[161]
Nevertheless, Ridolfi's statement that Titian was born in 1477 is
commonly quoted as if there were no better and earlier evidence in
existence, and, indeed, it is a matter of surprise that conscientious
modern biographers have not looked more carefully at the original
authorities instead of being content to follow tradition, and I must
earnestly plead for a reconsideration of the question of Titian's age by
the future historians of Venetian painting.[162]
If, as I believe, Titian was born in or about 1489 instead of 1476-7,
it follows that he must have been Giorgione's junior by at least twelve
years--a most important deduction--and it also follows that he cannot
have produced any work of consequence before, say, 1505, at the age of
sixteen, and he will have died at eighty-seven and not in his hundredth
year. The alteration in date would help to explain the silence of all
records about him before 1511, when he would have been only twenty-two
and not thirty-five years old; it would fully account for his name not
being mentioned by Duerer in his famous letter of 1506, wherein he refers
to the painters of Venice, and it would equally account for the absence
of his name from the commission to paint the Fondaco frescoes in 1507-8,
for he would have been employed simply as Giorgione's young assistant.
The fact that in 1511 he signs himself simply "Io tician di Cador
Dpntore" and not _Maestro_ would be more intelligible in a young man of
twenty-two than in an accomplished master of thirty-five, and the
character of his letter addressed to the Senate in 1513 would be more
natural to an ambitious aspirant of twenty-four than to a man in his
maturity of thirty-seven.
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