paul

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Titian’s Fire: Pyrotechnics and

Paul Hills
Venice
Representations in Sixteenth-Century

hills
Downloaded from http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Pittsburgh on October 22, 2012

1. In St Petersburg, see Titian, Prince of Painters,
Venice, 1990, cat. no. 75.
2. Now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,
Boston. Treatises on the Four Elements, taking
their point of departure from Aristotle, were
being published by the Venetian press at this
time: e.g. Paolo Manutio, De gli elementi e di molti
loro notabili effetti, Venice, 1557, which in turn is
based on the work of the Venetian patrician,
Gasparo Contarini, De elementis & eorum
mixtionibus libri quinque, Paris, 1548.
3. Turner’s comments are printed in John Gage,
Colour in Turner (Studio Vista: London, 1969),
p. 203. For Turner’s response to Titian, see Ian
Warrell (ed.), Turner and Venice (Tate: London,
2003), especially pp. 53–68.
4. See Beverly Brown, ‘From Hell to Paradise:
Landscape and Figure in Early
Sixteenth-Century Venice’, in B.L. Brown and
B. Aikema, Renaissance Venice and the North
(Bompiani: Milan, 1999), pp. 424–31,
especially p. 428, to which I am much indebted.
5. Natural History, 35: 96.
6. Recorded by Marcantonio Michiel, Notizie di
opere di disegno, ed. Gustavo Frizzoni (Bologna,
1884), p. 165; see Alessandro Nova,
‘Giorgione’s Inferno with Aeneas and Anchises
for Taddeo Contarini’, in L. Ciammitti (ed.),
Dosso’s Fate (Getty: Los Angeles, 1998),
pp. 41 – 62. Nova, like others, argues that
Marcantonio’s engraving, the so-called Dream
of Raphael, reflects the lost Giorgione, which in
turn did portray the burning city of Troy.
7. The words of Count Nicola Maffei. See
Brown, ‘From Hell to Paradise’, for a
well-documented account of the import of
northern paintings and the importance of fire
scenes: for Bosch’s Grimani triptych see
catalogue number 111, pp. 432–5; for Federico
Gonzaga’s collection see p. 426.
# The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcm005
Titian’s Fire: Pyrotechnics and Representations
in Sixteenth-Century Venice
Paul Hills
Why is fire so prominent in the paintings of Titian? In some instances it is
actual fire, as in Christ Crowned with Thorns (Fig. 1), where a crown of
flames blazes against the surrounding darkness; in others it is hard to
determine whether fire is described or merely its semblance. In a late
St Sebastian the saint’s flesh, conjured in loose brush-marks against the low
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horizon of a fiery sky, stirs memories of funeral pyres, martyrs burnt at
the stake, the flames their glory.1 Over his long career Titian moved
between painting the passion of the saints and the passions of the flesh: in
The Rape of Europa, destined for the Catholic emperor, Philip of Spain, he
suspended the four elements of air, water, earth and fire in a dynamic
state of flux reminiscent of the archetypal dramas of dreams – flying,
losing balance and traversing immeasurable space.2
Mastery of the mimetic description of fire gives rise to a pictorial language
evocative of states of becoming or of dissolution. Even when fire is not
literally described, many of Titian’s paintings are marked by the alternation
of explosive force and quiescence where energy has burnt out or run its
course. Before it was destroyed in a conflagration in 1867, the altarpiece of
The Death of St Peter Martyr (Fig. 2) was the Venetian master’s most admired
work. Significantly, it was an artist attuned to the speed and dynamism of
the first industrial age, J.M.W. Turner, who picked up on the explosive
force of Titian’s painting. He observed that the putti bearing the martyr’s
palm were like rockets blazing across the sky.3
Traditional explanations of this fieriness situate it safely within art’s own
history. They suggest that pictorial pyrotechnics were motivated by the desire
to rival the paintings of night scenes, flames and atmospheric effects in which
northern European artists excelled, and which had also been praised as a
virtuoso feature of Classical art in Pliny’s Natural History. With regard to the
earlier sixteenth century, this has some explanatory merit. Critics as influential
as Castiglione south of the Alps and Erasmus in the north wrote of fleeting
effects of fire, weather or atmosphere as challenges for the painter, and such
spectacles were indeed essayed by artists eager to catch the eye of the growing
class of private collectors.4 Following this line, Pliny the Elder’s praise for
Apelles’s ability to paint a flash of lightning, prompted Giorgione to paint the
Tempest,5 while the same master’s lost ‘inferno with Aeneas and Anchises’, very
probably depicting Troy ablaze, would have been another virtuoso performance.6
Certainly, in Venice and northern Italy paintings of nocturnes and fires were
imported from north of the Alps. A triptych by Hieronymous Bosch including
hell-fires had entered the collection of Cardinal Domenico Grimani by 1521,
and is preserved in the Doge’s Palace to this day. One of Titian’s most
notable patrons, the Duke of Mantua, Federico Gonzaga, acquired 120
Flemish landscapes, twenty of which depicted fires so convincingly that ‘it
seems they would burn the hands of anyone who approached to touch
them’.7 However, repeated stress on this kind of explanation leads art
historians to overlook how events, industrial processes, or the arts of
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007 185–204
Paul Hills

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Fig. 1. Titian, Christ Crowned with Thorns, ca. 1570 – 76, oil on canvas, 280  182 cm. Munich,
Alte Pinakothek. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek München.)

war impinged upon the ambitions of painters and collectors, and it fails to
address how the tenor and appeal of these virtuoso paintings might have
been inflected by experience, needs and fears. Of course there is a danger
here of positing a ‘real’ to which artistic representations correspond. In
attempting to avoid this trap, Manfredo Tafuri’s interrogations of Venice and
the Renaissance suggest a strategy. Drawing upon Heidegger’s idea of the
Renaissance as ushering in the modern era of ‘repraesentatio’, or the world as
image, Tafuri argued that the turn from Medieval to Early Modern involved

188 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007

 Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice

8. Manfredo Tafuri, Venezia e il rinascimento:

religione, scienza, architettura (Einaudi: Turin,
1985) p. XVIII; Venice and the Renaissance, trans.
Jessica Levine, (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology: Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. x.

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Fig. 2. Martino Rota after Titian, Death of St Peter Martyr, engraving ca. 1560, 37  27 cm.
London, British Museum. (Photo: # Copyright the Trustees of The British Museum.)

a move towards apprehension of the world through more pervasive forms of

representation.8 The image came to stand in for the world, thereby affording
a measure of control, as well as potential release from anxieties. Once
deposited in the world, representations do not remain sealed off from what
they describe, rather they displace and erase by substituting their own
reality. Tafuri’s argument differs from the traditional notion that art develops
as a process of adapting earlier artistic models – or as Gombrich put it, of
‘schema and correction’ – in its insistence that manifold representations,
not just those conventionally labelled art, constitute a world. Tafuri stressed
the role of cartography, architecture, perspective and the new military arts
as key forms of representation in sixteenth-century Venice.
From the start of his career Titian was acutely aware of stylistic choice and
driven by an ambition to rival the most successful artists of his time, notably
Raphael and Michelangelo. Soon he was aiming at the international market of
the courtly elites of Europe. In this context of self-aware artistry, reflection

