Secondly, Titian’s letter of 1571 says he is ninety-five years old.  Titian’s similar letter of 1576, the year of his death, omits to say he is one hundred.  Surely a strange omission, considering that he refers to his old age three times in this one letter.[172] Does not the second letter correct the inexactness of the first? and so Titian’s statement goes for nothing?

The collective evidence, then, of these Spanish letters amounts to this, that, in the words of the Envoy, “for money everything was to be had of Titian,” and accordingly any statement as to his great age when thus made for effect must be treated with the greatest suspicion.

But is the evidence of Dolce and Vasari any more trustworthy?  Dr. Gronau is at pains to show that both these writers often made mistakes in their dates, a fact which no one can dispute.  Their very incorrectness is the more reason however for trusting them in this instance, for they happen to agree about the date of Titian’s birth; and, although neither of them expressly gives the year 1489, they indicate separate and independent events in his life, the one, Dolce, at the beginning, the other, Vasari, at the end, which when looked into give the same result.

Moreover, be Dolce ever so anxious to cry up his hero Titian, and make him out to have been precocious, and be Vasari ever so inexact in his chronology, we must remember that, when both of them wrote, the presumption of unusual longevity had not arisen, and that their evidence therefore is less likely to be prejudiced in this respect than the evidence given in obituary notices, such as occurs in Borghini’s Riposo of 1584, and in the later writers like Tizianello and Ridolfi.

That Borghini therefore says Titian was ninety-eight or ninety-nine when he died, and that Tizianello and Ridolfi, thirty-eight and sixty-four years later respectively, put him down at ninety-nine, is by no means proof that such was the case.  It would seem that there had been some speculation before and after Titian’s death as to his exact age; that no one quite knew for certain; and that Titian with the credulousness of old age had come to regard himself as well-nigh a centenarian.  Be this as it may, I still hold that the evidence of Dolce and Vasari that Titian’s birth occurred in 1489 is more trustworthy than either the evidence found in the three Spanish letters, or the evidence as given in the obituary notices of Borghini and others.

One word more.  If Titian was born in 1489, instead of 1476-7, it does make a great difference in the story of his own career; and, what is more, the history of Venetian art in the early sixteenth century, as it centres round Giorgione, Palma, and Titian, will have to be carefully reconsidered.

HERBERT COOK.

NOTES: 

[148] The picture now hangs in the Academia at Venice.

[149] e.g. the “Sacred and Profane Love” (so-called) in the Borghese Gallery; the “S.  Mark” of the Salute; the “Concert” in the Pitti; the “Tribute Money” at Dresden; the “Madonna of the Cherries” at Vienna, etc., which one or other of his biographers assign to the years 1500-1510.