Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll.
- Anna Brownell Jameson
- Date:
- 1899
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll. Source: Wellcome Collection.
294/335 page 248
![the great painter constantly presenting petitions and complaints in moving terms, which always obtained gracious but illusive answers. Philip II., who commanded the riches of the Indies, was for many years a debtor to Titian for at least two thousand gold crowns, and his accounts were not settled at the time of his death. For our Queen Mary of England, who wished to patronize a man favored by her husband, Titian painted several pictures, some of which were in the possession of Charles I.; others had been carried to Spain after the death of Mary, and are now in the royal gallery at Madrid. Besides the pictures painted by command for royal and no- ble patrons, Titian, who was unceasingly occupied, had always a great number of pictures in his house which he presented to his friends, or to the officers and attendants of the court, as a means of procuring their favor. There is extant a letter of Aretino, in which he describes the scene which took place when the emperor summoned his favorite painter to attend the court at Augsburg in 1550. “ It was,” he says, “ the most flattering testimony to his excellence to behold, as soon as it was known that the divine painter was sent for, the crowds of people running to obtain, if possible, the productions of his art; and how they endeavored to purchase the pictures, great and small, and everything that was in the house, at any price ; for everybody seems assured that his august majesty will so treat his Apelles that he will no longer condescend to exercise his pencil except to oblige him.” The “Venus and Adonis” now in our National Gallery was painted by Titian for Philip II. in 1554, when he was in his seventy-eighth year, and the Cenacolo now at Madrid in 1565,1 when he was in his eighty-ninth year; but time passed on, and seemed to have no power to quench the ardor of this wonderful old man. He was eighty-one when he painted the Martyrdom of St. Laurence, one of his largest and grandest compositions. The Magdalene, the half-length figure with uplifted streaming eyes, which he sent to Philip II., was exe- cuted even later : and it was not till he was approaching his ninetieth year that he showed in his works symptoms of en- feebled powers; and then it seemed as if sorrow rather than time had reached him and conquered him at last. He had lost his daughter Lavinia, who had been his model for many 1 [Crowe and Cavalcaselle give the date a year earlier.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0294.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