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007 189

Paul Hills
of contemporary experience, needs and fears was bound to be mediated, never
direct. In Titian’s paintings, I will argue, it is detectable as it were in flickers
at the margins and in an insistent undertone, a distant drum-beat. Varnish and
oil-paint are flammable substances, more volatile than egg-tempera. In
Renaissance Venice, a city at the cutting edge of pharmacy and industrial
processes of transmuting by distilling or by applying heat, the creative
possibilities of this volatility were being explored. In this context fieriness
engages the medium and subject of paint; it belongs to both tenor and
substance as an energising, animating presence, embodied and loosed within
the brushwork. It extends the locus of expression of fear or arousal beyond
the body into the wider pictorial field.
The military arts – volatile and explosive – emphasised by Tafuri as key
new forms of representation, are crucial here, but so also is the urban
experience of fire and the shared sense of fear it provoked. As in any
pre-modern city, in Venice the threat of conflagration was a constant
source of anxiety. The presence of water did little to mitigate the dangers
of fire spreading through the dense urban tissue of narrow streets or calle.9
From Alberti onwards theorists pointed out that one of the virtues of the
architecture of the Ancients was that it was built to endure.10 Buildings in
stone, with stone vaults and stone staircases could withstand fire better
than buildings in wood and brick. In the second half of the fifteenth
century many of the wooden buildings of Venice were indeed rebuilt, but
owing to the instability of the site and expense of bringing stone from afar,
stone vaults were hardly ever constructed and timber remained the
essential element supporting floors and binding the buildings.11
Renaissance Venice remained a tinder-box. The elaborate, top-heavy
chimney-pots, designed to trap sparks, that catch the eye in the canvases of
Carpaccio are one sign of Venetian anxiety about fire. Such fear was hardly
surprising since the Venetians suffered many awesome fires.12 The Arsenal
with its industrial furnaces, sulphur and saltpetre mills, and munitions
depots was a constant flashpoint; an explosion in 1509 was so fierce that
sulphurous sparks were showered all over the city and stones hailed down as
far from the Arsenal as San Marco.13 In the 1570s the heart of the Republic,
the Doge’s Palace, was twice ravaged by fires that destroyed masterpieces of
Venetian art and scorched the consciousness of patrons and artists alike. All
the major painters – Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese – lost works, many of
them only recently painted.14 Theorists of the myth of the Serenissima
might boast about the Virgin City never violated by a foreign power, yet
how often was it ravaged by an enemy from within, the scourge of fire?
The most traumatic fire of the sixteenth century broke out on a bitterly cold
night in January 1514. Marin Sanudo’s eye-witness account fills ten
double-column pages of the printed edition of his diary. To convey the
horror of the disaster, which laid waste the Rialto and its market, the
business hub of the Republic, the diarist interrupted his reporting to
compare the fire to two calamities of war, one in the mythological memory,
the Fall of Troy, the other in recent experience, the Sack of the of Padua in
1509.15 As Venetians – so often educated at the University of Padua –
were well aware, Padua claimed the Trojan Antenor as its founder, therefore
Sanudo’s association of the two events was hardly fortuitous.
The Fall of Troy was the most mythologised burning of a city in history.
Some even claimed that the burning of Troy was the primordial disaster
that unleashed plague.16 Giorgione’s patrons, who acquired paintings such
as Aeneas carrying Anchises from the inferno of Troy, may well have
190 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007
9. cf. Paolo Preto, ‘Le grandi pauri di Venezia
nel secondo cinquecento: le paure naturali
(peste, carestie, incendi, terremoti)’, in
V. Branca and C. Ossola (eds), Crisi e
rinnovamento nel-autunno del Rinascimento a
Venezia (Olschki: Florence, 1991), pp. 177–92.
10. Leon Battista Alberti’s discussion of the
degree to which building stones could withstand
fire is in book 2, chapters 8 and 9 of Giovanni
Orlandi (ed.), De re aedificatoria (Polifilo: Milan,
1966).
11. For documentation on the rebuilding see
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A. Wyrobisz, ‘L’attività edilizia a Venezia nel
XIV e XV secolo’, Studi Veneziani, vol. 7, 1965,
pp. 303–43; also John McAndrew, Venetian
Architecture of the Early Renaissance (Massachusetts
Institute of Technology: Cambridge, MA,
1980).
12. In 1483 a wing of the Doge’s Palace and
part of San Marco was destroyed by fire, see
Francesco Sansovino, Venezia città nobilissima et
singolare, ed. G. Martinioni, (Steffano Curti:
Venice, 1663), p. 584; fire devastated much of
the Scuola Grande di San Marco in 1485; in
1505 the German warehouse, the Fondaco dei
Tedeschi, was burnt down. For a fuller list of
sixteenth-century fires see Preto, ‘Le grandi
pauri . . .’, p. 188.
13. Mighty explosions accompanied by fires
occurred in the Arsenal in 1476, 1509, 1522
and 1569; for the 1509 fire see B.Bressan (ed.),
Lettere storiche di Luigi da Porto (Florence, 1857)
no. 13, pp. 50–53; the 1569 fire provoked
extensive commentary, including Sansonvino,
p. 608, and Coryate, p. 221.
14. On the vicissitudes of the early cycles in
the Doge’s Palace see P. Fortini Brown,
Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio
(Yale University Press: New Haven, CT,
1988), pp. 272 – 9, and for the later work,
W. Wolters, Der Bilderschmuck des Dogenpalastes
(Wiesbaden, 1983).
15. R. Fulin and others (eds), I Diarii
(Visentini: Venice, 1879–1903), vol. 17, col.
459–74.
16. Enrico Guidoni, ‘Giorgione e la peste.
La venere di Dresda’, in Ricerche su Giorgione e
sulla pittura del Rinascimento (Kappa: Rome,
1998), pp. 51 –64, presents evidence of
association between fire and plague, though he
over extends his interpretation.

