MASP

Born in Cadore, back then a territory of the Republic of Venice, Titian became one of the most acknowledged Renaissance painters. As a young man, he attended the ateliers of Giovanni Bellini (circa 1430/35-1516) and Giorgione (1477-1510). He was one of the first painters to preferably use color as a constitutive element of composition, replacing the drawing by chromatic spots. His paintings are characterized by big formats and scenes of emotional impact. He was the most famous portraitist of his time, creating a new interpretation to the genre, named “portrait in action,” which combined the fidelity of representation of physiognomy with allusions to the historical, political, and social roles of his models. For this reason, he became the favorite of Charles V (1500-1558), emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, of pope Paul III (1468-1549), among others. In this painting of the MASP collection, cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo (1512-1578) was portrayed standing up and not bearing the traditional and typical purple garments of his high rank in the Roman Curia. Madruzzo was the prince and bishop of Trent, and had a prominent role in the negotiations that led to the choice of the city as siege of the Council (1545-63), taking part actively in the discussions that gave rise to the Counter-Reformation, the answer of the Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation. The portrait was painted during this period. The clock on the table, to the left, is a common element in representations of political figures of the period, an allusion to the ephemerality and fugacity of both time and power, which might be taken as a stimulus to the sovereign’s prudence.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017

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On his return from a second stay in Augsburg, in 1551, Titian executed the portrait of Prince-Bishop Cristoforo Madru- zzo, host of the great Council of Trent, 1545-1563. The historical profile of this person who was so fundamental to the political and ecclesiastical history of 16th-century Europe became much clearer during the 1993 exhibit in Trent, which was devoted to the Madruzzos. The youngest son of an aristocratic family, and therefore destined for an ecclesiastical career, Cristoforo Madru- zzo (1511-1578) studied law at Padua, where he received minor orders in 1531-1532 and took a degree in jurisprudence in Bologna (1532-1537), meanwhile holding the position of “procuratore della nazione germanica” (his mother, Eufemia Sporenberg, was German); at the same time and with remarkable avidity, he gained all the clerical dignities, attaining the cardinalate through an in pectore nomination by the consistory of 1542. For two years, 1556-1557, he held the politically sensitive post of governor of Milan, in name of the emperor. A declared defender of Spanish imperial interests, Madruzzo tried to mediate Spain’s differences with the Catholic church. Robertson (1983, p. 227) ponders that this might be the reason he is not wearing cardinal’s robes in this portrait. In 1567, he bequeathed his Tridentine titles to his nephew Ludovico Madruzzo and died in 1578, in Tivoli, when staying with Cardinal d’Este. The clock that is so prominent in this picture (not an un- common presence in Titian portraits) strangely accompanied the displacements of the work and was seen by Cavalcaselle in 1877, in the residence of the Salvadori barons. The subject of several interpretations, it probably symbolizes, as Panofsky (1969) suggests –in a general way and without detracting from the more contingent or circumstantial significations ingeniously listed by Camesasca (1987) – a memento mori, a warning of the ephemeral nature of glory and the need for temperance. As such, the clock is commonly found in Venetian portrait work and appears in a portrait of Paris Bordon conserved in the Masp. According to Wethey (19y1), Portrait of Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo was “slightly reduced at the bottom and on its right side”. The precise sequence of owners of the work was established by Camesasca (1987, p. 84), from the residence of Cardi- nal Madruzzo, the Castello del Buon Consiglio, in Trent (1552- ante 1658), going on to the Roccabruna Palace in the same city (1682-after 1735) to the heirs of the new owners, the Gaudenti della Torre barons. In 1855, the della Torres bequeathed it to the Salvadori barons, who around 1905 sold it to Maison Trotti & Cie., in Paris, which transferred it to J. Stillman, whose heirs took it to New York before 1907. In 1942, the Madruzzo passed to Mrs. Avery Rockfeller, who sold it to the Knoedler Gallery, through which Masp acquired the work. Its condition was evaluated quite differently by scholars, from Cavalcaselle and Fogolari to Wethey and Camesasca. Although severe in his judgment concerning “inaccurate restoration work” that took place before 1907, Camesasca writes in 1987 that “there is no reason to doubt the possibility of recovering the extremely refined play of blacks on blacks, from which should surface part of the original quality”. And indeed, after the restoration entrusted to the Getty Museum’s Andrea Rothe (1992-1995) its full and favorable visibility is revealed. Notwithstanding its unfavorable earlier state of conservation and its remote location, the work was always the object of superlative evaluations, from Cavalcaselle who, in the last century, defined it as “one of the important por- traits of the Venetian school” –to Palluchini, who, in 1969, spoke of “a color paste worthy of Renoir”, concluding with: “Never as in this image did Titian know how to catch the sense of fluid, flowing life, caught in an attitude, in a movement, in a look; a figure thus comes to life in physical and spiritual entirety. In this full-length figure portrait, Titian shows his skill at placing the model in a new worldly dimension, captured through the perfect aisance of his pictorial medium, concomitantly both fluid and atmospheric”. The controversy about the date 1552 twice inscribed in the painting, supposedly refuting an inexact mention by Vasari, and the fact that Madruzzo is not wearing his cardinal robes (he had been made a cardinal in 1552) aroused several possibilities for dating alternatives through to 1542 (Pallucchini; Valcanover). Today these doubts have apparently been resolved, as may be seen in the most recent studies by Pallucchini himself (1969), Wethey (1971), and Camesasca (1987). The date of 1552 is also confirmed by the declared age of the cardinal, 39 (not 38, as Pallucchini claims), for it is known that he was born on July 5, 1512 (Vareschi, in Dal Prà 1993, p. 57). And most importantly, the stylistic characteris- tics, already mentioned by Camesasca, are close to the portrait of Philip II, executed in 1551 and now at the Prado.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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