, a documented work of 1543 (Naples, Capodimonte), and the dramatic device of figures raised on a marble platform but set against the sky is found in the altarpiece of S. Giovanni Elemosinario (Saint John the Almsgiver) made for the church of that dedication in Venice, an undated work but certainly painted before December 1541 and probably before 1539. In addition, the idea of a dramatised family portrait of three men of different ages is reminiscent of the great unfinished painting of the three Farnese (Naples, Capodimonte) that Titian painted in 1546 (fig. 3, p. 202).¹⁹

The Vendramin Family must have been painted for a specific location. The lighting is from the right, which Titian generally avoided in portraits (for the obvious reason that it meant that his painting hand would cast a shadow over the very part of the painting that he was working on). The vanishing point is fairly low, and carefully calculated for the extreme left. The anticipated viewing position that this would imply is one that has the lower edge of the painting at approximately head height. This has surely determined the degree of finish. There is less broad and bravura handling than in the portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti (Washington, National Gallery of Art), which was surely intended to hang above a door or at a similar height, but if the head or hands of the oldest bearded man are compared with those in the portrait of Pope Paul III without his cap (as proposed above), it will be noted how many more descriptive details, such as [page 212][page 213]the finger ring or the hairy ears, there are to be seen in the papal portrait.

However, if the height and lighting were known in advance, it seems very likely that there was a change of mind concerning the width of the picture, for the profile of Lunardo (the adult on the far left) was (as noted above) originally painted slightly lower down and considerably to the left, and was cut by the present edge. If more space was originally planned at the left of the picture, that might explain why the three eldest boys appear to have been crushed into the space. They also impede the movement of Lunardo and obscure the volume of his figure. The only other explanation would be that Titian did not originally intend to include any of the boys. The composition of the adults and the altar is assured and, having achieved this, Titian would not then have simply tried to squeeze in the lesser figures. The former explanation – that the boys had to be moved when there was a change of plan – is preferable because the boy holding a dog looks as if he was always planned and if one boy were included it would be odd for the others not to be. Against that, however, we can observe [page 214]that the boy with the dog may have been a brilliant improvisation which provoked the unfortunate idea of including all the other boys.

The painting of the adult heads and hands, the head of the youngest boy and his dog, and the better preserved passages in the clothing of these figures (especially the fur lining of the sleeves) are typical of Titian at his best. But the boys on the left are a problem not only in terms of composition: their heads are poorly related to their bodies, their features are uncertain in modelling and have none of the vitality we would expect. These parts must have been painted by an assistant, and the same is perhaps true of the last two boys on the right, although there Titian himself may have corrected the assistant’s work. Perhaps only two boys were originally planned for the right part of the picture, a conclusion which is supported by the technical evidence (see above, in the section on materials and technique). In any case X‐radiography reveals some major revisions in this area, and the present position of the drapery at the back of the altar looks like an improvisation.

It is of course most unlikely that Titian painted the portraits directly on to this canvas. Presumably he made separate studies from the life which he copied or at least consulted. If the children did not sit for him – and we have just observed that most of them were not painted by him – then this would have been known by the family. However, if Titian’s other commissions or a change of plan caused a significant delay in completing the painting then the children would have been of the wrong age for the original conception by the time they were inserted, so sittings would not have been expected.

As will be discussed below (in the section on family members), the youngest child must be Federigo Vendramin. He does appear to have been painted by Titian from life and, if so, that would suggest a date of about 1541, since he cannot be much older than five and may even be younger. Lunardo, who must be the youngest adult in profile, was seventeen in that year and he looks like a mature teenager in the painting. He died on 5 October 1547, soon after his father, who died on 31 January 1546 (modern 1547), so their portraits would have been painted before then, unless they are posthumous, as has been suggested by one scholar.²⁰

Since the picture seems to have been executed in at least two phases it is worth noting how busy Titian was in the 1540s. The visits he made to Rome in 1545 and to Augsburg in 1548 were at the behest of the pope and the emperor, whose wishes must have prevailed over a commitment to a Venetian patrician, even one who was, apparently, a close friend of the artist.

The workshop assistant who painted at least three of the boys may have been Titian’s son, Orazio Vecellio. Orazio was born out of wedlock not long before 1525 and died in 1576. In 1545, when work on this painting had recently begun, Orazio accompanied Titian to Rome, and Vasari noted that he was active there – independently – as a portraitist.²¹ In 1550–1 Orazio accompanied his father as an assistant on his visit to Augsburg. He certainly attempted some ambitious compositions – most notably the Battle of Castel Sant’Angelo, begun in 1562 and completed in 1564 for the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace (destroyed 1577)²² – but it seems clear that his talent was limited and his role in the workshop came to be more managerial than creative.²³

Another and perhaps better candidate is Girolamo Dente, called Girolamo di Tiziano, who was aged fifteen in 1525 when he served as a witness at Titian’s marriage to Cecilia (Orazio’s mother)²⁴ and who was probably active in Titian’s workshop until the mid‐1550s.²⁵ There is no known signed work by him but a painting of the four seasons (recorded in a private collection in Paris in 1934) is said to be inscribed as by him, and a group of other workshop paintings have been plausibly proposed, including the Detroit Nymph and Satyr and portraits in Kassel (Gemäldegalerie), Dortmund and Dresden. The faces in these works tend to present ‘a certain flattened appearance, and display a kind of indifferent stupor’, which is, as Fisher noted, characteristic of the three portraits discussed here.²⁶ Other examples of these flattened faces intruding into compositions by Titian are the National Gallery’s Allegory of Prudence (see p. 237) and the Judith with the Head of Holofernes in the Detroit Institute of Art.²⁷

The Family Members

The painting was described in March 1569 in Palazzo Vendramin (which still stands in the Campiello of Santa Fosca in Venice). It was ‘un quadro grando nel qual li sono retrazo la crose miracolosa con messer Cabriel, Andrea Vendramin con sette fioli et messer Cabriel Vendramin, con suo adornamento d’oro fatto di man de messer Titian’ (‘a large painting in which is depicted the miraculous cross with messer Gabriel, Andrea Vendramin with his seven sons and messer Gabriel Vendramin together with its gold frame made by the hand of Titian’).²⁸ This occurs in an inventory made for the members of the family who appear in the painting as children – a formal document but not one which was very carefully revised, as is clear from the repetition of ‘Cabriel’ in the description.

Andrea and Gabriel (often called Gabriele by modern scholars but always Cabriel or Gabriel in contemporary texts) were sons of Lunardo Vendramin and Isabella Loredan; their brothers Federico, Filippo and Luca had all died by 1532. They are first recorded as partners in September 1526.²⁹ The family tree (fig. 5) shows how well connected they were; their aunt was the wife of Doge Andrea Gritti, their great‐aunt’s daughter was the wife of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo and, above all, their great‐uncle was Doge Andrea Vendramin, one of the richest men in Venice and thus in Europe.³⁰

As was common among patrician Venetian families, the brothers shared the family palace and only one of them married. Both were respected figures in the Senate, Andrea being one of the electors of Doge Piero Lando in 1538 and Gabriel one of the electors of Doge Francesco Donà in 1545.³¹ Andrea made his will on 20 January 1546 (modern 1547) ‘in letto amalado ma sanno di mente memoria et intellecto’ (‘ill in bed but healthy in mind memory and intellect’).³² He died eleven days later.

The will testifies to his close relationship with his ‘carissimo et honoradissimo’ brother Gabriel, who had long lavished great love and expense on Andrea’s children. He had never quarrelled with his brother and clearly looked up to him despite his younger age. Gabriel was named as the executor together with Andrea’s wife, Lucrezia Pasqualigo (over whom Gabriel was to have the power of veto), and this was in accordance with an agreement made long before. He was given charge (‘governo’) of Andrea’s youngest sons, but all the children were urged by their father to be ‘obedientissimi et obsequentissimi’ towards their ‘Barba’.

Their sons were Lunardo (Leonardo, born 4 April 1523), Lucha (Luca, born 15 March 1528), Francescho (Francesco, born 29 April 1529), Bortalamio (Bartolommeo, born 10 August 1530), Zuane (Giovanni, born 11 March 1532), Felipo (Filippo, born 30 May 1534), and Federigo (Federico, born 26 December 1535).³³ The last three are not specified in the will, save as the ‘other three’. There were also six daughters. Four of these – Isabella, Orsa, Marietta and Chiara – had married, but of these only Orsa and Marietta are mentioned as beneficiaries in the will (the other two had died).³⁴ Two other daughters, Biancha and Diana, are described in the will with brutal candour as ‘donzelle pizocharette mal qualificatte dala natura’ (‘church mice ill favoured by nature’). The first should be kept at home, the second is urged to take the veil in the convent on Murano where she was already residing.

Doubtless because of his new responsibilities, Gabriel himself made a will soon afterwards, on 3 January 1547 (modern 1548).³⁵ He died on 15 March 1552. His will, a garrulous and eccentric document, is discussed in the second appendix to this entry. In it he appoints his nephews his heirs. Each is named repeatedly but the last three are distinguished as ‘de minor età’, and this division between them is reflected in the composition of Titian’s painting.

It seems likely, from the appearance of the children, that the painting was commissioned and begun before Gabriel made his will and presumably before Andrea died, although the fact that Andrea is depicted as living is not conclusive evidence of this. Andrea was three years older than his brother, who was born in 1484.³⁶ It is therefore natural to suppose that he is the older man nearest the altar. Gabriel would then be the larger and most prominent figure leading his brother’s children, his adopted children, in prayer. This is the interpretation given in the most thorough scholarly account of the picture by Rosella Lauber.³⁷ Possible objections to it are given in the first appendix below.