17. For the performance in 1502 see Raimondo
Guarino, Teatro e mutamenti. Rinascimento
e spettacolo at Venezia (Il Mulino: Bologna), 1995,
p. 131.
18. For overviews of military developments see
Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military
Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500– 1800
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
1988); for representations see John Hale, Artists
and Warfare in the Renaissance (Yale University
Press: New Haven, CT, 1990).
19. The Allegory is attributed to Cariani, see
J. Martineau and C. Hope (eds), The Genius of
Venice (Royal Academy: London, 1983), cat. 26;
Renaissance Venice and the North, p. 430. For
Bonifazio see Genius of Venice, cat. 14; Renaissance
Venice and the North, pp. 452–53.
20. See Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of
Fire, trans., A.C.M. Ross (Beacon Books:
London, 1964), especially chapter 4,
‘Sexualized Fire’.
21. Luigi da Porto, Lettere storiche, ed.
Bartolommeo Bressan (Florence, 1857), no. 13,
p. 52. For portents see Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy
and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton
University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1990),
especially pp. 53–5, and p. 117 for prophecy
concerning fire.
22. Guidoni, ‘Giorgione e la peste . . .’,
associates it with the burning of the Fondaco dei
Tedeschi in 1505: though Marcantonio’s
Venetian sojourn pre-dates the 1509 explosion
in the Arsenal, an explosion or a fire on Murano
seems a more likely trigger. For the Dream see
Brown, Renaissance Venice, p. 440, cat. 114, who
convincingly plays down the debts to Bosch.
Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice
witnessed the scenes from the Trojan War which were enacted in the Great
Council Chamber.17 Not surprisingly, it was in the period of the Italian Wars
(1495 –1527), when advances in the technology of gunpowder and fire-arms
magnified the incendiary character of warfare, that the ancient metaphor ‘the
flames of war’ became all-pervasive.18 Already before the Sack of Rome by
the troops of the Emperor Charles V, burning cities became pre-eminent
symbols of destruction, awesome signs of God’s wrath. Contemporary
disaster is foreshadowed in Biblical apocalypse. In an Allegory of a Venetian
Victory a city burns to represent War, and in Bonifazio’ de Pitati’s canvas
of Lot and his Daughters, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, seen across a
space of water, are consumed by fire from heaven.19 The story of Sodom
and Gomorrah was, of course, an archetypal myth that fuelled the
association of lust and fire.20
Conflagrations mocked the dignity of man, and by striking cities threatened
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the very order in which civic humanists of the fifteenth century had put their
trust. In the next century writers discerned in fire not only a warlike muse,
but an awesome sign. Typically, one Venetian interpreted the explosion in
the Arsenal of 1509 as a dismal augury, associating it with such portents as
comets in the sky and the entry of wolves into Vicenza.21 When calamities
were laden with portent, it is easy to imagine how a fire in the Arsenal or
in the furnaces on Murano could act as trigger for an image such as
Marcantonio Raimondi’s Dream of Raphael (Fig. 3).22 This print is not an
illustration of such an event, but is redolent of the feverish auguries
circulating during Marcantonio’s sojourn on the lagoon. The explosions
in the buildings beyond the water are matched by convulsions of the
women lying on the shore. Together they evoke a world disturbed by
dreams. If the semantic inscrutability here is troubling, it is redolent of a
time of anxiety when portents were never plain and meanings often obscure.
Commenting on the fire in the Rialto, Sanudo found a happy omen in the
miraculous manner that San Giacomo al Rialto, although close to the heart
Fig. 3. Marcantonio Raimondi, Dream of Raphael, engraving 231  330 mm. Vienna Albertina
(www.albertina.at). (Photo: Albertina, Wien.)
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007 191
Paul Hills

of the fire, escaped without serious damage. For the patriotic diarist, the fact
that the little church, deemed the oldest Christian foundation in Venice, was
spared by the flames was a sign of divine providence. Sanudo’s identification of
23. See Genius of Venice, cat. 79. For paintings of
an omen, together with his association of the fire with the Sack of Padua and the the Doge’s Palace fire see Wolters,
Fall of Troy, exemplifies how fire, passing through consciousness into written Bilderschmuck, p. 29, n. 3.
representation, became denatured, metaphorical, a sign. Yet neither the fire in 24. See Lucia Nuti, ‘The Mapped Views of
the Rialto, nor those in the Doge’s Palace, gave rise to representations by Georg Hoefnagel: the Merchant’s Eye, the
major painters. An exception is the canvas of the Fire in the Palazzo Ducale of Humanist’s Eye’, Word and Image, 4 (1988),
1577, attributed to the Flanders-born Lodewijk Toeput, known in Italy as pp. 545–70; Gert Jan van der Sman, ‘Print
Publishing in Venice in the Second Half of the
Pozzoserrato, which was probably based on the print by another northerner, Sixteenth Century’, Print Quarterly, 16, 2000,
Joris Hoefnagel.23 Typically it was artists from north of the Alps, especially pp. 235–47; Michael Bury, The Print in Italy
printmakers, who were expanding the market for maps and topical views of 1550–1620 (British Museum: London, 2001).
foreign places.24 In earlier sixteenth-century Venice, pictorial reporting was
hardly on the patrons’ agenda, nor were painters at liberty to follow their

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own enthusiasms. Instead, in contrast to the developing print-culture, Titian
generalised from the experience of fire, imbuing it with an elusive
metaphorical significance by incorporating it into the mise-en-scène of his
commissions. Two paintings, one for home consumption, one for foreign
eyes, exemplify this.
To my knowledge no-one has explained why a conflagration blazes on the
lagoon in the background of the portrait of Doge Francesco Venier (Fig. 4),

Fig. 4. Titian, Doge Francesco Venier, 1555, oil on canvas, 113  119 cm. Madrid,
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, no. 405. (Photo: Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza.)

