Early in the 17th century, the Florentine nobleman Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, scholar, sometime Knight of Malta and owner of a tremendous moustache, commissioned a series of paintings and grisailles commemorating his great-uncle and namesake, to adorn the family palazzo in Florence. Michelangelo the Elder was depicted at various stages of his illustrious if somewhat chequered career: hobnobbing with five popes, Emperor Charles V, Doge Andrea Gritti and an embassy from the Ottoman sultan; declining to return to Rome after a disagreement with Julius II; designing fortifications for the short-lived Florentine Republic; refusing payment from Paul III for his work on St Peter’s Basilica; slumped over a manuscript in meditazione poetica; and, finally, dying.
The pictures testify to the huge success enjoyed by Michelangelo during his lifetime (1475-1564), as well as suggesting at least something of his character (his frugality, his piety—later in life, at least—his contrariness). But what they arguably illustrate most eloquently is how dramatically tastes had changed in the half-century since the maestro’s death.
Planning vs spontaneity
There is a longstanding art-historical dichotomy that sets Michelangelo at the pinnacle of a tradition prioritising disegno, which means both drawing and design: thinking about what you are going to do before you do it, and setting down precise guidelines for your brush to follow when you eventually execute your painting. Conversely, Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian (active around 1506, died 1576), Michelangelo’s younger Venetian contemporary, is said to be the fountainhead of another tradition based on colore or colorito, which does not simply mean rich, voluptuous colour, but also something more wide-ranging: a certain spontaneity of conception and freedom of execution.
This distinction was always a blunt instrument. Within the rigid limitations imposed by thin, fast-drying tempera and fresco, Michelangelo achieved thrilling chromatic effects, learned during his apprenticeship with Domenico Ghirlandaio and then perfected on the wide savannah of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But, in painting at least, his work was always meticulously planned and exactly, even drily, executed—no Leonardo-esque pentimenti for him. Preoccupied with beauty in an exalted, ideal sense, he struggled with subjects that called for sensuality. Meanwhile Titian, working in oils, could break down the distinction between drawing and painting, building his pictures up in layers, changing his mind, switching between thin glazes and thick impasto, smudging and scumbling. He was undoubtedly a worldlier artist—and man—than Michelangelo: better at conveying emotion and atmosphere, less good when the brief called for an exact understanding of the human figure, or something heroic or sublime.
Titian was undoubtedly a worldlier artist—and man—than Michelangelo
The celebrated art historian and Michelangelo expert, William E. Wallace’s elegant double biography attempts to consider the two artists, who probably met only twice, not as polar opposites, but rounded creative beings in active dialogue. It does not—spoiler alert—make good on the title’s claim of “rivalry”, despite Michelangelo’s famously bitchy remark on seeing Titian’s Danaë that it was a pity the Venetians had never learned to draw: Michelangelo had something of a talent for bitchy remarks, after all. But it does speculate intelligently about the impact Alfonso d’Este’s studiolo in Ferrara, which included commissions by Titian, must have had on Michelangelo; it notes similar poses in several works by the two artists; it outlines the ways in which ideas were disseminated during the period, not just through direct collaboration—some of Michelangelo’s best-known paintings are not painted by Michelangelo, but worked up by Sebastiano del Piombo and others from his designs—but through shared drawings, studio visits, a burgeoning print culture and simple hearsay. Wallace notes the impact of what modern Italians would call campanilismo but at the time was regarded as simple patriotism: a tendency to fly the flag for one’s home turf. Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) gives more weight to Michelangelo than Titian in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects partly, at least, because the former was, like the author, a Florentine.
When Michelangelo and Titian slipped the surly bonds of earth, they were transfigured into the stuff of art-historical myth. Wallace mentions two artists, Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto, and Annibale Carracci, who implicitly or explicitly aimed for a synthesis of Titian’s colorito and Michelangelo’s disegno. He concedes, somewhat grudgingly you feel, that Titian’s influence on later centuries was the greater: he anticipates the “painterliness” of a Rembrandt, a Rubens, a Turner, a Monet, even a Pollock or a Twombly. He might have said more about the shared influence of the antique on both artists, and their contemporaries and immediate forebears, Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi in Florence, Luca Signorelli in Umbria, Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione in Venice, the brilliant, peripatetic Lorenzo Lotto: neither Titian nor Michelangelo sprang into being fully formed ab nihilo. Wallace is oddly preoccupied with Michelangelo’s footwear. But this is a fluent, readable and thought-provoking book about two great artists, and what they might have had to say to one another—whether or not they actually got to say it.
- William E. Wallace, Michelangelo and Titian: A Tale of Rivalry and Genius, Princeton University Press, 248pp, 48 col. & 49 b/w illust., $35/£30 (hb), published 3 February (US) 31 March (UK)
- Keith Miller is a commissioning editor for The Telegraph and writes for the Literary Review and The Times Literary Supplement