The Clothes

The three adults all wear the style of dress that distinguished Venetian patricians – a gown with wide sleeves (known as ducale), to which they were entitled from the age of fifteen. The oldest man in the painting wears a velvet gown of a deep violet purple known as pavonazzo (peacock) velvet, the man behind him wears crimson velvet, and the youngest crimson damask. The two velvet gowns are at least trimmed, and presumably fully lined, with fur, as was normal for much of the year. The fur must be that of the lynx.³⁸

Stella Mary Pearce (Newton), in notes made for the Gallery, speculated that the oldest bearded man was wearing personal mourning.³⁹ The colour black was reserved for this purpose, although not exclusively, for it was also worn for Good Friday and sometimes as a vow. However, the colour has darkened considerably (see above) and is meant for pavonazzo, not black. This was the colour used for state mourning and during fasts and ember days, although not only on such occasions. There may well be a special explanation for the three different colours of robe, beyond the obvious one that the degree of sobriety corresponds to the age of the men, but the variety depicted would also have been familiar. Thus Sanuto in his diary for 8 September 1515, recording the procession of the procurators on the feast of the Madonna, recorded that Antonio Grimani wore ‘veludo paonazo’, Nicolò Michiel ‘veludo cremeson’, Tomà Mozenigo [Mocenigo] ‘damaschin cremeson’.⁴⁰ A similar variety of gowns is found in other paintings of groups of patricians, for example the Consegna dell’Anello (fig. 1, p. 44) by Paris Bordone of the early 1530s,⁴¹ where the pavonazzo has remained lighter and brighter, or, later in the century, Palma Giovane’s painting of Doge Zen and other dignitaries, dated 1585, in the oratorio of the Ospedaletto dei Crociferi, where the pavonazzo worn by one of the senators to the left of the painting is almost as dark as it is in the Titian.⁴²

Patricians also wore stoles over their shoulders. In exceptional cases (as in Tintoretto’s portrait, p. 177) these were gold, but usually they were red or black, the red apparently sometimes worn as mourning. The oldest man has a red stole over his right arm, and the man behind him a black one over his left. It is curious that the stoles are carried in this way rather than over the shoulder. Perhaps this was intended as a mark of respect before the cross, equivalent to the removal of a cap, but it is noteworthy that in other paintings kneeling patricians are shown with the stoles over their shoulders.

The Relic of the True Cross, the Scuola di S. Giovanni Evangelista and the Rise of the Vendramin Family

As was first pointed out by Philip Pouncey in 1939, the cross in Titian’s painting (see detail, fig. 6) is a gothic reliquary of silver gilt and rock crystal which was the greatest treasure of the Scuola di S. Giovanni Evangelista in Venice (fig. 7).⁴³ It would have been easy for Titian to sketch it because he was employed at much the same date to decorate a ceiling of the Scuola’s albergo.⁴⁴

Above the foot of the reliquary, which is not visible in the painting, there is a knob of eight small clustered tabernacles with crocketed gables. Rising from these is a four‐sided tabernacle from either side of which spring vegetal branches supporting statuettes of the mourning Virgin and Saint John. Above the four‐sided tabernacle there is a cross composed of five pieces of rock crystal, the arms lobed in outline and framed with intricately foliated metal from which delicate tendrils curl out to support half‐length figures of prophets. Attached to the front of this cross and rising from the apex of the spire of the four‐sided tabernacle is a crucifix. The crystal cross is crowned by a separate gabled compartment [page 216][page 217]of rock crystal supported by two angels. In this may be seen the two splinters of wood which were said to come from the true cross. They themselves are arranged as a cross. In Titian’s broad brushstrokes the details are not evident and, unsurprisingly, the smaller prophets are hardly indicated at all, except in two cases, beside the larger figures of Mary and John, where they seem larger than those in the actual cross. Titian seems also to have omitted the angels which give extra support to the uppermost section, but the angels there today are not gothic and probably date from the restoration of 1789 – they are not apparent in the woodcut by Giacomo Franco that was published in 1590 in Giacomo de Mezi’s booklet recording the miracles of this relic. The reliquary seems to combine the work of more than one craftsman but the whole must date from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.⁴⁵

The Scuola di S. Giovanni Evangelista was founded in March 1261. It was one of four penitential confraternities (Scuole dei Battuti) formed in Venice at that period (the others were the Scuole of the Carità, of S. Marco and of S. Maria della Misericordia). These developed into rich and influential institutions and were distinguished by the Council of Ten in 1467 as Scuole Grandi. Membership was confined to men (a fact which is perhaps of significance for Titian’s painting) and included patricians, who, however, had an honorary role. Such indeed was the prestige of the Scuola di S. Giovanni Evangelista in the sixteenth century that King Philip II and other members of the Spanish royal family became brothers.⁴⁶ Membership of the Scuole Grandi was supposed to be limited to 500 or 600 but, in 1576, that of S. Giovanni Evangelista was discovered to be three times larger.⁴⁷ The officers, elected annually, were responsible for the administration of hospitals and of extensive rental property, the distribution of alms, and the provision of dowries ‘to provide comfortable matches for poor maids’.⁴⁸

The Scuola of S. Giovanni Evangelista moved to the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista in 1307. Work on its new premises was complete in 1354. Fifteen years later Philippe de Mézières, Grand Chancellor of Cyprus, presented to the Scuola a relic of the cross, which had been consigned to his care by his intimate friend Pietro Tommaso, to whom it had been entrusted by friars fleeing from Syria in 1360.⁴⁹ Tommaso had been Patriarch of Constantinople from 1364 until his death in 1366. Mézières (1327–1405), a soldier, diplomat and writer from Picardy, was one of the most eloquent champions of the Crusades, of peace among the European powers, and of the notion of a spiritual knighthood. He was made chancellor by Peter of Lusignan when the latter succeeded to the throne of Cyprus in 1358. Mézières visited Venice to obtain funds for Pietro’s campaign, and the relic may have been presented as a mark of gratitude for the Scuola’s support.⁵⁰

The possession of this relic gave the Scuola new prestige, which in due course led to an increase in its wealth. By 1420 the Scuola’s premises had been enlarged and a gothic façade was added in the 1450s. In 1478, Pietro Lombardo commenced work on the magnificent marble entrance screen enclosing a courtyard between the Scuola and the church.⁵¹ It is this entrance which testifies most eloquently to the part played by the cross in the identity of the Scuola, for the lunette, filled with the eagle of Saint John, is crowned with a large copper cross adored by kneeling marble angels and the inscription above the doorway reads:DIVO IOANNI APOSTOLO ET EVANGELISTAE
PROTECTORI * ET SANCTISSIMAE CRUCI – that is, ‘Dedicated to John, Apostle and Evangelist * and to the Most Holy Cross’.

There were two upper rooms in the albergo: a meeting room and a room dedicated to the relic of the cross, with a cycle of paintings recording the miracles it had performed. These paintings had been commissioned in 1414 but the miracles had continued, and more money and better artists became available, so they were replaced in the last decade of the fifteenth century. Most of them survive today in the Accademia and are the work of leading Venetian painters – Gentile Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Lazzaro Bastiani, Giovanni [page 218]Mansueti, Benedetto Diana – but one painting in the series, destroyed by fire, was signed in 1497 by Perugino, then probably the most admired (and expensive) artist in Italy. Some of the miracles had taken place at the end of the previous century but others showed very recent events – in 1474 when the cross had become impossible to carry at the funeral of a sceptic, in 1490 when it had healed a boy who had fallen from a window, and in 1494 when it had cured a case of lunacy.⁵²

The Guardiano of the Scuola who accepted the relic on the confraternity’s behalf on 23 December 1369 was Andrea Vendramin, and he is depicted doing so in Lazzaro Bastiani’s painting for the Scuola. Andrea was a wealthy merchant, whose family had prospered retailing oil, cured meat and cheese but who was now also involved in the manufacture of hard white soap (made of olive oil from Apulia and ash from Syria, among other ingredients), an industry in which Venice had come to rival Castille.⁵³ In 1374, as the members of the Scuola advanced in procession to the church of S. Lorenzo, the pressure of the crowd when they were crossing a bridge caused the reliquary to slip. It hovered miraculously above the water of the canal but eluded the grasp of all who tried to rescue it, until Andrea Vendramin himself entered the water and saved it, an event that was recorded for the Scuola by Gentile Bellini in a painting dated 1500.

In addition, Andrea’s own business fortunes were saved by the relic. One night, awakening from a dream that his house was in flames, he leapt from his bed and prayed ardently to the cross for protection. On the next day sailors came to the Scuola and described a terrible tempest in which two of his ships had nearly been destroyed. The ships had been saved by a vision of the cross, which had not only calmed the storm but had even restored the cargo that had been cast overboard. When escorted by Andrea into the albergo the sailors beheld the reliquary and sank to their knees, exclaiming, ‘Questa è quella croce’. This miracle was the subject of the lost painting by Perugino. The cargo was of ‘olei da fare savoni bianchi, perchè lui lo faceva fare, come ancor fanno quelli di casa sua’ (‘oils for making white soap, such as he made and his family – or family firm – still makes’), observed the little book explaining the paintings that was published in 1590, no doubt referring to the factory mentioned in Gabriel’s will.

In September 1381, a year before he died, Andrea Vendramin was admitted to the Maggior Consiglio, in return for the massive loans he had made to the state during the War of Chioggia.⁵⁴ Andrea’s grandson, another Andrea, was elected doge in 1476, though not without some objections that a member of a family of grocers was hardly suited for such an honour.⁵⁵ He died in 1478.