192 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007


25. Miguel Falomir (ed.), Tiziano (Museo del
Prado: Madrid, 2003), cat. 45. Falomir points out
that Venier’s gesture, ‘with the palm of the right
hand facing downwards, derives from Roman
court iconography and was taken up by emperors
to signify authority and good conscience’. He
further observes ‘a burning fortress in the middle
of a lagoon’ is ‘an inappropriate image for the
pacifist policies implemented by Venier’ (English
translation, p. 398).
26. Tiziano, ed. Falomir, cat. 46.
27. Panofsky, Problems in Titian: mostly
Iconographic (Phaidon: London, 1969), pp. 50–
51, is unconvincing. For comments on this
painting as an example of Titian’s rendering of
spiritus see Paul Hills, ‘Cuerpo y espı́ritu en el arte
de Tiziano’, in Tiziano y el legado veneciano (Galaxia
Gutenberg: Barcelona, 2005), pp. 173–90.
Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice
since no great fire was recorded in his short dogate of 1554 –1556.
Exceptionally, the portrait includes a view through a window and this
exterior world of wind-filled sail and smoke-filled air is linked to the
person of the doge through his raised hand. It is an image of solicitous
care. How fast conflagrations spread depended upon the direction of the
wind. Here, then, the billowing sail and the plume of smoke may stand as
indexical signs of the forces of wind and fire that the maritime republic,
guided by the doge, needed to harness and control.25
While Venier’s portrait was for home consumption, another painting lit
up by fire was intended for foreign eyes. This was the canvas of St Margaret
(Fig. 5), in which a burning city is seen across the waters of a lagoon by
night, that Titian most probably despatched to the sister of Charles V, Mary
of Hungary.26 Despite Panofsky’s best efforts, iconographers have failed to
explain what a burning city has to do with the legend of St Margaret.27
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Instead the painting is marked by an uncertainty of meaning, a destabilising
that extends from the macro-structure of the composition through to the
micro-structure of the brush-marks, loosely spaced in a flux hovering over
Fig. 5. Titian, St Margaret, Prado, ca. 1555, oil on canvas, 209  184 cm. Madrid, Museo
Nacional del Prado, no. 445. (Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado.)
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007 193
Paul Hills
the canvas. Rather than turning to hagiography, it is more plausible to
interpret the phantasmal flaming city in the light of Dante’s references to
the spectacle of fire in the Venetian arsenal and his description of the view
across water of the burning city of Dis.28 In his Inferno the poet compared
the boiling pitch of Hell to working with pitch in the Venetian Arsenal,
a simile which was read more as a compliment than a slur, boosting the
Arsenal’s attraction as a top sight for visitors to Venice.29 Dante was
a master of describing the stages of coming to know through an extended
process of sensory perception involving deceptions of vision and
hallucinations. Titian’s open handling of oil-paint induces in the viewer a
comparable extension, a period of irresolution or semantic uncertainty. As
the eye lingers and roams over this space, the mind is given time to
recognise the signs of authorial presence in the painterly facture. In this
light, Titian’s canvas may be interpreted as a missive to a distant and
discerning patron, both as an example of the skill of his brush, and of
the awesome spectacle of fire for which the lagoon city was renowned.
Venice’s most famous painter was exporting a sign of himself and of his
adopted city.
Accounts of fires on the lagoon show how events were overlaid with
mythic or prophetic interpretation already at the moment of eye-witness
reporting. While of course Venice had no monopoly on conflagrations,
what is distinctive on the lagoon is that fear of fire was balanced by eager
embrace of its creative power; or – as Dante perceived – infernal fires
give rise to wonder. Positive technologies of fire were an enduring feature
of the Serenissima. Travellers to the lagoon were impressed by the
beautiful white wax of the candles produced by Venetian chandlers.30
A white candle was one of the dogal insignia, and like Byzantine emperors,
the Venetian Doge was preceded by a candle-bearer in processions, and
offering candles was central to Venetian religious and civic rituals.31 The
Scuole Grandi were distinguished by candles of different colours, and the
large double candles, the doppiere, feature as a constant and substantial
item in Scuole spending, carried in daylight and darkness in processions
and funerals.32 Though by no means peculiar to Venice, the doppiere
were conspicuous in its rituals, and Venetians spent lavishly on all manner
of candles, votive lamps and torches. In his accounts of Good Friday
ceremonies in Venetian parishes Sanudo mentions time and again the great
lamps or lights and the many torches affixed to floats or carried in
procession to the sepulchres.33 Jacopo Tintoretto, more than Titian,
responded to these rituals, especially in Christ Washing His Disciples’ Feet, in
which double candles often feature.34 An altarpiece of Christ Carried to the
Tomb, where two women stand within the sepulchre holding great flaming
candles, may have been prompted by these sacred representations.35
Of all the key forms of world-making singled out by Tafuri, it is the new
military arts that may most profitably be set in relation to painting. If
the period of the Italian wars induced a sense of political crisis, it was the
new military arts that had the potential to explode the artistic language in
which the contained body was the prime bearer of meaning and source of
action.36 Titian’s career frequently brought him into contact with soldiers
and those involved with the technologies of war. The painter’s own father,
Gregorio Vecellio, who may well be identified as the man in armour in
the portrait in the Ambrosiana, served as captain of the Pieve centuria or
militia.37 The mountains of Cadore were rich in metallic ores, and
Gregorio later became an inspector of iron mines. Francesco Vecellio,
194 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007
28. This idea has recently been reiterated in
Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting
(Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 2005),
p. 122. For Dante’s vision of Dis see Inferno
canto viii, esp. lines 67–78.
29. Canto xxi, lines 7– 18.
30. See M. Newett (ed.), Canon Pietro Casola’s
Pilgrimage (Manchester University Press:
Manchester, 1907) and Thomas Coryate, Coryat’s
Crudities, 1611, and many subsequent editions.
31. Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance
Venice (Princeton University Press: Princeton,
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NJ, 1981) describes the use of candles on many
ritual occasions, pp. 84 –5, 88, 104, 109, 191,
217–18, 223.
32. The Carità had red candles, San Giovanni
Evangelista yellow, the Misericordia green, San
Marco white and San Rocco ‘beretin’, the
colour of undyed wool. The candles are
conspicuous in Gentile Bellini’s Procession in
Piazza San Marco, Accademia Gallery, Venice.
33. See for example Sanudo’s entry for 22 April
1519, Diari, vol. 27, col. 194.
34. For example in the Washing of the Feet in the
National Gallery, London, and in the workshop
version in Santo Stefano in Venice. In
Tintoretto’s Last Supper in San Simeone Piccolo,
Venice, a chandelier with thirteen candles
burning hangs over the table, while behind a
turbaned figure enters the room bearing a large
candle. A candle burns in the darkness at the
centre of Tintoretto’s San Rocco amongst the
Plague-stricken in the church of San Rocco; again,
a single lit candle is conspicuous amongst the
liturgical vessels placed in the foreground of the
Assumption of the Virgin in the Gesuiti, Venice.
Candles are carried like votive gifts in the
Tintoretto’s paintings of the Presentation of Christ
in the Temple in the Carmini and the Accademia
in Venice. Titian preferred antique lamps and
blazing torches to candles: one exception is the
Ecce Homo in St Louis, Missouri, where the
figure on the left holds a doppiera: for colour
plate see D. Jaffé (ed.), Titian (National Gallery:
London, 2003) cat. 41.
35. From San Francesco della Vigna, now in the
National Gallery of Scotland: see The Age of
Titian (National Galleries of Scotland:
Edinburgh, 2004), cat. 66, pp. 180–83.
36. For comments on the Italian Wars and
artistic crisis see Jill Burke, ‘Meaning and Crisis
in the Early Sixteenth Century: Interpreting
Leonardo’s Lion’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 29,
no. 2, 2006, pp. 77–91, especially p. 90.
37. Harold Wethey, The Paintings of Titian,
vol. 2, The Portraits (Phaidon: London, 1987),
cat. 109, pp. 146–7.

