Titian (1488/1490-1576), Young Man with a Glove , early 1520s, Oil on canvas, 100 x 89 cm, The Louvre (fragment)
The canvas reached France by a route worth tracing. It belonged first to the Gonzaga collection in Mantua. In 1627, the heavily indebted Duke Vincenzo II agreed to sell a large share of the family’s pictures to Charles I of England, a purchase orchestrated by the Flemish dealer Daniel Nijs and the English king’s agent Nicholas Lanier, his Master of Music (Anderson, 2015). After Charles’s execution in 1649, the painting was sold at the Commonwealth Sale and passed through the hands of a London buyer recorded as J. Jackson before reaching the Cologne-born banker Eberhard Jabach in Paris. Louis XIV acquired it from Jabach in 1671. It was transferred from Versailles to the Louvre in 1792.
The sitter has never been securely identified, which is itself a kind of freedom: the painting no longer has to answer to anyone’s biography. Three names have been proposed. A 1527 letter from Pietro Aretino to Federico Gonzaga mentions a portrait by Titian of Girolamo Adorno, a young Genoese diplomat, though there is nothing beyond this single reference to connect Adorno with the Louvre canvas. Giambattista Malatesta, an agent of the Gonzaga active in Venice, has also been put forward. Charles Hope, formerly director of the Warburg Institute and one of the most exacting scholars of Titian’s chronology and patronage, proposed a third candidate, Ferrante Gonzaga, younger brother of Federico, who would have been about sixteen in 1523 (Hope, 1980). None of these identifications commands wide agreement, and the coat of arms on the ring worn on his right hand, which might settle the matter, has not been deciphered.
The painting dates from a period when Titian’s career was built on ground that Giorgione had cleared but not lived to occupy. The two had trained together in Giovanni Bellini’s workshop, and in 1508–1509 they worked side by side on the exterior frescoes of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the state warehouse for German merchants on the Grand Canal. Giorgione took the principal facade; Titian painted the less prominent southern side, along the narrow Calle Merceria. Contemporaries, according to Lodovico Dolce, already found Titian’s figures more impressive, a judgement that evidently caused friction between them (Joannides, 2001). Giorgione died in 1510, probably of plague. Sebastiano del Piombo left for Rome the following year. Titian, still in his early twenties, was suddenly without serious rivals of his own generation in Venice.
In 1513 he secured the senseria, a broker’s patent at the very same Fondaco dei Tedeschi he had helped to fresco. The position was a valued sinecure: it carried a salary of twenty crowns a year, certain tax exemptions, and official standing as superintendent of government works, with the specific obligation to complete the paintings Bellini had left unfinished in the hall of the Great Council in the Doge’s Palace, and to paint the portrait of each successive Doge at a fixed fee of eight crowns. It was, in effect, the nearest thing Venice had to a court painter’s appointment. But Titian could not fully take up its privileges until Bellini himself died in 1516, after which no one disputed his pre-eminence (Humfrey, 2007). The Assumption of the Virgin, installed on the high altar of the Frari on 19 May 1518, marked the decisive break from the Giorgionesque mode: where Giorgione had worked in intimate formats, soft atmospheric light, and a lyrical pastoral register, the Assumption was enormous, rhetorical, and built on a scale of colour and physical energy that looked towards Rome rather than backwards to the poetic world of the Concert champêtre (Joannides, 2001). At the same time, Titian was producing the mythological canvases for Alfonso I d’Este’s Camerino d’Alabastro in Ferrara, among them Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523, National Gallery, London) and The Bacchanal of the Andrians (1523–1525, Museo del Prado, Madrid). The Pesaro altarpiece, also in the Frari, was under way from around 1519 and would not be completed until 1526. In 1523 Titian first met Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, Alfonso’s nephew, who became one of his most significant patrons after Habsburgs. The Young Man with a Glove, quiet as it is, belongs to these same years. It is a private painting made by someone whose attention was otherwise occupied with enormous subjects, and its restraint may be all the more deliberate for that reason.
The Louvre’s own description notes the sitter’s clothing carefully: a black doublet over a pleated white shirt, the collar gathered at the neck by a thin cord, the half-open doublet revealing a gold chain with a medallion set with a sapphire and a pearl. His left hand wears a leather glove and holds the second, removed from the right hand, whose bare index finger displays the ring bearing the unread coat of arms. He leans on a marble block, at ease but composed, his head and eyes turned slightly to the right. None of this is ostentatious, yet every detail registers a young man of means and self-possession.
A useful point of comparison is Titian’s earlier Portrait of a Man (also called Man with a Quilted Sleeve), c.1509, in the National Gallery, London. The attribution has been debated for over a century. The painting carries Titian’s initials on the parapet, yet the Giorgionesque handling has periodically drawn doubt. Harold Wethey (1902–1984), whose three-volume catalogue raisonné remains the foundational reference for Titian’s paintings, catalogued it as an early Titian (Wethey, 1971). Cecil Gould (1918–1994), Keeper and Deputy Director of the National Gallery and a meticulous connoisseur of sixteenth-century Italian painting, upheld the attribution in the Gallery’s own catalogue (Gould, 1975). Both scholars were central to the mid-twentieth-century effort to disentangle Titian’s early output from Giorgione’s, a problem that runs through almost every attempt to reconstruct Venetian painting before 1510. Hope, whose insistence on documentary evidence over stylistic intuition has done more than most to discipline the field’s tendency towards speculative attribution, cautioned that claims about the early Titian remain difficult to resolve definitively (Hope, 1980). More recently, Antonio Mazzotta identified the sitter as a member of the Venetian patrician Barbarigo family, connecting the portrait to Vasari’s description of a work Titian signed in shadow so that it might have been taken for a Giorgione (Mazzotta, 2012). That London painting, with its broad stone parapet and extravagant quilted blue sleeve projecting into the viewer’s space, still belongs to the Giorgionesque mode of portraiture: mood-laden, saturated in colour, the sitter arranged to impress. The Louvre painting, a decade or so later, has moved on. The background is darker, the palette more austere, and the young man occupies his space with a physical ease that owes less to poetic atmosphere and more to observed deportment. Whether this young man was a diplomat, a duke’s brother, or someone whose name was already half-forgotten by the time the painting entered the Gonzaga inventories, the canvas has outlived all of them. Titian was not painting a record of features. He was painting the impression a living person leaves when they are still in the room.
References
Anderson, C.M. (2015) The Flemish Merchant of Venice: Daniel Nijs and the Sale of the Gonzaga Art Collection. New Haven: Yale University Press
Hope, C. (1980) Titian. London: Jupiter Books
Pope-Hennessy, J. (1966) The Portrait in the Renaissance. London: Phaidon.
Wethey, H. (1971) The Paintings of Titian: Complete Edition. Volume II: The Portraits. London: Phaidon
Humfrey, P. (2007) Titian. London: Phaidon
Joannides, P. (2001) Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius. New Haven: Yale University Press
Mazzotta, A. (2012) ‘A “gentiluomo da Ca’ Barbarigo” by Titian in the National Gallery, London’, The Burlington Magazine, 154(1306), pp. 12–19. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/8545514/A._Mazzotta_A_gentiluomo_da_Ca_Barbarigo_by_Titian_in_the_National_Gallery_London_in_The_Burlington_Magazine_CLIV_2012_pp._12-19 (Accessed: 2 May 2023).