Pietro Lombardo and his sons created Doge Andrea’s tomb in the Chiesa dei Servi between about 1489 and 1493. It was transferred to the Tribune of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in 1812.⁵⁶ In its day it was the largest ever erected in Venice, and one of the most splendid and original to be erected anywhere in Europe. Several of Doge Andrea’s sons held high office, and the family business flourished. The brothers Gabriel and Andrea Vendramin discussed above were the grand‐nephews of Doge Andrea, and the great‐great‐grandsons of the Andrea who, as Guardiano of the Scuola, received the relic of the cross from distant Syria and later rescued it from the canal. Other members of the family (unrecorded in the genealogies of the chief branches) served as Guardiano Grande of the Scuola in the sixteenth century: a Zuane Vendramin was elected in 1529, a Giacomo in 1542 and again in 1551.⁵⁷

The Painting within the Painting

The painting on the altar appears to be a panel composed of separate compartments containing dark figures on a gilt ground, very likely in the Byzantine style, that is, ‘alla Greca’ (in the Greek style), as it was then known. It may correspond to the one large example of this type which is described in the inventory of the Vendramin family’s paintings made in 1569 (see the third appendix below). Devotional paintings ‘alla Greca’, usually of Christ or the Virgin, and ‘dorado’ – that is, with gold backgrounds – are common in Venetian household inventories in the sixteenth century, and could be seen in the home of a patrician (for example Paolo Loredan in 1534) or wealthy physician (for example Girolamo da Salis in 1537), as well as in more humble settings and of course in the homes of the large Greek community. They were certainly not confined to persons of old‐fashioned or unsophisticated taste but were found in homes which included collections of hardstone cups and large Flemish canvases.⁵⁸ Although such paintings were made in Venice, the majority were probably made in Crete where they were commissioned in huge quantities by Venetian merchants.⁵⁹ Numerous paintings of Byzantine style, often called ‘Madonne Nere’, are still venerated in Venetian churches. Some among them are reputed to possess special powers and were presented by great patrician families, such as the ‘Madonna della Pace’, brought to Venice by Paolo Morosini from Constantinople in 1349 (now in SS. Giovanni e Paolo); the panel which had accompanied the Venetian fleet at Lepanto, bequeathed by the last of the Venier family to the church of S. Maria Formosa; or the Virgin known as the ‘Mesopantitissa’, brought from Candia in 1672 by Francesco Morosini and enshrined within the high altar of the Madonna della Salute.⁶⁰ It is not unlikely that one such picture had a special status for the Vendramin family.

Gentile Bellini’s painting of Cardinal Bessarion with two members of the Scuola della Carità in prayer before the Bessarion reliquary (NG 6590, fig. 8), a panel that originally served as the door to a tabernacle containing the reliquary it reproduces, reminds us that some panel paintings could themselves serve as reliquaries – in this case the reliquary panel contained fragments both of the true cross and of Christ’s shirt. The seven episodes of the Passion in the panel were commissioned by Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472), who presented the reliquary to the Scuola.⁶¹ This demonstrates that the Greek style was not regarded by Venetians as archaic (as it was by Vasari) but as an alternative, contemporary style, exotic perhaps and certainly especially suited to some sacred purposes.

In the great religious processions of Venice, the Bessarion and the Vendramin relics were accorded similar honour and prominence. Thus on the Feast of the Virgin in 1515 the [page 219]Scuola of the Carità, the second Scuola in the procession, carried their relic – ‘l’ancona fo dil Cardinal Niceno’ (the tabernacle belonging to the Cardinal of Nicea, that is, Bessarion) – beneath one of their two ‘umbrele’ (the other one protected an icon painted by Saint Luke). They were followed by the Scuola of S. Giovanni, also with two ‘umbrele’, one for the leg of Saint Martin encased in silver and the other for ‘la santisima Croze di ditto scuola’.⁶²

The ‘Three Senators of Venice’ in the Collections of Van Dyck and the Earls of Northumberland

The Revd William Petty, chaplain to the Earl of Arundel, had left England for Italy by July 1633 to seek out works of art for the earl’s collection of paintings and sculpture. In 1636, when Arundel was in Germany, Petty kept in touch with the earl’s eldest son, Lord Maltravers. The latter, in a letter addressed to ‘Gulielmo Petty a Foiensa’, added in a postscript dated 9 September from ‘Lalan’ that ‘I have heard that there is a picture at Vennice to bee sould for 5 or 6 hundre duccatts. I desire that you would enquire diligently after it, if you like it, to give earneste for it, for it is for the king although his name must not be used. As I heare it hath some 4 or 5 figures in it, drawn after the life of some of the Nobility of Vennice. What ye doe must be without Sigr: Neeces knowledge untill it bee past, & I pray lette not him knowe that I did write to ye of it.’⁶³ This is almost certainly a reference to the Vendramin Family, which by December 1641 was in the possession of Sir Anthony van Dyck. Whether it had been acquired by him, or for him (perhaps by Daniel Nys, the ‘Neece’ of Arundel’s letter), or acquired for King Charles I or another collector and passed on to him, as is perhaps more likely, is not known.

The painting was probably the largest and certainly one of the most important paintings in Van Dyck’s collection, a collection of interest not only because it was formed by one of the greatest painters of the seventeenth century but because it consisted in large part of the work of one artist, Titian, whose artistic heir Van Dyck aspired to be. The brief account of this collection attempted here depends on the recent studies of Jeremy Wood.

In his Italian sketchbook Van Dyck had made a list of ‘le cose de titian’, which suggests a special interest, and he certainly acquired some – probably most – of his paintings by Titian in Italy, although he continued to collect after his return to Flanders in 1627. His special sympathy for Titian was acknowledged a year later by King Charles I of England, who entrusted to him the task of restoring Galba and copying Vitellius from the series of canvases by Titian which had been acquired from Mantua.⁶⁴

In 1635 Van Dyck moved with his collection to London. At some time between his death in December 1641 and 1644 a list was made of thirty‐seven paintings that he had owned, probably because they were available for sale. Nineteen of them were described as by Titian and four were copies after [page 220]Titian by Van Dyck himself. The paintings had been inherited by Lady Van Dyck, but she had also inherited the artist’s debts. Moreover, her second husband, Sir Richard Price, had debts of his own. By March 1645 a certain Richard Andrewes, having obtained most of the paintings as collateral for some of these debts, smuggled them to Flanders. The group was said to include ‘fifteen or sixteen choice portraits by Titian’ (the term ‘portraits’ was probably used loosely). The paintings described do not correspond exactly to the list of paintings mentioned, the chief difference being that both the Vendramin Family and Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda were not included. These, together with other items, had been obtained from Van Dyck’s studio and his collection by Sir John Wittewronge, a kinsman of Sir Richard Price, on behalf of his mother, Lady Anne Middleton, as settlement of a debt. It is known that Wittewronge was also endeavouring to claim the paintings in the possession of Andrewes during the winter of 1644/5, but these two, the largest paintings, could not be as easily smuggled, which perhaps explains how he managed to obtain them. On 4 October 1645 Wittewronge sold them for £200 to Algernon, 10th Earl of Northumberland. The latter, however, then sold the Perseus and Andromeda, which was soon afterwards recorded on the Continent.⁶⁵

Besides the paintings already mentioned, it seems very likely that Van Dyck had owned the portrait of Cardinal Antoniotto Pallavicini now in the Pushkin Museum,⁶⁶ a version of the Ecce Homo,⁶⁷ and perhaps the portrait of a boy now attributed to Sofonisba Anguissola, now in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.⁶⁸ His copies were made after the Cupid blindfolded by Venus and Titian and his Mistress, both then in the Borghese collection,⁶⁹ the Bacchanal of the Andrians,⁷⁰ a pastoral Holy Family, and the Annunciation.

It seems that the earl did not feel quite secure in his possession of the Vendramin Family because there was always the possibility that a claim might be made on behalf of Van Dyck’s daughter Justiniana. But, after receiving a present of ‘£80 of lawful money of England’, her husband, John Stepney, signed on 10 November 1656 a document renouncing all claims to both Perseus and Andromeda and ‘the three or four Senators of Venice with their children’ by Titian.⁷¹ Since the earl had been a close personal friend of the artist, as well as perhaps the keenest of all collectors of his paintings, he may have felt concern at the treatment of Justiniana by both her mother and her stepfather, as well as apprehension concerning possible legal action.

The 10th Earl of Northumberland (1602–1668) represented one of the oldest and most powerful families in the kingdom and was probably the most important of the noble supporters of the Parliamentary cause in the Civil War. He dissociated himself from the execution of King Charles and thereafter retired from active political life. Between 1640 and 1647 he resided in York House by the Thames amid the great collection of the late Duke of Buckingham, some items of which, including an important Titian,⁷² he seems to have acquired from Parliament in lieu of the repayment of loans he had made (Parliament had confiscated the paintings from the duke).

In 1642 the earl purchased Suffolk House, the property next to York House, from his father‐in‐law, the Earl of Suffolk, and in 1647, when the renovation was complete, he moved there. Given the costs involved in this move, the huge loans he had made to Parliament, and the greatly diminished rents from his properties in the north of England, the earl was not in an easy financial situation when he purchased the two large canvases from Van Dyck’s collection, and this probably explains why he sold the Perseus and Andromeda almost immediately.⁷³

The Vendramin Family may have hung, or at least been stored, in York House for a year or so but the paintings there seem to have been moved into Suffolk House in 1647. Payment for a frame for ‘ye 3 Senators’ was made in 1649.⁷⁴ It was perhaps cleaned in 1651, when a payment of £2 is recorded for ‘mending the Senators’.⁷⁵ Other frames were being made in 1652. The picture was certainly hanging there by 27 December 1652, when Richard Symonds made notes of the collection, recording as ‘rarely done’ – that is, of exceptional quality – ‘3 Senators of Venice in their scarlets kneeling afore ye lofty altar. & six boyes. Ritrattoes all. & ye field [meaning background] are clouds’. It is noteworthy that it seems from this account to have hung with smaller paintings by Titian on either side, one of which, the portrait of d’Armagnac, was called ‘A Senator of Venice and his secretary’.⁷⁶

As the earl’s collection increased during the 1650s its arrangement was modified, and in 1657 payments were made for green and red silk cords (the former for pictures, the latter for mirrors), suggesting that the larger paintings were canted forward from the walls, in the Continental fashion.⁷⁷ John Evelyn, who visited Suffolk House on 9 June 1658, mentions the Vendramin Family before any other painting as ‘one of the best of Titians’.⁷⁸ In 1671, after the death of the 11th Earl, Josceline Percy (1644–1670), ‘the 3 Senators done by Titian’ was the first item in the inventory made of the collection and was valued at £1,000. Very few were valued at more than £100 and no other at more than £200. The total value of the 140 paintings (including those at Petworth and Syon House) was £4,260 10s.⁷⁹ The painting gallery seems to have been on the top floor, running the full length of the west range of the house, with windows overlooking the Strand at one end and the Thames at the other.⁸⁰

The ‘Cornaro Family’ in the Collection of the Dukes of Somerset and the Dukes of Northumberland

The only child and heir of the 11th Earl of Northumberland married Charles, 6th Duke of Somerset (1662–1748), who rebuilt Petworth House in Sussex in the late 1680s. On 20 March 1682 (1683 in the modern calendar) Parry Walton was paid £20 for ‘lineing, primeing and mending the peece of the Senatores of Titian’.⁸¹ Although it has been assumed that the painting was taken to Petworth,⁸² there is no reason to suppose that it was. Vertue does not mention it in his lists of the pictures there, and it was in London in 1732 when Bernard Baron engraved it (fig. 9). In the small letters below the florid dedication the engraving is identified as after the painting by the incomparable Titian of the Cornaro family [page 221](‘ad picturam incomparabilis Titiani de Cornaro familiam’). This is the earliest reference to the Cornaro family as the subject; thereafter it was seldom identified by any other title until 1925, when it was recognised as the Vendramin Family (and even after that it was frequently called the Cornaro Family). It is not clear why it was supposed that the Cornaro were represented. The Cornaro family was perhaps the most famous of all the old patrician families of Venice (it had supplied a queen of Cyprus as well as four doges, including one who had died in 1722).