38. Charles Hope, ‘Titian’s Life and Times’, in
Jaffé (ed.), Titian, p. 11.
39. The relief is in the Hermitage,
St Petersburg: see Il Camerino di alabastro: Antonio
Lombardo e la scultura all’antica, ed. Matteo
Ceriana (Silvana: Milan, 2004), cat. 2, p. 138.
40. The Dosso is in the Galleria Estense,
Modena; see Jane Bridgeman and Karen Watts,
‘Armour, weapons and dress in four paintings by
Dosso Dossi’, Apollo, vol. 151, no. 456,
February 2000, pp. 20–27; and Titien, Le pouvoir
en face (Musée du Luxembourg: Paris, 2006), cat.
22, pp. 124–5. A. Bayer, ‘Dosso’s Public: the
Este Court at Ferrara’, in Dosso Dossi. Court Painter
in Renaissance Ferrara (The Metropolitan Museum,
New York, 1999), pp. 27–54, gives an account of
Alfonso’s interest in casting and in artillery.
Titian’s portrait is known from what is probably a
copy in the Metropolitan Museum: New York:
see Federico Zeri with Elizabeth E. Gardner,
Italian Paintings. A Catalogue of the Collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Venetian School,
(The Metropolitan Museum: New York, 1973),
pp. 82–3; for another copy or variant see Titien,
Le pouvoir . . ., cat. 21, pp. 122–23.
41. Wethey, Portraits, cat. 103, p. 143; Titien,
Le pouvoir. . ., cat. 35, p. 150.
42. Wim Blockmans, Emperor Charles V
1500–1558 (Arnold: London, 2002) p. 150;
the increasing size of armies also affected the
visualisation of battle; at the siege of Metz in 1552
‘Charles V commanded about 55,000 men and 150
guns’. Blockmans gives a useful round-up of the
many exhibitions celebrating the fifth centenary of
Charles V in 2000. Fernando Checa, Carlos V: La
imagen del poder en el renacimiento (Ediciones El Viso:
Madrid, 1999), illustrates, in Fig. 92, Sebald
Beham’s print of 1532, ‘Military display to
celebrate the entry of Charles V into Munich in
1530’, with rows of cannon prominently featured.
For image management see Peter Burke,
‘Presenting and representing Charles V’, in Hugo
Soly (ed.), Charles V 1500–1558 and his Time
(Mercatorfonds: Antwerp, 1999), pp. 393–476.
43. Both the drawing in the Louvre and the
engraving after the picture are reproduced in
Charles Hope, Titian, (Jupiter: London, 1980),
Figs 45 and 46.
44. Vasari, Le vite, ed. G. Milanesi (Sansoni:
Florence, 1906), vol. 7, p. 439, ‘fece una battaglia
e furia di soldati che combattono, mentre una
terribile pioggia cade dal cielo: la quale opera,
tolta tutta dal vivo, è tenuta la migliore di quante
storie sono in quella sala, e la più bella’.
45. See Hale, Artists and Warfare, for the
plenitude of depictions of warfare north of the
Alps and the paucity of them in Italy; for the
Albertian mode of High Renaissance depictions
see pp. 157–67.
Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice
Titian’s brother, who had worked as his assistant in 1511, for a time gave up
painting to become a soldier.38
Many of Titian’s most influential patrons were aficionados of the new arts
of war. Exploitation of these arts required resources: cannon founding was
expensive and manning artillery depended upon skilled bombardiers,
therefore the deployment of cannon, though deemed beyond the pale in
traditional codes of chivalry, soon became a sign of status. Alfonso d’Este,
Duke of Ferrara, ploughed funds into cannon-foundries, witnessed casting
and took a close personal interest in the evolving technology of gunpowder
and artillery; he adopted a smouldering grenade as a personal device.
Fittingly, one of the reliefs that Antonio Lombardo carved for Alfonso was
The Forge of Vulcan.39 Dosso Dossi portrayed him on the field of battle,
surrounded by heavy artillery in action, and Titian showed him standing
proud beside a cannon’s mouth.40 Significantly, it was Titian’s image of
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power which Alfonso ceded to the Emperor Charles V in return for
political favours. While in Augsburg, at the behest of Charles, Titian
painted the emperor’s commander of artillery, the Venetian general,
Gabriele Tadino. Titian alluded to Tadino’s expertise in artillery by
including a row of field-guns in the background of the portrait.41 Charles V
himself, Titian’s most powerful patron, waged war for twenty-three years
of his reign and deployed artillery as a vital component of his huge armies.
From 1535 onwards Charles personally commanded his forces in battle: it
is hardly surprising that his pictorial iconography played up his image as
warrior emperor, a true Caesar.42
In 1538, the year that Titian painted Charles’s artillery commander, he
finally completed the Battle of Spoleto for the Doge’s Palace. If this
enormous canvas had survived the fires in the palace we would be more
vividly aware of how warfare shaped Titian’s pictorial imagination. The
preparatory drawing in the Louvre shows that Titian knew the celebrated
battle scenes planned for the Palazzo Vecchio by Leonardo and
Michelangelo, but in the finished work, as recorded in the engraving by
Giulio Sanuto, the melée was transformed by being set in a towering
panorama.43 In a canvas which must have been nearly 6 m in height, a
field-cannon dominates the lower right, while the bodies of the individual
actors are caught up in a maelstrom of cloud and smoke billowing between
mountains and cliffs. Vasari described the picture as ‘all taken from life’,
and mentions the soldiers fighting ‘while a terrible rain falls from
heaven’.44 In such an expansive scene the heroic body is no longer the
only source of action and energy, no longer the sole mover of the
narrative; instead Titian advances beyond his sources towards a new
conception of battle. There are precedents in painting north of the Alps,
but Vasari’s mention of ‘the terrible rain’ that falls from heaven points to
the novelty of the Battle of Spoleto in a context still dominated by the
Albertian conception of historia as the choreographed combat of selected
figures.45
The spectacle of war and the spectacle of pageantry marched in step.
The Venetians became the pre-eminent specialists in what a later age will
term ‘son e lumière’. With every flame and every firework mirrored by
water, the city lent itself to nocturnal illumination, and the gunfire of its
navy, technologically the most advanced in Europe, provided resounding
accompaniment. A German friar who passed through Venice in the 1480s
was bowled over by the festive entries, with bonfires on church towers,
fireworks and setting fire to the worn-out sails so that they boats blazed
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007 195
Paul Hills
across the lagoon.46 In Brescia, a city under Venetian rule noted for
the casting of cannon and armour, Sanudo was impressed by a joust
by torchlight in which the crests of the helmets of the jousters burst
into flame.47 In 1500 the Scuola dei Bombardieri, which included
cannon-founders as well as bombardiers, was founded in Venice, and over
the course of the new century artillery salvoes played an ever louder part
in festive entries, mock battles and celebrations.48 Benedetto Agnello,
Mantuan ambassador and intermediary between Titian and the Duke of
Mantua, witnessed a mock naval battle staged on rafts on the Grand
Canal, where a castle was stormed ‘by means of artificial fire’ and, once
captured, ‘an infinite number of rounds of artillery were discharged in
the Piazza of the Palace’ to summon guests to the feast.49 Military parades
and spectacles such as this are closer to the modern notion of simulacra as
duplications than to strictly mimetic representations, and as duplications
they reinforce Tafuri’s argument that new forms of representation
constitute their own reality in the Early Modern world.50 When all the
world’s a stage, the distinction between reality and representation is
confounded.
Venice was a singularly nocturnal city. Visitors record their excitement
at parties that went on late into the night. On her visit in 1493, Beatrice
d’Este Duchess of Milan wrote to her husband of staying up late and her
amazement at the ‘hundred lighted torches’ that hung from the ceiling of
the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge’s palace.51 Characteristically,
the allegory performed before the Duchess climaxed in pyrotechnics:
all the figures, Beatrice records, ‘danced round Justice, and after dancing
for a while, their spheres exploded, and out of the flames, an ox, a lion,
an adder, and a Moor’s head suddenly appeared, and all these danced
together round the figure of Justice’.52 Throughout the next century
there are many testimonials to the exceptional artifice and splendour of
nocturnal festivals on the lagoon. Monumental pyramids, illuminated or
decked out with fireworks, and capable of revolving, became a Venetian
tour-de-force. Francesco Sansovino described such a pyramid in the
courtyard of the Doge’s Palace in 1557, where the fireworks burned for
three hours and ‘the fury of their rays’ dazzled the eyes.53 To celebrate
the victory of Lepanto in 1571, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was illuminated
with torches, music was played and fireworks let off for three nights
in succession.54 On the occasion of the visit of Henry III in 1574 a
wooden construction set in the Grand Canal gave such an explosive show
of flames and fireworks that Francesco Sansovino likened it to Mount Etna
erupting.55
Titian did not witness the battle of Lepanto, or – as far as I know – any
other battle, but he would have seen in the course of his long life many
celebrations, parades and mock battles. Such performances, transforming
the distant chaos of war into an image presented in the very heart of
civic space, are the most vivid example of a world-making practice that
characterises the ‘era of representation’. For Titian they mediated between
experience and picture-making. As a painter he can hardly have felt a
complete distaste for battle-scenes, since in 1560 he suggested to Philip II
that he paint the victories of Charles V.56 The offer was not followed up,
but later Philip commissioned him to commemorate the twin events of the
victory of Lepanto and the birth of the Infante Ferdinand, with a result
(Fig. 6) that shows how the fireworks and artillery displays on the lagoon
fed Titian’s imagination. The emperor holds up his new-born heir while
196 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007
46. Felix Faber’s account is cited by Patricia
Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the
Age of Carpaccio (Yale University Press: New
Haven, CT, 1988) p. 166, from C. D. Hassler
(ed.), Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et
Egypti (Stuttgart, 1843), vol. 4, p. 433.
47. In 1497 in honour of Caterina Cornaro,
Queen of Cyprus: Diari, I, 741.
48. The statute book, Capitolari or Mariegola
(of 1539) is in the Correr Library, Cl. IV, 166.
For the role of the Scuola dei Bomabardieri in
casting and firing artillery, in making
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gunpowder and artificial fire, see M. E. Mallett
and J. R. Hale, The Military Organization of a
Renaissance State: Venice c.1400– 1617
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, MA,
1984), p. 403. Beatrice d’ Este was thrilled by
the salvoes which greeted her on state visit to
Venice in 1493: Julia Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este,
Duchess of Milan (Dent: London, 1905), p. 191.
49. In 1530, see David Chambers and
Brian Pullan (eds), Venice: A Documentary
History, 1450–1630 (Blackwell: Oxford 1992),
pp. 381–82; also David Chambers, ‘Benedetto
Agnello, Mantuan Ambassador in Venice, 1530–
56’, in War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice:
Essays in honour of John Hale’ (Hambledon Press:
London and Rio Grande, 1993), pp. 129–46.
50. See Michael Camille, ‘Simulacrum’, in
Critical Terms for Art History, eds R. Nelson
and R. Shiff, 2nd edn (University of Chicago:
Chicago, IL, 2003), pp. 35 –48.
51. Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, p. 202.
52. Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, p. 201.
53. Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et
singolare, ed. G. Martinoni (Stefano Curti:
Venice, 1663), p. 414. For another example see
E. H. Gombrich, ‘Celebrations in Venice of the
Holy League and of the Victory of Lepanto’, in
Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art presented to
Anthony Blunt (Phaidon: London, 1967), p. 67.
54. Gombrich, p. 63. For illumination of the
palaces on the Grand Canal for the visit of
Henry III three years later, see Giambattista
Lorenzi, Monumenti per servire alla storia del
Palazzo Ducale di Venezia (Venice, 1868),
p. 396, doc. 808.
55. Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare,
p. 447: ‘si presentò in mezzo del canale, uno
edificio grande di legno, pieno di fuochi
artificiati, & datoli fuoco, parve che si aprisse il
monte Etna, & che da ogni parte fulminasse’.
56. This had been overlooked until pointed out
in Tiziano, ed. Falomir, p. 393, referring to
Annie Cloulas, ‘Documents concernant Titien
conserves aux Archives de Simancas’, Me´langes
de la Casa de Velázquez, 3 (1967), p. 244.
 Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice

