As their titles indicate, these two books—both of which originated as academic dissertations at the Universities of Munich and Rome respectively—cover much the same ground. Both provide detailed discussions of Titian’s association with Federico Gonzaga, marquis (later, first duke) of Mantua, from their first meeting in 1523 until Federico’s premature death in 1540. Both include appendices with transcriptions of more than 300 documents (and in the case of Lisa Zeitz, translations into German). Almost inevitably, both jackets are illustrated with Titian’s celebrated portrait of Federico, now in the Prado. Diane Bodart’s Tiziano e Federico II Gonzaga is the smaller in format, with fewer illustrations. Lisa Zeitz’s “Tizian, Teurer Freund…” is considerably more handsome than is customary in published German dissertations; and its ninety-nine black-and-white illustrations (plus twenty-three of the rectos and versos of coins and medals representing Federico) provide the more useful visual resource. Partly for this reason, and partly because it is the more recent, the present review will concentrate chiefly on Zeitz’s book.

The common subject of the two books is an important one. Like his mother Isabella d’Este and his uncle Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, Federico was one of the leading art patrons of his day. His patronage of Titian is all the more interesting since he succeeded in making it fruitfully complementary to that of his resident court artist, Giulio Romano, and also to that of another occasional visitor to Mantua, Correggio. Federico commissioned more than thirty pictures from Titian during their seventeen-year-long association, many of them supreme masterpieces, such as the Prado Portrait of Federico Gonzaga and the Louvre Madonna of the Rabbit and Saint Jerome. Also hugely admired in their day was the series of Eleven Caesars, painted for the Camera de’ Cesari in the Ducal Palace in 1536-38. The paintings were later sold to Charles I of England and then to Philip IV of Spain, but perished in the fire at the Alcázar in Madrid in 1734. While this series is recorded in painted, drawn, and engraved copies, many of Titian’s other pictures for Federico are lost without any visual record. It is some compensation for the historian, however, that the relations between artist and patron are so richly documented. Thus, in addition to chronicling the commissions for a succession of highly significant works of art, the extensive correspondence between Federico, his various agents, and Titian provides exceptionally detailed insight into the interests and motives of a major Renaissance patron, and into the ways in which the patron-client relationship operated to mutual benefit.

It is somewhat unfortunate, and particularly for Zeitz, that the preparation and publication of the two books should have coincided so closely. As she ruefully but generously admits in her opening pages, the earlier book by Bodart already provides an excellent account of Titian’s relations with Federico, based on a close familiarity with the documentation; and Bodart already came to many of the same conclusions. Both authors agree, for example, that the Prado portrait of Federico must date from 1529 (and not 1523, as argued by Harold Wethey). But Zeitz consoles herself by pointing to a number of features of her own book that distinguish it from that of Bodart, justifying it as a complementary publication. It contains, for example, a much more detailed discussion of the role of Aretino as an intermediary between Federico and Titian. Zeitz’s book also contains a much fuller account of the Eleven Caesars; indeed, her reconstruction of the dismembered decoration of the Camera de’ Cesari, a work of collaboration between Titian and Giulio Romano, will now provide the principal source of information on this major project. Zeitz is further right in claiming that she provides much more visual analysis than does Bodart of Titian’s pictures for Federico—although it has to be said that, as is often the case in German dissertations, her analysis sometimes degenerates into overlong description.

Zeitz also differs from Bodart in a number of her points of emphasis and conclusions. On the matter, for example, of when and where Titian painted his first portrait of Charles V, she follows Charles Hope in thinking that Titian’s original meeting with the emperor in Parma in October 1529 did not have any immediate result, and that the now-lost portrait, showing him in half length and in armor, was painted in Bologna early in 1533. Bodart, by contrast, argues that the portrait was executed in Parma three years earlier (indeed, the documents show that Federico summoned Titian from Venice for this very purpose), and that the reason why Charles rewarded the painter with the seemingly derisory tip of one ducat was perhaps that the work was commissioned and paid for by Federico, who regularly used works of art as valuable instruments of diplomacy. On the question of whether Titian’s Mary Magdalen in the Pitti is identifiable with the picture commissioned by Federico in 1531 as a gift for Vittoria Colonna, Zeitz is equivocal, whereas Bodart convincingly argues that the Pitti picture does not show the Magdalen “lacrimosa più che si puó” (as tearful as possible) and concludes that Vittoria’s picture is lost. On the other hand, Zeitz is surely right to insist on the extreme sensuousness of the Pitti picture, and to regard recent attempts to play up the moralizing aspect as misguided. Given the long tradition of self-identification of Gonzaga rulers with Julius Caesar, Zeitz probably is also right to interpret the Camera de’ Cesari primarily as a glorification of Federico himself rather than, as Bodart would have it, of the emperor.

Some of Zeitz’s other suggestions—for instance, that the subject of the Louvre Saint Jerome of 1531 was chosen to honor Federico’s brother Ercole, who had been appointed Cardinal in 1526—are somewhat tenuous (and surely the celestial body that glows so magically behind the dark tree trunks in the painting is not, as she claims, the sun but the moon). In the end, it has to be admitted that her book is somewhat disappointing in its lack of major discoveries in the form of fresh information, or even of radical new interpretations of existing material. But even without Bodart’s recent book, this is fairly well-charted art-historical territory, and one cannot fairly criticize the author for not coming up with results that are more dramatic. As it is, Zeitz deserves much credit for the meticulousness of her research and for assembling in a convenient form a body of material that will remain fundamental to our knowledge and understanding of this important episode in Renaissance art patronage.