Jonathan Richardson the Elder, in the second edition of his Essay on the Theory of Painting published in 1725, still referred to the ‘Admirable Family Picture of the Senators of Titian which the Duke of Somerset has.’⁸³ But he believed that the children were sexually segregated (as they would have been on an English alabaster tomb of the sixteenth or seventeenth century), with the girls ‘more Orderly’ on the left, contrasting with the boys ‘got upon the steps with a dog amongst ’em; a rare Amusement for them while the old Gentlemen are at their Devotions’.

The 7th Duke of Somerset, who inherited the painting in 1748 and was created Earl of Northumberland in 1749, had no male children. On his death in 1750 the collection was divided between his nephew, the 2nd Earl of Egremont, and his daughter Elizabeth, whose immensely wealthy husband, Sir Hugh Smithson, took the name Percy and inherited the earldom by special remainder. He was made Duke of Northumberland in 1766. Syon House and Northumberland House (as Suffolk House became) were part of the share of his duchess, Elizabeth, together with the paintings kept in them.

Admission to Northumberland House was not always easy and although the painting is recorded there by ‘The English Connoisseur’ in 1766⁸⁴ it was not included in C.M. Westmacott’s British Galleries of Painting and Sculpture of 1824, nor in Passavant’s Tour of a German Artist in 1836 (recording a visit of 1831). Gustav Waagen did obtain an invitation in 1835 and found the Titian in the dining room, at the head of the imposing marble staircase.⁸⁵ It was exhibited by the 3rd Duke at the British Institution in 1818 (no. 86) and 1846 (no. 109), [page 222]but in 1856 the 4th Duke of Northumberland singled it out as the only one of his paintings which he would not agree to lend to the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition.⁸⁶ His successor, the 6th Duke, did agree to lend the painting to the Royal Academy in 1873 (146), perhaps because it only had to travel less than a mile across London. Its transfer to the family’s new (smaller but still palatial) town house, 2 Grosvenor Place, was presumably already envisaged, for in 1874 Northumberland House was demolished.⁸⁷

In about 1900 the painting was taken to Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, where it hung in the great hall known as the Guard Chamber. It is recorded there in the background of Sir Edward John Poynter’s portrait of the 7th Duke (1846–1918), dated 1908, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy (of which Poynter was president) in 1909 (fig. 13).⁸⁸ It is in some ways surprising that it had not been incorporated long before into the great collection of Italian paintings displayed in the new interiors created at Alnwick in the 1850s, especially since that collection included works by Titian and his contemporaries, notable among them the Feast of the Gods by Bellini (the landscape of which Titian modified to match his own paintings) and Titian’s double portrait of Georges d’Armagnac and his secretary, which, like the Vendramin Family, had belonged to Van Dyck. The sale of the painting to the National Gallery is discussed in detail in the fifth appendix below.

Copies and Engravings

The earliest known copy of NG 4452, by Symon Stone (‘Old Stone’), can be seen at Hampton Court.⁸⁹ Stone was employed by the Earl of Northumberland as a copyist and curator and is known to have made many copies of paintings in Northumberland’s collection, some of which were intended as gifts. It is probable that this copy was among the works of art presented by the earl to Charles II at the Restoration.⁹⁰ It may be the first full‐size, or nearly full‐size, copy to have been made. A large copy attributed to Benjamin West (but without good reason) was sold at Christie’s, London, in 1962.⁹¹ It showed more of the boys’ feet and therefore possibly reflected the appearance of the painting before it was slightly trimmed at the lower edge. Other large copies are at Auckland Castle, Bishop Auckland,⁹² and Dunham Massey Hall (National Trust), Cheshire.⁹³ This last‐mentioned painting is identified in an inventory of 1769 as the work of Francis Harding, who also made accomplished copies of Canaletto and Panini. It seems likely to date from before 1758, when the 2nd and last Earl of Warrington, the probable patron, died, but probably after the death of the 6th Duke of Somerset in 1748, for it is unlikely that the duke, who owned the Titian, would have permitted any copying.⁹⁴

It is noteworthy that in some old copies the composition was altered. One that was sold in 1927 and 1966, which had formerly been in Lady Lucas’s collection, omitted the cross and cut off the group at the left.⁹⁵ This reminds us of how controversial Titian’s picture must have been when it arrived in England. In September 1641 the Long Parliament ordered the immediate destruction of chancel steps and crucifixes in parish churches.⁹⁶ During the eighteenth century a crucifix would also have been a rarity on an altar in an Anglican church.

Copies of parts of the painting were also occasionally made. A study of the boys on the left was for sale in 1992.⁹⁷ Reduced copies are not common but there is one at Muncaster Castle which is freely and rapidly executed and is attributed to Gainsborough. It may be the copy by Gainsborough that is mentioned among the painter’s works and was later acquired by Samuel Rogers, who lent it to the British Institution in 1814 (where it must have exemplified the sort of copy that the Institution itself encouraged).⁹⁸

The painting was engraved by Baron in 1732 (fig. 9).

Provenance

Recorded in March 1569 in one of the Vendramin properties at S. Fosca. Probably available for sale by 1636, and by 1641 certainly in the collection of Anthony van Dyck in London. Acquired about 1644 by Sir John Wittewronge as part repayment of a debt owed by Sir Richard Price, who had married Van Dyck’s widow. Sold by Wittewronge on 4 October 1645 to Algernon, 10th Earl of Northumberland. By succession to the 11th Earl’s son‐in‐law, the 6th Duke of Somerset, and then to his daughter Elizabeth, wife of Sir Hugh Smithson, later created Duke of Northumberland. By succession to the 7th Duke, by whom sold in July 1929 to the National Gallery.

Exhibitions

London 1818, British Institution (86); London 1846, British Institution (109); London 1873, Royal Academy (146); London 1930, Royal Academy (168); London 1945, National Gallery, NACF Exhibition (15); London 2003, National Gallery (29); Madrid 2003, Museo Nacional del Prado .

Frame

NG 4452 was probably sent from Venice to England without its frame. Payment for a frame was made in 1649 when it was in the collection of the Earl of Northumberland, as mentioned above. The frame which it seems to have had throughout the nineteenth century and which is shown in a photograph of about 1870⁹⁹ is probably the same as the one of which a detail is represented in Poynter’s portrait of 1908 (fig. 13). It is likely to have been given to the painting in the early eighteenth century, when gadrooned outer mouldings were popular. The painting had been reframed by 13 January 1939 with lengths of baroque carving that remain on it today (fig. 10). These are said to have been found in Palermo¹⁰⁰ – by Roger Fry according to one source, and ‘soon after purchase’.¹⁰¹ This is likely to have been early in Kenneth Clark’s directorship of the Gallery for he was at that period very close to Fry. The sight mouldings of acanthus and pears may well have been added in London. The massive scrolling leaves and straps in the hollow frieze are hard to parallel exactly in other picture frames but it is noteworthy that pierced, pulvinated foliate frames were much favoured for Titian’s paintings at this date, especially by Duveen.¹⁰² The carving may well be Sicilian and is somewhat [page 223]reminiscent of Giacomo Amato’s flamboyant designs of about 1690 for the altar of the Pietà in the church of the Pietà, Palermo. The frame was regilded soon after Sir Michael Levey became director in 1973.¹⁰³

Appendix 1
Alternative Identifications of the Sitters

There are five good reasons to question the natural assumption that the older grey‐bearded man in the painting represents Andrea, the older of the two brothers, and that Gabriel is the dark‐bearded man in profile. Firstly, the young man in profile on the left must be Lunardo, Andrea’s son, and he bears a closer resemblance to the bearded man in profile than to the older man holding the altar, so it is easier to believe that the former rather than the latter is his father. Secondly, in memorials and epitaphs it is to be expected that lineage is clearly expressed in composition (as also in word order) and thus if a man kneels in front of children, leading the older boy in prayer and indicating the next in age, that man should be their father, not their uncle. Thirdly, in the earliest document concerning the painting it is described as representing the miraculous cross with Gabriel and Andrea with his seven sons: the person here represented ‘with his sons’ is more likely to be the central figure than the slightly detached figure by the altar, and the description clearly suggests that Gabriel is the figure nearest the cross. Fourthly, Gabriel Vendramin is likely to have commissioned the painting, for he was a noted art lover and a friend of the artist, and it makes more sense for the patron to be the person looking out of the painting at the presumed posterity for whom it was made. Fifthly, the character of Gabriel Vendramin, as it emerges vividly in his will, is one of an anxious man with a profound attachment to the family relic, whereas Andrea in his will does not mention the relic and impresses one as a more direct, if no less fervent, personality.