57. As noted by Miguel Falomir in Tiziano,

cat. 61.
58. In 1537 Nicolo Tartaglia, a Brescian living
in Venice, published his Scientia nuova, in Book
V of which he discussed explosive materials.
Though essentially concerned with artillery and
ballistics, Tartaglia stresses the varied uses of
‘diverse specie di fuochi’. He amplified this
material in his Quesiti et inventioni diverse,
Venice, 1554. See J.R. Hale, ‘Industria del libro
e cultura militare a Venezia nel Rinascimento’,
in G. Aranaldi and M.P. Stocchi (eds), Storia
della Cultura Veneta, vol. 3/II (Neri Pozza:

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Vicenza, 1980), pp. 245–88. For Tartaglia see
Carlo Maccagni, ‘Le scienze nello studio di
Padova e nel Veneto’, in Storia della Cultura
Veneta, 3/III, pp. 163–66.

Fig. 6. Titian, Philip II offering the Infante Don Ferdinand to Heaven, 1573 – 5, oil on canvas,
35  274 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, no. 431. (Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado.)

an angel flies down bearing a victor’s palm and a banderole inscribed Maiora
tibi, in reference to the greater triumphs that Philip hoped would await his
child – hence the odd conjunction of baby prince and the explosions of
the naval battle behind. Although this baptism by fire couples rather
incongruously the heroism invested in the body with explosive forces that
transcend human agency, its juxtaposition of inner ardour and outer
conflagration is very much of its time. Contemporaries rated the picture
more highly than later critics and powerful patrons were quick to
commission replicas and variants.57
Fireworks were a spin-off from the military exploitation of gunpowder. In
sixteenth-century texts fuochi – literally ‘fires’ – covers all manner of flaming
lights, torches or explosive devices, as well as fuochi artificiali, or fireworks.
From the 1530s the Venetian presses printed numerous treatises on explosive
materials, and readership for this material steadily grew.58 In 1572 an
entrepreneurial Venetian editor with an eye for the popular market,
Girolamo Ruscelli, published a compilation that gives an idea of how the
pyrotechnics of Renaissance weaponry had become one of the marvels of

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007 197

Paul Hills

the age. It contains a copious number of recipes for explosive mixtures of

saltpetre and other materials; some will ignite when it rains, others will
burn on water; Greek fire, which sticks to the body and will not be
extinguished by water, described as a terrifying novelty at the Sack of
Padua, is explained by Ruscelli.59 He describes many varieties of fiery
missiles from flaming arrows to cannon balls – some of which are
illustrated by simple woodcuts. He tells how to make torches for fighting
by night that will illuminate the enemy but leave your own position under
cover of darkness, and how to make torches which will burn in wind and
rain.60 Of one mixture he vouches that it will make all kinds of fuochi, and
especially those for festivals, ‘because they make a very beautiful effect’.61
Among the illustrations are flaming arrows, and arrows with a cylinder
of incendiary powder attached to their shaft (Fig. 7). Contemplating
Veronese’s Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto (Fig. 8), it is easy to assume

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there is a split between two conventions of pictorial reality or vraisemblable,
between the historical battle on the sea on the one hand and the vision

Fig. 7. Incendiary arrows, woodcut illus-

tration to Girolamo Ruscelli, Precetti della
militia moderna, Venice 1572, p. 54.

59. Precetti della militia moderna, tanto per mare,

quanto per terra. Luigi da Porto describes Greek
fire at Padua in P. Bressan (ed.), Lettere storiche
(Florence, 1857), pp. 122–23.
60. Precetti, 33.
61. Precetti, 32v.

Fig. 8. Veronese, Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto, ca. 1572, oil on canvas, 169  137 cm.
Venice, Gallerie dell’ Accademia. (Photo: Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.)

