Page - 5 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

5The Image—Or from Whom (Not?) to Buy a Second-Hand Car the habitual neutral or landscape background, here the protagonist is placed in a localized inner space, in a diagonal movement across the plane of the painting, actively inviting the observer to participate. The painting is moreover atypically crowded with attributes. So it is not surprising that the portrait has been often discussed in detail, mostly within the context of Titian’s late style. A principal reason why Titian’s portrait of Jacopo Strada has received so much critical attention is that it is often considered as a prime example of Titian’s gift of psychological penetration. In his book Portraits of the Renais- sance John Pope-Hennessy discusses it as such in a chapter entitled ‘The Motions of the Mind’, a title he borrowed from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s note- books. He discusses the Strada portrait in prose sufficiently magnificent to be quoted in full: To judge from the paintings he produced, Titian was gifted with a godlike view of the potentials of character and mind against which the individual before him was sized up. On only one occasion is his private reaction to a sitter set down in print. The victim was Jacopo Strada, a dealer in an- tiques, who was born at Mantua, allied himself with the Fuggers of Augs- burg, joined the court of the Emperor Maximilian ii, and in 1567 visited Venice in search of antiques for Albert, Duke of Bavaria. Titian, who had known him for some years, viewed him with unfeigned dislike. A pretentious humbug, he called him, one of the most solemn ig- noramuses that you could find. His success, Titian declared, was due to a capacity for flattery, and to the ‘tante carotte’ he had held out to the Ger- mans, who were too dense to realize his incompetence and his duplicity. In the painting Strada is shown bending obsequiously across a table, holding a marble statuette which he is displaying deferentially to some patron on the right. The significance of this motif would have been even more apparent than it is today when the picture was still free of the pompous cartouche in the upper right-hand corner which was added at Strada’s own request. The fur and sleeve are some of the most splendid passages in any Ti- tian portrait <…> but the features contrast with the splendour of dress; they are petty, and are stamped with guile and a particularly unattractive sort of eagerness. And there is no reason to suppose that the effect was anything but calculated.4 ‘To judge from the paintings he produced, Titian was gifted with a godlike view of the potentials of character and mind against which the individual before 4 Pope-Hennessy 1966, pp. 145–147.