However, if Gabriel is the grey‐bearded man, then he must either have looked much older than his older brother (which hardly seems likely) or he must have been painted at a different date. If it is acknowledged that the painting may have been worked on in at least two phases (as the radical alteration in format and the fact that most of the children seem not to have been painted by Titian or from life suggests, and as Titian’s numerous other commitments and the deaths in the Vendramin family would also help to explain) then it is possible to imagine that Andrea was painted in the early 1540s and Gabriel a decade later.

It is of course more likely that both men were painted at the same date, but if so then we are left with another problem. There seems to be more than three years’ difference in age between the two men. It was for this reason that I was attracted by Stefanie Lew’s idea that the oldest man may represent the first Andrea Vendramin, the ancestor who had established the family’s fortune and nobility and who was so closely identified with the relic.¹⁰⁴ Gabriel would thus not be present in the painting. This interpretation becomes less extraordinary when we consider that the painting cannot have been intended to be taken literally: there never was an outdoor altar of this type upon which this reliquary was displayed and the painting is more like Titian’s Gloria (fig. 3, p. 309) than it is like the family portraits of later centuries. [page 224]The other figures do not appear to acknowledge the old man’s presence. He grips the altar in what seems a somewhat proprietorial way. If painted after the deaths of Lunardo and Andrea then we may be meant to understand that they are joining their ancestor, Andrea, the founder of their family. A somewhat similar conception is apparent in a famous work of art created a century later. Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa in S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome includes sculptures of members of another great Venetian patrician family, that of the Cornaro, who are witnessing the miraculous event and eagerly discussing it. Some of those represented had recently died but they are shown together with others who had died more than a hundred years before.¹⁰⁵ It was certainly not unusual in sixteenth‐century Venice for the living to be depicted in the company of figures from the distant past; some examples are discussed elsewhere in this catalogue (pp. 72, 184). A major problem with this interpretation is, of course, that it ignores the evidence of the early inventory. And it must be admitted that Orazio, who helped compile that document, even if he did not take the trouble to ask his father who was represented in two of the independent portraits elsewhere in the palace, probably knew what Gabriel Vendramin had looked like – and had he not, one of the children would probably have put him right.

Appendix 2
Gabriel Vendramin and his Will

As mentioned above in the section entitled The Family Members, Gabriel Vendramin’s long and rambling will is dated 3 January 1547 (1548 by the modern calendar). However, almost all of it must have been composed before 5 October 1547, when his eldest nephew, Lunardo, died, because the latter is repeatedly referred to as alive – a (relatively) short codicil mentions his death.

Two passages in the will are of direct relevance for Titian’s painting. Having expressed his desire to be buried in the family vault of S. Maria dei Servi, Gabriel’s first bequest is to his brothers of the Scuola di S. Giovanni Evangelista, a bequest to both those who do and those who do not escort his remains to the grave. The Scuola preserved the relic of the cross that Gabriel venerates in the painting. At the end of the will, in a passage of moving (and perhaps slightly mad) intensity, Gabriel adds another ‘venticinque parolete’ (‘twenty‐five little words’, but actually there are several hundred) exhorting his nephews never to neglect the interests of their family and those of the Venetian state, never to forget the only means whereby both could flourish: dedication to navigation and wholehearted study of ‘la militia maritima’. They should also not neglect the study of letters. They should conduct trade without accruing debts. They must remember how old the family business is. They must remember that their surest intercessor (‘il vostro miglior mediante’) is the most holy cross of ‘messer San Giovanni’. The family fortune is something which they should embrace with all their mind (‘cum tuto lo inteleto vostro’) and with the utmost care as something they have inherited by the will of God Almighty (‘cossa vostra ereditaria dal omnipotente dio’).¹⁰⁶

Most of his will concerns the prospects of the family business, and elaborate precautions to prevent its falling into the hands of ‘homeni desoluti et di pocho governo et religion’. He wanted the heirs to buy a ballot box modelled on that of the ‘gran conselgio’, but with two rather than three divisions, whereby family disputes could be settled, a striking instance of the parallel he felt there to be between the welfare of the state and that of the ‘casa Vendramina’. And indeed he attached much weight to the ability of his heirs and successors to appeal to the procurators, citing his will in the event of an irregularity.

The family business was the making, selling and exporting of soap, which involved ingredients imported from Syria and markets as far away as Portugal and England.¹⁰⁷ Factories and warehouses are mentioned in all parts of the city; even parts of the family palace at S. Fosca and the family villa at Stra seem to have been given over to the business. What concerned Gabriel most, indeed obsessively, was the control of the ‘Segnio de la luna’, evidently the official trademark used to stamp all the green soap made by the Vendramin – a stamp of a star, and another, a ‘segnio Morescho’ (used for white soap, together with ‘il segnio che dice da Venetia’), are also mentioned.

After several pages on this subject Gabriel addresses another topic that is very dear to his heart – ‘il mio chamerin’, with all the works of art therein and elsewhere in his palace. He wants a proper inventory of these to be made immediately after his death, and he wants the works of art to be placed under seal. He describes his collection in categories. First he mentions ‘molte picture a olgio [sic] et a guazo in tavole et telle’, all by the hands of most excellent masters. Next he refers to ‘carte disegnate a mano’ and ‘disegni stampidi’ from copper and wood. In both categories he notes that some sheets are bound into books, others kept loose or framed. Then there are antiquities ‘de pietra et di metallo’. Then ‘molti vasi di terra cota antiqui’ and medals ancient and modern, and a variety of metalwork ‘lavoradi ala damaschina’, animal horns, a tiny cameo fashioned as a death’s head, entirely in the round, and other things that he could not list.

Gabriel was not the only Venetian to make elaborate provision for the preservation of his collection. Jacopo Contarini in 1595 wanted his studio to be conserved by the descendants of his nephew ‘de primo genito in primo genito’ and if male heirs were wanting it was to be entrusted to his ‘carissima patria’.¹⁰⁸ Another Contarini, Federico, wanted his collection of sculpture, coins, gems and paintings to stay together ‘perpetuamente’, as he instructed his nephew in 1605.¹⁰⁹ But no one can have gone to greater lengths than Gabriel Vendramin to ensure that his works of art could not easily be dispersed. He proposed that the collection could be opened up when one of his nephews or one of their legitimate male descendants aged over twenty was deemed ready (here the family ballot box would again be used), on account of his learning, to enjoy it, and worthy, on account of his moral character, to care for it. This hypothetical heir would in turn place similar restrictions upon the Camerino, thus transmitting it safely and in perpetuity within the family. [page 225]Systems of fideicommissum whereby property was inherited under a deed of trust came to be greatly favoured in Italy in the late sixteenth century but in Venice there was a resistance to accept accepting primogeniture, which so often accompanied this, despite the increasing importance of landholdings by the patriciate. Gabriel’s peculiar plans for posterity have to be understood in this context.¹¹⁰

Gabriel reminded his heirs that the collection was of great financial value but in addition he had invested huge effort of mind and body in its assembly. And it had given him ‘uno pocho di reposo et de quiete de hanimo’. Gabriel impresses us from his will as much in need of spiritual calm. He clearly had no real confidence in his brother’s children, and perhaps not only because they were so young or because he had little faith in human nature. He hoped that his will would have a good influence on them – and perhaps he hoped that the painting would do so too.

Appendix 3
Titian and Gabriel Vendramin’s Collection

Marcantonio Michiel made notes of the collection ‘in case de m. Chabriel Vendramin’ in 1530. It already included notable antiquities, including two of ‘pietra rossa’, presumably ‘rosso antico’: a ‘nudetto senza brazza et testa’ and the head of a laughing satyr, both reputed to have come from Rhodes (so perhaps by‐products of the owner’s involvement in Mediterranean trade).¹¹¹ Delight in fragmentary antiquities was, of course, a sign of real connoisseurship; so too, at that date, was a relish for rare materials. Michiel also noted many of the paintings that, as we will see, were recorded in subsequent inventories – notably Giorgione’s Tempesta and La Vecchia, and a Virgin and Child attributed to Rogier van der Weyden.¹¹²

A decade later, in the postscript to Sebastiano Serlio’s third book of architecture, dedicated to the antiquities of Rome, Gabriel Vendramin is mentioned as exceptionally knowledgeable on this subject. Some idea of the fame of his ‘studio’ may be obtained from the first letter in Anton Francesco Doni’s Disegno of 1549, where it is listed among the half dozen wonders of the city (that is, the quattro cavalli divini, the things of Giorgione, Titian’s battlepiece, Pordenone’s façade painting on the Grand Canal, Dürer’s altarpiece in S. Bartolomeo, and in particular Bembo’s studio and that of ‘M. Gabriel Vendramino Gentilhuomo Venetiano’).¹¹³ Doni also provides a glimpse of the type of learning in which Vendramin delighted when he describes, in I Marmi, Vendramin expounding the meaning of the small bronze cupid riding on a lion.¹¹⁴ That was published in 1552, the year Vendramin died. Three years later Enea Vico in his Discorsi sopra le medaglie de gli antichi recalled a very rare coin of Pertinax in the collection,¹¹⁵ but by then it was probably quite difficult to visit his Camerino – and the coin may no longer have been there.

The palace at S. Fosca was occupied by Gabriel’s oldest surviving nephew, Lucha. Word that he was selling medals and drawings reached the ear of his younger brother Federigo – his informant being Alessandro Contarini (probably the same connoisseur to whom Lodovico Dolce had addressed his letter concerning Titian’s Venus and Adonis, for which see p. 285). Federigo and his brother Zuane took legal action to ensure that a proper inventory, which their uncle had wished to be made subito upon his death, be drawn up; in fact, a series of inventories were compiled between August 1567 and March 1569,¹¹⁶ but despite the impressive names of the ostensible compilers – Jacopo Sansovino, Tommaso Lombardo da Lugano, Alessandro Vittoria, Tintoretto, and Titian’s son Orazio – they are not especially informative. However, they do enable us to envisage something of the Camerino’s character. It must have been very crowded, in the manner of the antisala of Jacopo Sansovino’s library which Vincenzo Scamozzi adapted in the 1590s as a statuario pubblico to display the bequests of Cardinal Domenico Grimani (d. 1523) and his nephew Giovanni Grimani, Patriarch of Aquileia (d. 1593),¹¹⁷ but with far more colour and variety of materials.