198 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007


62. It has been translated as The Pirotechnia of
Vannoccio Biringuccio, ed. C.S. Smith
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
Cambridge, MA, 1942). ‘Concerning the
location of ores’ is in the Preface to Book I;
distillation is in Book IX, chapter 2; colours and
pigments in Book I, chapters 7–12; glass in
Book II, chapter 14; the quotation is from
Smith, p. 131.
63. Published in Basle in 1556, but largely
complete by 1550. The description of Murano
glassmaking is at the end of Book XII; quoted
here from the translation by H.C. Hoover,
New York, 1912, p. 592.
64. Giuseppe Campori, ‘Tiziano e gli Estensi’,
Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti, series 1,
vol. 27 (Florence: 1874), p. 589.
65. See The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art
from Scottish Collections (National Gallery of
Scotland: Edinburgh, 2004), cat. 130, p. 285
(entry by Michael Bury).
66. D’Eliq, The Poetics of Titian’s Religious
Paintings (Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, 2005), pp.107–14.
67. For a wide-ranging discussion of this
altarpiece see Daniela Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und
Farbe – Körperlichkeit und Materialität in den
Gemälden Tizians (Edition Imorde: Berlin,
2002), pp. 25 –62, and for details of the
commission. D. Bohde, ‘Titian’s Three-Altar
Project in the Venetian Church of San Salvador:
Strategies of Self-representation by members of
the Scuola Grande di San Rocco’, Renaissance
Studies, 15, no. 4, 2001, pp. 450– 72. For the
painterly facture see Paul Hills, ‘Titian’s Veils’,
Art History, vol. 29, no. 5 (November 2006),
pp. 770–95, esp. pp. 783–5.
68. For the symbolism see David Rosand,
‘Titian’s Light as Form and Symbol’, Art
Bulletin, 57 (1975), pp. 58 –64.
Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice
of divine aid afforded to the Venetians on the other, whereas Ruscelli’s
illustrations suggest that the flaming arrows hurled by Veronese’s angels
were indeed similar to those used at the time.
The most scientific treatise about fire of the sixteenth century, Vannoccio
Biringuccio’s On Pyrotechnics, was published in Venice in 1540. Born in Siena,
Biringuccio was employed by Alfonso d’Este before serving the Venetian
Republic in the 1530s. In his celebrated treatise he describes the trial of
metals and casting of cannon, as well as the pharmaceutical techniques of
distillation and sublimation. He devotes a chapter to fireworks and several
to colours and pigments. Of all the products of the technology of fire,
his greatest praise is saved for the glass of Murano. ‘It seems to me’,
he writes, ‘that all metals must give way to glass in beauty’.62 That
admiration was shared by the most notable scholar of metallurgy, Georg
Baur, known as Agricola, the German who spent two years in Venice
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studying its furnaces and methods of smelting. In his De re metallica he
stressed that the excellence of Venetian glass ‘does not consist solely in
the material from which it is made, but also in the melting’.63 In short,
the celebrated transparency of Murano glass depended as much upon
control of the furnace as the constitution of the raw materials: mastery of
fire was the secret of transmuting matter into art.
From his house at Biri Grande, Titian looked north across the lagoon to
Murano. He would certainly have been familiar with its glassworks and
furnaces: for Alfonso d’Este he acted as an intermediary, providing designs
for vessels to the glass-makers.64 In 1536 he was commissioned to paint an
Annunciation for the nuns of Santa Maria degli Angeli on Murano. In
the event, the altarpiece never reached its intended destination since the
nuns refused to pay Titian’s price, and the painter presented it to the
Hapsburgs. The painting has been lost, but the contemporary engraving of
it by Caraglio shows that Titian conceived of the Annunciation as a drama
in which a host of angels rend the dark clouds to reveal the blazing light of
heaven.65 Una Roman D’Elia has pointed to the parallels between this and
Pietro Aretino’s literary description of the Annunciation in terms of a
cosmic drama of supernatural light, fire, rays and sparks.66
The furnace as womb or crucible of creation cannot have been far from
Titian’s mind when, nearly twenty-five years later, he returned to the
theme of the Annunciation in an incandescent painting which explicitly
united imagery of fire and glass (Fig. 9). In the words of the commission,
the artist was to deliver ‘an altarpiece of the Incarnation of Our Lord’.67
Just as fire converts matter into spirit, so here, in an atmosphere of
explosive friction, the mystery of the Incarnation or begetting of the Son
of Man, is conceived as a spark that will trigger the golds, reds and
browns to smoulder into flame. Such an intuitive reading is reinforced by a
detail we only notice once the painting has started to stimulate what I am
tempted to call our ‘thermo-tactile’ sense: in the right-hand corner of the
painting, in place of the traditional lily, there is a branch supported in a
glass carafe of water. Its leaves are bursting into flame. Beneath it can
faintly be discerned the inscription, IGNIS ARDENS ET NON COMBURENS,
‘the fire that burns and does not consume’. These words refer to the
burning bush out of which God spoke to the young Moses.68 Ordinarily a
mortal would not be able to survive so complete a possession by the fire of
divine love, but, like the bush, the virgin burns with its ardour and is not
consumed. Titian had long delighted to display the crystal clarity of
Venetian glass, as in the ewer of wine held aloft in the Bacchanal of
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007 199
Paul Hills

69. For parallels between Titian’s late style and

the development of ice-glass see Paul Hills,
‘Venetian glass and Renaissance self-fashioning’,
in Francis Ames-Lewis and Mary Rogers (eds),
Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art (Ashgate:
Aldershot, 1998), pp. 163–78.

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Fig. 9. Titian, Annunciation, ca. 1560, oil on canvas, 403  235 cm. Venice, San Salvatore.
(Photo: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Veneziano.)

the Andrians, or the carafe of water in the Diana and Actaeon, where the
transparency and lustre of glass seems like an emblem of vision itself.69 In
the altarpiece of the Incarnation in San Salvatore, the Virgin is a pure
vessel, and like a glass goes through the fire and is not consumed.

200 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007


70. Bachelard, Chapter 1. For the conversion of
Titian’s painting of Tityus into Cort’s engraving
entitled Prometheus see Olga Raggio, ‘The
Myth of Prometheus’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, vol. 21, 1958, pp. 44 –62.
71. Book II, chapter 1.
72. For phantasm in Aristotelian and later
philosophy see Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas:
Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans.
R.L. Martinez (University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, 1993).
73. Translated by George Bull (Penguin:
Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 340–41; from
Book IV, lxix, ‘Che dolce fiamma, che incendio
suave creder si dee che sia quello, che nasce dal
fonte della suprema e vera bellezza! . . . e però,
come il foco materiale affina l’oro, cosı̀ questo
foco santissimo nelle anime distrugge e consuma
ciò che v’è di mortale e vivifica e fa bella quella
parte celeste . . . Questa è il rogo nel quale
scrivono i poeti esser arso Ercule nella summità
del monte Oeta e per tal incendio dopo morte
esser restate divino ed immortale; questo è lo
ardente rubo di Mosé, le lingue dipartite di
foco, l’infiammato carro di Elia . . .’.
Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice
This painting reveals with blazing power how readily Titian’s art moves
from the literal description of fire to an all pervasive metaphorical affect.
An undertone of sexual energy that runs through so much imagery of fire
registers here as the mighty Gabriel bears down upon the Virgin with an
intrusive force akin to that of Tarquin entering the chamber of Lucretia –
a subject that Titian painted several times in his later years. Students of
angelic sexuality will note that the heavenly host above are segregated by
gender, naked male putti above Gabriel, girlish, slightly older angels above
Mary. This confrontation of masculine and feminine, in the heavens and on
the earth, brings a flush of excitement to the Christian mystery.
Myths about fire, especially the story of Prometheus, well known to the
educated elite, suggest that fire is linked to our most primitive feelings about
sexuality and power relations between fathers and children.70 Prometheus
steals a spark of fire from Zeus by hiding it in a stem of fennel – and fennel
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was symbolic of the genitals. Fire is a potent symbol because it manifests
contraries. Fire signals danger and provokes desire. Fire offers welcome
warmth to us warm-blooded creatures; it cooks our food. As Vitruvius
described it, the hearth fire in bringing men together in fellowship is the
very origin of society.71 Yet at the same time fire can utterly destroy.
The terrible energy of fire, by turns destructive and creative, lends
expressive intensity to the paintings by Titian that have been examined
here. In one work, commissioned by Brescia – the city within the
Venetian terrafirma noted for its foundries – he tackled the creative –
destructive antithesis head-on. Ironically, the canvas was itself burnt, but
the composition, known through Cort’s dramatic engraving (Fig. 10),
shows how he conceived of the Cyclops at the Forge of Vulcan as an awesome
spectacle. Significantly, Titian exhibited the canvas in Venice before it was
delivered to Brescia. Vulcan’s forge is emblematic of the creative power
of the artist, the site of heroic effort and fearful spectacle. As so often in
Titian’s art, spectacular effect becomes emotive affect. Phantasmal,
irreducible to figurative narrative, the fieriness holds judgment in suspense
and prolongs wonder; as an excess or efflorescence in the brushwork this
fieriness renders emotive affect sensible.72 Impossible to locate in the
delineation of form or the governing design, what Vasari termed disegno,
this fieriness is a general diffusion, emanating like heat from the painting.
Fire as trope had long been a staple of poetic discourse. In Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier the final encomium to divine love, delivered by Pietro
Bembo, is couched in tropes of fire:
What sweet flame, what ravishing (suave) fire must we believe that to be which springs from
the source of supreme and true beauty . . . And thus, just as material fire refines gold, so this
most sacred fire consumes and destroys everything that is mortal in our souls and quickens
and beautifies the celestial part . . . This is the pyre on which the poets write that Hercules
was burned on the summit of Mount Oeta and through whose fire he became divine and
immortal after death; this is the burning bush of Moses, the parted tongues of fire, the fiery
chariot of Elias . . .73.
The same Bembo – whose portrait Titian painted – in his sonnets elaborated
upon Petrarchan antitheses of fire and ice. By the mid-sixteenth century fire
imagery was running wild through Italian poetry, always as metaphor for the
passion of love. Giraldi Cintio’s collection of poems entitled Le fiamme, was
published in Venice in 1547. Fuoco, fiamme, faville, scintille became key
words. The Accademia degli Infiammati flourished in Padua. In Catholic
devotional texts the ruling metaphor shifted from illumination towards
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Paul Hills