The first inventory starts at the top of the room, with heads or busts of marble and terracotta and vases perched on the cornice (the ‘soazon de sopra’), interrupted by what seem to have been a series of canvas covers (‘tempani atorno’) said to have been ‘depinti de man de misier Titian’.¹¹⁸ (The word timpano is also used for the covers of Venetian paintings.¹¹⁹)

At a lower level, on consoles or in niches, fragmentary marble antiquities were arranged symmetrically with smaller items: for example, a satyr’s mask with, to either side, small heads in marble and stone, respectively, or a small draped female torso flanked by small heads of a Hercules and a young faun.¹²⁰ In cupboards below, blue and white porcelain mingled with hardstone vessels, little boxes of ivory and ebony, miniature paintings, small antique bronzes, a Turkish dagger with a fish‐tooth handle, globes, books of drawings and prints, and some precious drawings evidently not only framed but in some sense boxed – for example, ‘un quadro dessignado de chiaro e scuro de Man de Raphael de Urbin con un San Pietro et Paolo in aere con La Spada in man con La cassa’¹²¹ (‘a picture drawn in light and shade ’ [that is, not coloured but shaded] by Raphael with Saints Peter and Paul appearing in the sky, the latter with a sword in his hand, with its case or cover’, evidently the modello for the Repulse of Attila now in the Louvre¹²²) – and many cassette con concoli, doubtless shell‐like boxes for the keeping of coins and medals.

Smaller paintings were kept here, for example ‘un quadreto de man de Zuan Belin con una figura de dritto et da roverso un cerva’ – possibly the miniature portrait by Jacometto in the Robert Lehman collection¹²³ – and ‘una toleta con un re David depinto de man de Andrea Montagna’, which has not been identified.¹²⁴

The framed paintings hanging on the walls of the palace are listed separately in the inventory dated 14 March 1569.¹²⁵ They seem to have occupied five rooms. Many are described together with their frames, the majority of which are of noghera (walnut) with gilded ornaments (flutes, reeds, fillets and beads – marche, fusarioli, fileti, paternostri). The first room is unnamed and it might be supposed to be part of the Camerino itself. Thus Anderson claims that the National Gallery’s painting, which is the first to be mentioned, ‘hung high in Gabriel’s camerino, above his collection of antiquities’. [page 226]Identifying him as the bearded figure advancing from the left, she suggested that he was gesturing ‘out toward his collection beneath him’.¹²⁶ One problem with this theory is that the painting does not appear to have been designed to hang at so very great a height (the vanishing point is not below the lower edge of the picture). In addition, since the first inventory mentioned some paintings by Titian at the level of the cornice of the Camerino there seems no good reason why they should not have listed this as well, had it been there.

It seems more reasonable to suppose that in the inventory of 1569 the first paintings to be listed after the contents of the Camerino were those hung in the portego, the central chamber in a Venetian palace, which was indeed, as will be shown, the place where we would expect to find a painting such as the Vendramin Family. The portego was as much a hall or corridor as a room, which would explain why it is not named as a room. Moreover, the four principal rooms of a Venetian palace would generally be linked by a portego so we would expect one in this context. The description of the painting in the inventory has already been discussed. It is one of the only two paintings in the collection qualified as ‘grando’ and is fairly unusual in having a gilded frame – ‘adornamento d’oro’. Among the other paintings listed in the same unspecified space were an unfinished Vulcan (without attribution), a Saint Jerome (also without attribution), a male portrait by Palma, and a painting by Giorgione of three heads singing.¹²⁷

Four other rooms are recorded. The last of these seems to have contained a miscellany of paintings, statues, reliefs and drawings, none of them attributed, but in the other three rooms some kind of order seems to have been imposed. One of the rooms must have been a sort of picture gallery, for it included twenty‐two modern Italian paintings of medium or small size, including the Tempesta and La Vecchia and two other paintings by Giorgione, male and female portraits by Palma, and what was described as a self portrait by Raphael.¹²⁸

Another room, perhaps a bedchamber, contained only three paintings, all of them Netherlandish, and a third room, also perhaps a bedchamber, contained four paintings, all said to be by Titian. The latter were a pair of portraits of ‘zentil‐done’ and two pictures ‘fatto in tondo’, one of Christ flanked by two figures, the other a self portrait. The only other picture recorded in this room is a ‘quadro grando’ of ‘nostra dona alla Greca dorado’,¹²⁹ a Byzantine‐style painting to which reference has already been made in the section on the altarpiece within the painting.

The fact that Vendramin owned ornamental paintings by Titian (the timpani mentioned above), an unusual small picture and a very ambitious family portrait by him, and a group of paintings attributed to him gathered in a single room, suggests that he had a special relationship with the artist, and the fact that Titian was a witness to a codicil dictated by Vendramin on 13 March 1552, two days before he died,¹³⁰ does much to support this idea.

We should not, however, conclude from this that Vendramin owned only works by Titian’s own hand. Leaving aside the mixed quality of the family portrait itself, it seems possible that the self‐portrait tondo is the painting formerly in the Kaufman collection in Berlin, and the other tondo is perhaps the Mocking of Christ in the Louvre.¹³¹ The latter is certainly not autograph, nor is the former, to judge from photographs, but given their shape they were perhaps designed to fit into the architecture of the room, conceivably as overdoors.

Access to the paintings was probably not difficult in the second half of the sixteenth century. The palace was often leased (for some years it was the French ambassador’s residence) and, while the Camerino would have been locked up, the portego and four contiguous rooms would presumably have been rooms of ‘parade’. Francesco Sansovino, in a rapid survey of the city’s palaces in his Descrizione di Venezia published in 1581, notes that works by Giorgione, Bellini, Titian, Michelangelo and others were to be seen there, conserved by the ‘soccessori’ of ‘Gabriello’.¹³² Although he often mentions notable decorations of façades or interiors, this is the only collection of paintings to which he draws attention.

By 1600 two of the nephews of Gabriel Vendramin were still alive: Lucha, the eldest surviving boy at the time of his uncle’s death, and Felipo. Lucha died on 17 December 1601 and immediately afterwards his son Andrea removed most of the paintings from the palace at S. Fosca to his own house at S. Felice. Legal proceedings were initiated by other members of the family and an inventory dated 4 January 1601 (1602 in the modern calendar) was made of fifty‐nine items which had been removed – Titian’s family portrait, the least portable of the paintings, was, unsurprisingly, not included. The pictures all had to be returned.¹³³

According to Scamozzi in his Idea dell’architettura of 1615 the collection of antiquities in the Camerino of the S. Fosca palace was still at that date under seal (sotto sigillo).¹³⁴ Considering the fact that it had been eagerly eyed for half a century by rapacious collectors and their agents, it was surprising that it had survived for so long.¹³⁵ The explanation lay in the improbability of any agreement between the brothers who are harmoniously clustered on the steps of the altar in Titian’s picture.

Niccolò Stopio explained to his employer Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, in September 1567 that all the brothers would be prepared to sell furtively to get cash for gambling and whoring – ‘per fare danari da giucare et putanisare’.¹³⁶ We should not give too much credence to character sketches made by an art dealer for the benefit of a collector who likes to suppose that he is rescuing treasures from unworthy owners (especially when the proceedings are of doubtful legality). But there is no evidence that any of the children behaved well. In any case, a public sale of the collection or any well‐publicised dispersal of a significant part of it was impossible. By 1657 the collection of antiquities was being sold. Some of the legal obstacles had presumably been removed or forgotten twenty years before then, when Titian’s Vendramin Family was put on the market. Andrea, the great‐great‐grandson of Gabriel’s brother, has been identified by Rosella Lauber as the man most responsible for the sales.¹³⁷

The family had not all fallen on hard times. But the conspicuous wealth in the early seventeenth century belonged [page 227]to another branch, one descended directly from Doge Andrea Vendramin, whose great‐great‐grandson Cardinal Francesco Vendramin was given by his nephews a burial chapel in S. Pietro di Castello which is among the richest in the city.

Appendix 4
Family Paintings for the Portego

The Vendramin Family seems to have inspired a fashion for large paintings on canvas of horizontal format depicting Venetian families at worship. These were displayed in their palaces in the city. The most famous example is Veronese’s Cuccina Family of 1571, measuring 167 × 416 cm, painted for the new palace on the Grand Canal (now Palazzo Papadopoli) erected by this wealthy but not patrician family. Here Alvise Cuccina with his wife Zuana and their seven children (the youngest in the arms of a nurse) and Alvise’s two unmarried brothers are supported by the Cardinal Virtues as they kneel or prepare to kneel before the Virgin and Child and Saints John the Baptist and Jerome).¹³⁸ Tintoretto’s painting, similar in size (216.1 × 416.5 cm) but greatly inferior in quality, of the Doge Alvise Mocenigo with his wife, his brother and his nephews, and angels that appear to be portraits of deceased children, is another example, probably of the same date and probably made for the same Mocenigo palace in which it was recorded in the seventeenth century.¹³⁹ Other examples include the slightly naïve painting of a husband and wife with six children in the company of the Holy Family, probably dating from the 1560s (156 × 207 cm), recently at auction (fig. 11),¹⁴⁰ and the superb picture of the Pagello family consisting of a dozen children shepherded to a crucifix by their parents, convincingly attributed to Giovanni Antonio Fasolo and datable to the early 1570s, now in Vicenza (fig. 12).¹⁴¹ A mediocre example of the genre by a follower of Tintoretto at Kingston Lacy, probably of the 1590s, is of interest because deceased children (four out of eleven) are distinguished by heavenly crowns.¹⁴²

Most of the five family paintings just described have in common with that of the Vendramin family the presence of one or two uncles as well as a father. This reflects an important feature of Venetian patrician life in which brothers often lived together in the same palace, sometimes also forming a ‘fraterna’, or family trading partnership. It was also a common feature of Italian noble families generally that some brothers lived under the same roof, thus displaying the cohesion, [page 228]economising the expenses and concentrating the wealth of the family.¹⁴³ A notable difference in the case of the Vendramin Family is the absence of the female sex, which may be explained by the emphasis on male inheritance or by the fact that the relic they venerate was preserved by a male confraternity.

Although we do not know exactly where these paintings hung in the palaces for which they were made in Venice (or, in the case of the Pagello family, Vicenza) it is reasonable to deduce from their size that they were generally intended for the portego or portego de mezo, a long hall set at right angles to the centre of the façade. This room was lit by the clustered front windows at one end and by windows giving on to a courtyard at the other, and was punctuated in the centre of the long walls by doorways, one of which in the sixteenth century connected with the main staircase.¹⁴⁴ The portego could thus often accommodate four large paintings. The three companion paintings of the Cuccina Family, the Road to Calvary, the Feast at Cana and the Adoration, all survive but I know of no other series that was certainly painted for a portego in the sixteenth century.

A good deal can be learned about the portego from palace inventories. The room ‘was normally furnished with large tables and dozens of chairs and seems to have served as a dining room’. In a patrician home it could contain banners, arms and armour. ‘More than any other room in a Venetian palace, the portego exhibited the status of its owner.’¹⁴⁵ There does not seem to have been much consistency in the type of painting displayed there. Large paintings are often mentioned, however – a ‘quadro grande con un battaglia turchesca’, for example,¹⁴⁶ a ‘quadro grande con una cena’,¹⁴⁷ a large painting of ‘La Samaritana’,¹⁴⁸ and pictures of Saint Christopher, which are likely to have been sizeable.¹⁴⁹

The family paintings described above do not form a discrete genre. Titian’s Vendramin Family owes something to the votive painting he made of Andrea Gritti, a composition which is partially preserved in a woodcut (the original, in the Doge’s Palace, was destroyed by fire).¹⁵⁰ Tintoretto’s Mocenigo group is even closer to the votive paintings of doges, procurators, magistrates and governors that were placed in official buildings in Venice and the terra ferma. These were certainly being made in the fifteenth century, sometimes for domestic settings. Thus the painting now in S. Pietro Martire, Murano, of Doge Agostino Barbarigo on his knees before the Virgin and Child, which Giovanni Bellini signed and dated 1488, was ‘nel Palazo’, meaning presumably in the doge’s apartments in the Doge’s Palace at the time of his death. It measures 200 × 320 cm, which is close in size to Titian’s Vendramin Family. So too is the votive painting of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo in the National Gallery (184 × 296 cm), also perhaps painted for a family palace.¹⁵¹

The other category of paintings with which the family paintings overlap is that of a religious episode into which the family are introduced as witnesses. One example is Bonifazio’s Adoration (fig. 2, p. xv). Another is Titian’s Ecce Homo (fig. 4, p. 203), completed for the Venetian palace of the Flemish merchant Giovanni d’Anna in 1543, together with a painting of the Madonna and other figures which was said by Vasari to include members of the patron’s family.¹⁵² As with the Vendramin Family, a fairly low viewing point and an approach from one side seems to have been anticipated by [page 229]the artist. The vanishing point is here on the extreme lower right of the composition (in the Vendramin Family it is on the extreme lower left).

The most remarkable example of this type of painting is Veronese’s Supper at Emmaus in the Louvre (290 × 448 cm), a work of the late 1550s in which eleven Venetian children, together with two dogs and a cat, their parents and a pair of uncles invade the palatial dining room occupied by Christ, two disciples and the innkeeper.¹⁵³ It seems likely that the other, earlier paintings of this subject by Venetian artists were painted for the portego, where, as noted above, a large picture of a ‘cena’ was certainly recorded. They would have been domestic equivalents of the paintings of feasts that were favoured for monastic refectories.¹⁵⁴ What may have been an early example of this genre is the painting of Christ with the woman of Canaan by Palma Vecchio which must be the panel described in an inventory of the artist’s studio at his death in 1528 as a ‘quadro da portego’. The child in this painting certainly looks like a portrait.¹⁵⁵

The popularity of these paintings may doubtless be related to the paintings of miracles and sacred narrative in the meeting rooms of the Venetian scuole which are filled with contemporary witnesses. Thus the precedent for Titian’s Ecce Homo is clearly his Presentation of the Virgin (fig. 1, p. 128), completed for the Scuola of the Carità five years before.¹⁵⁶ This painting is still in its original location (now part of the Accademia Galleries), as is the case with no other painting mentioned in this section.

Appendix 5
The Sale of the Vendramin Family to the National Gallery

In the middle of the First World War word spread among those who sold paintings and those who owned them that a colossal sum of money had been offered for the great ‘Bridgewater Titians’ (the Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto belonging to the Duke of Sutherland, then being stored by the National Gallery in London, now on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland). The Trustees of the National Gallery debated the question of how they could possibly afford to counter bids of this kind and began to make a plan to sell a portion of the Turner Bequest and some of the Dutch pictures that were considered redundant.¹⁵⁷ Such a sale was sure to be controversial and in any case would have required the consent of Parliament, so it was shelved. Then it was learnt that the 7th Duke of Northumberland had agreed to sell Bellini’s Feast of the Gods to the London dealers Thomas Agnew and Arthur J. Sulley. Charles Holmes, the Gallery’s director, was alerted but he was powerless to intervene and the painting was exported. Having been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1920 as the property of a New York collector, Carl W. Hamilton, it was then sold in 1921 to Joseph Widener of Philadelphia (from whose collection it passed to the National Gallery of Art in Washington).¹⁵⁸

Titian’s Vendramin Family, which, like the Bellini, was in the collection of the 8th Duke of Northumberland (1880–1930), who inherited it in 1918, was included in a list of a dozen ‘paramount pictures’ presented to Lloyd George soon after the war. Obviously it was also high on the list of desiderata kept by Joseph Duveen, who was by then the leading dealer in old masters. He would have recalled a letter concerning it, sent to him by Berenson in 1916: ‘All the Tintorettos and Paul Veroneses, Rubens and Van Dycks and Franz Hals’s, and even Sir Joshuas, Gainsboroughs and Romneys are, when in groups, descended from and inspired by this picture… Here Titian feels, draws and models on a level with Rembrandt at his best but with so much more style and so much more colour. Do you wonder that Van Dyck owned it? There is in the whole world no picture of greater distinction.’¹⁵⁹ This was not the style in which Berenson communicated with Duveen; but Berenson understood that Duveen needed to show his American clients this sort of effusion.

In 1921 Sir Philip Sassoon, Unionist Member of Parliament for Hythe, was made a Trustee of the Gallery. Holmes recalled that he was ‘young, rich and clever’, and like ‘the hero in a novel by Disraeli’, meaning that he was cosmopolitan and Jewish and ‘in touch with all the great ones of the day’. Sir Philip promptly proposed an amendment to the Finance Act whereby, ‘if a national art treasure were sold to a national [page 230]institution’, it would be ‘free from estate, legacy and succession duties’. In August 1922 he obtained the agreement of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Robert Horne (later the first Viscount Horne), that if any of the paintings on the secret ‘paramount list’ were to be offered for sale the Government would agree to contribute a special grant of fifty per cent, provided that prices were not greatly out of line with the estimates then given. Only the simplest outline of this plan was ever announced to the House of Commons.¹⁶⁰

It is very likely that this was the best arrangement that could have been contrived. In the economic climate it was pointless to hope for an increase in the Gallery’s ‘grant in aid’, which had been cut from £10,000 to £5,000 in 1889 and never increased. It was of course essential to ensure that successive chancellors understood exactly what was at stake. It was essential also, in the exceptionally volatile political climate, to ensure that their commitment would not be vulnerable, were the mood of Parliament or the press to be unfavourable on the day that the actual purchases had to be made. At a moment of emergency the National Gallery had secured the counsel of advisers with a shrewd knowledge of politics, and enlightened convictions that were uninhibited by an undue attachment to the procedures of representative democracy.

No less important than influence in the Treasury was knowledge of, and influence on, the art trade, something in which the National Gallery had often, during the previous half‐century, been deficient. In October 1925 the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, recently made chairman of the Trustees for the second time, wrote to the Duke of Northumberland mentioning that he had heard rumours concerning the possible sale of the Vendramin Family and reminding him of the advantages of selling it to a national institution.¹⁶¹ The rumours were probably correct, since Duveen’s Paris office had reason to believe that it had been offered to Gulbenkian.¹⁶² The duke replied that he did not need to sell the picture, now that he had cleared the death duties he owed. But he added, ominously, that the ‘coal industry etc.’ did not encourage ‘confidence in the future’.¹⁶³ Altogether, this was not reassuring. Crawford may already have decided to approach London’s leading dealer. Concealing the detestation he felt for Duveen, Crawford applied what seems to have been the only method of curbing his rapacity, that of flattering him into believing that Britain needed him, and intimating that the government would in some way reward him, or that at least the establishment would embrace him, if he helped to frustrate the painting’s sale. Duveen grandly cabled his Paris office to announce that he had ‘promised Government’ that he would not interfere and that he knew that ‘Government will buy it at psychological moment’.¹⁶⁴ He explained to Crawford that the duke had refused an offer of £70,000 four years previously but had also made it clear that he might agree to sell it for £100,000. In both of these instances the duke, without knowing it, had been dealing with agents of Duveen.¹⁶⁵

In the spring of 1928 the duke agreed to allow the Vendramin Family to be restored by Dyer in the Gallery’s ‘repairing studio’. This enabled the Gallery to judge the painting’s condition, about which there had been alarming reports. The dealer Arthur Ruck visited the studio and boasted that he was buying the painting from the duke. The duke was informed, and dismissed the claim as a ‘characteristic piece of impudence’. But his letter was not intended to be reassuring. It ended with a reference to the increased taxation which a Conservative government had felt obliged to impose.¹⁶⁶

Meanwhile, Duveen’s patriotic fervour had begun to wane. ‘Doris’ (the code name for Berenson within the Duveen firm) reminded him at the end of October 1927 that the Titian was the ‘finest, greatest in any private collection’. He was doubtless anxious for the percentage that his endorsement would secure, were it to be sold. Ruck, who was in fact acting for Duveen, reported on 18 May 1928 that Lady Beckwith had informed him that the duke was very excited about the price recently fetched by a Raphael. Duveen cabled from the Olympic on 19 May for news about the picture, and no doubt the boast Ruck had made in the repairing studio was related to an approach that he made to the duke in consequence of Duveen’s cable. In June, Mary Berenson wrote to her ‘dear Joe’, reporting to him yet again ‘B.B.’s’ opinion that the Cornaro Family (as it was still commonly known) was ‘the finest Italian picture in any private collection, finer, he thinks, than even the Bridgewater ones. Couldn’t you get it?’¹⁶⁷ Clearly it was time for the Gallery to approach Duveen again. Sir Robert Witt did so in January 1929 with the grand idea that Duveen should buy the picture and present it to the nation.¹⁶⁸ While Duveen deliberated on this flattering, if somewhat alarming, proposal, the Trustees found themselves with an extraordinary problem.