74. Michel Foucault, in Madness and Civilization

(Tavistock: London, 1967), pp. 108–109,
discusses how ‘dazzlement’ and the opposition
of night to day rules in seventeenth century
imagery, but fails to note sixteenth-century
precedents.
75. D’Elia, Poetics, p. 69, citing Giovan Battista
Giraldi Cintio, Discorsi . . . intorno al comporre dei
romanzi, delle comedie, e delle tragedie, e di altre
maniere di poesie (Giolitti: Venice, 1554),
pp. 221, 285.

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Fig. 10. Cornelius Cort after Titian, The Cyclops at the Forge of Vulcan, 1572, engraving, Vienna
Albertina (www.albertina.at). (Photo: Albertina, Wien.)

ardour: the emphasis is no longer on the shared light of grace, source of clarity
and understanding, but on fire that is private. It is a fire that does not expel the
darkness, but dazzles and blinds; fire that consumes matter and converts it into
spirit.74
Titian’s Martyrdom of St Lawrence (Fig. 11), completed in 1557, belongs to
this culture of ardent piety. In this altarpiece fire is emblematic of danger and
desire. Pagan soldiers and stokers cower and shrink from its terrible heat,
but for the Christian Lawrence, martyred upon his bed of fire, it is a
consummation devoutly to be wished, so that – as the Golden Legend
relates – he requested his executioners turn him over and grill him on the
other side. Titian borrowed figurative elements from Baccio Bandinelli’s
engraving, but departed from his Florentine source by staging the scene by
night, doubtless to accentuate fire. Recently, as d’Elia has pointed out,
a sixteenth-century writer on tragedy, Giraldi Cintio (the poet of
Le fiamme), ‘translated Aristotle’s “fear and pity” as “terror” or “horror”
and pity, and argued that this horror was pleasurable’.75 Like the flaming
city in the canvas of St Margaret, the fire in the Martyrdom of St Lawrence
provokes in the beholder the blend of terror and pity that Cintio admired.
If the spectacle of fire evokes terror and pity in a Renaissance version of
Aristotelian tragedy, it also draws appropriately upon the study of the
antique. Titian’s altarpiece was begun shortly after he visited Rome in
1545, and the statue of Vesta and the flaming torches are based upon

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 Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice

76. Panofsky, Problems in Titian, pp. 53– 7.

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Fig. 11. Titian, Martyrdom of St Lawrence, ca. 1548 – 57, oil on canvas, 493  277 cm. Venice,
Church of Gesuiti. (Photo: # Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.)

archaeological study.76 From this time onwards the imagery of fire in Titian’s
religious paintings brings together antique sources in the service of the
Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation. Ever since Mantegna, artists in
Italy had become connoisseurs of scenes of ancient sacrifice with fires upon
altars or blazing candelabra: now, in the period of the Council of Trent,
renewed Catholic insistence on the sacrificial nature of the mass again
drew attention to Christ’s sacrifice as replacement of the burnt offerings of
the pagans. Aquinas’s teaching, that the physical fire of the altar in

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.2 2007 203

Paul Hills

Hebrew sacrifice was a pre-figuration of the true presence of the divine fire of
the Holy Spirit in Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross and in the Eucharist, was
emphasised once more.77
77. This teaching became familiar throughout
Christ Crowned with Thorns (Fig. 1) belongs to this moment when the the Catholic world thanks to Aquinas’s
sacrificial fires of Hebrew, antique and Christian traditions were associated compilation of the Feast of Corpus Christi.
within Catholic culture. Left in Titian’s studio at his death, the painting This argument is treated at greater length in
Paul Hills, ‘Tintoretto’s Fire’, in P. Rossi and
evokes horror and pity. A grand and wildly guttering chandelier places the L. Puppi (eds), Jacopo Tintoretto del quarto
macabre spectacle in the courtyard of the praetorium of the Roman centenario della morte (Il Poligrafo: Padua, 1996),
procurator of Judaea. The spiritual implications of this crown of flame, pp. 267–71.
beacon in the darkness, upwardly mobile in contrast to the downward 78. The Dream of Scipio, xvii.
pressure of the staves that impress the crown of thorns on the suffering
79. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 8, p. 284.
king, hardly need underlining. None of the actors acknowledge the
spectator, and in some mysterious way the chandelier becomes the light of
consciousness and eye of heaven. In antiquity the sun as a sign of celestial

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consciousness or the eye of heaven was commonly invoked: Cicero in the
Dream of Scipio referred to the sun as the world’s mind or mens mundi, and
Ovid in the Metamorphoses wrote of it as the mundi oculus, and in
sixteenth-century literature the invocation of the sun as the all-seeing eye
of heaven was enjoying renewed currency.78 It was also in Venice at
mid-century that the feat was achieved of creating a theatrical simulacrum
for the sun itself. In his account of his staging of Pietro Aretino’s La
Talanta, Vasari described how lamps, placed within great globes of glass,
were moved across the painted sky to represent the passage of time.79 At
the moment when the heliocentric cosmology was beginning to penetrate
the consciousness of the educated elite, a theatrical equivalent for the orb
of fire at the centre of the universe had been created – and not without
the employment of Venetian glass. This move exemplifies Tafuri’s point
about the enlarged scope of Early-Modern representations to stand in for
the world.
Taken singly, none of the aspects of fire discussed here are peculiar to
sixteenth-century Venice. What is unique to the lagoon city is the particular
concatenation of artistic traditions, a manner of handling oil paint, military
expertise in artillery and gunpowder, creative understanding of foundries and
furnaces, a highly developed culture of theatre and spectacle, particular
religious rituals made vivid through devotion to locality, and a unique
physical environment lending itself to the juxtaposition of fire and water.
Viewed in this light, it is apparent that Venetian colorito – a manner of
handling oil-paint that lends dynamism to colour and dissolves the boundaries
of forms – is not merely the theoretical antithesis to Tuscan disegno, but has
manifold roots within the culture of making, representing and doing battle in
the Republic of Venice. This is the culture that shaped Titian’s fire and
conditioned the world of its reception.

I would like to thank Maria Loh and Patricia Rubin for their helpful comments on
drafts of this paper. Uschi Payne’s assistance in obtaining illustrations has been
invaluable.

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