Early in 1929 it had become clear not only that the Vendramin Family was for sale but also that the Wilton Diptych would be put on the market. When in February 1927 the Trustees had voted to give an order of priority to paintings on the ‘paramount list’ the third item had been the Titian and the fourth the Wilton Diptych.¹⁶⁹ The Trustees now resolved that both must be acquired and that there must be no question of choosing between them. So the Treasury was informed that two paintings on the ‘paramount list’ had to be saved – it was the first time that the arrangement had been put to the test. Holmes had warned the Treasury about the Titian in October 1925 and Sir George Barstow had replied curtly that ‘you could hardly have called upon us at a more inconvenient moment’. There were now two paintings to be purchased and the timing was especially awkward since the government was facing a general election. On 6 February 1929 Crawford met with Sir Richard Hopkins to learn that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, agreed to pay half the price of the Wilton Diptych Wilton Diptych but was ‘not prepared to help the Trustees now’ over the Titian, although he would do so ‘later on in the year if still responsible for the Treasury’. This decision was said to be ‘final’, but Crawford insisted on an interview with Churchill on the following day and obtained from him an agreement that negotiations could continue on the basis that there would be Treasury support provided nothing was concluded before the election.¹⁷⁰ At this moment the government could not afford to be seen to hand a fat cheque to a Tory duke, especially one with extensive interests in the coal industry.

The next step was to neutralise the threat presented by Duveen. In March the extraordinary step was taken of making him a Trustee. In response, Duveen revealed to Witt that he had offered £130,000 for the painting through Ruck, stipulating that he would of course offer it to the Nation first.¹⁷¹ The Trustees therefore knew what they were likely to have to pay. At the end of April the duke informed the Gallery that although ‘reluctant to sell’ he would consider any offer from the Gallery with sympathy.¹⁷² On 30 May the Labour Party won the election, but without achieving an overall majority. Their leader, Ramsay MacDonald, formed a government on 5 June. He too had been made a Trustee in the previous year and he was now able to provide assurances that there would be no obstacle from the Treasury. The duke agreed to a price of £122,000. The Treasury contributed £61,000, Samuel Courtauld £20,000 and Duveen himself £16,000. The National Art Collections Fund found £5,000 and the Gallery added £10,500 from its purchase fund and £9,500 from the bequest of Claude Phillips.¹⁷³ The painting was hung in Room XXVIII on 12 June for a private view, and the room was open to the public on 15 June.

The Duke of Northumberland received the third instalment on 19 July. Five days later the financial secretary to the Treasury asked the Parliamentary Committee for Supply to approve the advance which had been made from the Civil Contingencies Fund. The acquisitions were supported by William Ormsby‐Gore (the future Lord Harlech), a Unionist Member of Parliament and a Trustee of the Gallery who declared that he believed it to be the duty of a ‘great and wealthy nation’ to provide ‘the public and visitors to the country with the finest works of art for their spiritual refreshment, education and enjoyment’.¹⁷⁴ But to many Labour Party members it must have seemed as if the whole deal (including the complicity of the prime minister) had been fixed by the ‘establishment’ (or at least by a cultivated minority within it). And so it had. But the transaction was not as dishonourable as they may have suspected. It was only prudent that the ‘paramount’ list had been made well in advance and discussed in secret. Furthermore, neither vendor had been paid more than the current market value.

Andrew MacLaren (1883–1975, Member of Parliament for Burslem) and Joseph Batey (1867–1949, Member for Spennymoor, Durham) spoke bitterly of the possible reaction in the distressed mining areas of Durham and Northumberland to this use of public money and to such a favourable deal being struck with an immensely wealthy man who owned so many coal mines. Batey himself had worked in the coal mines at the age of twelve.¹⁷⁵ The claim that on some days the Gallery was free to the public, and the figures quoted for weekend attendance, can have made little impression on them. George Buchanan (1890–1955), the Member for Gorbals, the notoriously poor area of Glasgow, revealed that he had twice visited the National Gallery – ‘my wife made me go’ – and did concede, by implication, that it was not a resort reserved for the privileged few. But he was clearly unconvinced that the ‘spiritual refreshment’ it provided could be compared with the school milk the previous government had refused to subsidise.¹⁷⁶

The acquisition of the Vendramin Family and the Wilton Diptych was an operation that revealed consummate political skill on the part of the more active Trustees and especially on the part of Sir Philip Sassoon and Lord Crawford. Charles Holmes, the director from 1916 to 1928, played a relatively inconspicuous part in the whole affair, and Augustus Daniel, his successor, almost no part at all. Much of the hard work backstage was due to Holmes, of course, and it was he who in 1921 worked out the details of the amendment of the Finance Act, but by his own admission Sassoon not only proposed and carried the amendment in the House of Commons but was of vital assistance when the scheme was explained to the chancellor: ‘There was so much to say that I could say nothing, and had not Sassoon come to the rescue the appeal must have failed completely.’¹⁷⁷ It was an assistant in the Gallery, Collins Baker, who suggested and arranged for the cleaning of the Titian, a very well‐timed favour. It is true too that the agitation articulated by The Burlington Magazine and the National Art Collections Fund, also the polemics of Claude Phillips, whose bequest was so appropriately employed to help acquire the painting, had supplied the arguments which the Trustees used. Nevertheless, the authority enjoyed by the Trustees in this period was a precondition for this success, just as it had been responsible for several failures in previous decades. No director at that date could hope to have equivalent contacts in Whitehall or to address dukes as equals, or make both the leader of the Labour Party and the most powerful art dealer in the world feel flattered to be allies in a cause that was against their political and business interests, respectively.

The parliamentary debate revealed, however, the vulnerable image that the National Gallery had in this period. During the hard economic climate following the First World War the Gallery had increased (on 4 April 1921) its paying days from two in the week to four, putting the extra receipts towards the purchase grant and endeavouring to enhance those extra funds by means of concerts.¹⁷⁸ The charging had been unpopular enough to prompt art students to march in protest with a banner. They were led by Muirhead Bone (1876–1953, knighted 1937), painter and etcher and a Trustee of the Tate Gallery, who also argued forcefully against this step in The Burlington Magazine for May 1923.¹⁷⁹ This was painful for Holmes, who had been so closely associated with the Burlington. He had faced great pressure from the Treasury to impose admission charges, and concessions to this pressure probably improved the chancellor’s preparedness to enter into the Sassoon agreement. However, Bone was surely correct in saying that the paying days ‘create imperceptibly, but very surely, a sense of alienation between the public and the National Gallery. Somehow it is no longer “theirs”’.¹⁸⁰ Yet it was for the public that the Titian was purchased with substantial amounts of public money.

It fell to Daniel’s successor, Kenneth Clark, to exploit the circumstances of the Second World War to make the Gallery truly popular as an institution. He also had the tricky job of removing Duveen from the Board of Trustees. Clark himself was comfortable in the highest social circles. Like Sassoon [page 232]when he became a Trustee, he was ‘young, rich and clever’; unlike Holmes, he did not have to worry about the cost of hotels in Paris.¹⁸¹ This made it easier for him to accomplish the second of these tasks, and perhaps also the first.

One other episode connected with the acquisition of Titian’s Vendramin Family deserves to be mentioned because it is of some significance in the history of the National Gallery, and indeed of public art collections generally. Great plans were being made in 1929 to organise one of the largest international loan exhibitions ever mounted, that devoted to Italian art, which would open at the Royal Academy in 1930. The Gallery had never agreed to lend paintings to events of this kind but prior to the sale there had been an understanding that the Titian would be lent. There was considerable political pressure on the Trustees to agree to the loan. The prime minister even let it be known that he was in favour. Lord Crawford was especially opposed to it, sensing that the exhibition represented publicity for fascist Italy: ‘I stand for Britain first, and I regret that we should denude ourselves in order to boost a movement which is political in its fundamentals’; ‘I am entirely opposed to giving way … It is not our business to make the Italian show a success, and to save Mussolini’s face.’¹⁸² More than half a century would elapse before the Trustees would begin to agree with any frequency to lend masterpieces to loan exhibitions, yet today it seems clear that the very idea of the permanent collection has been altered by an increasing obligation not only to lend but to borrow.

Were anyone to doubt the central role of the loan exhibition, not only in the history of museums but in the history of the art market, they would do well to study the exhibition The Venetian School: Pictures by Titian and his Contemporaries that was mounted at the Burlington Fine Art Club between May and July 1914 , or rather the illustrated record of the exhibition that was published in 1915, because it included ‘four famous pictures at Alnwick Castle three of which have never before been photographed’, among them (as no. 64) the ‘Cornaro Family’, and of course the Feast of the Gods.¹⁸³ It seems likely that the Club had hoped to borrow these paintings, but that the duke had not agreed. However, by allowing the paintings to appear in the catalogue he did much to quicken the appetite of London’s art dealers and North America’s collectors and to initiate the moves and counter‐moves described above.

Notes