Telesio, Bernardino
(1509-1588) Italian natural philosopher
Telesio was born at Cosenza and was educated by his uncle who taught him Greek, thus enabling him to make direct contact with Greek scientific writings. He studied at Padua where he became disillusioned with contemporary ARISTOTELIANISM, influenced as it was by Arabic interpretations. After he left Padua he spent some years developing his own views, which amount to a return to the authentic opinions of Aristotle. In 1565 he published his first book, De rerum natura iuxta propria principia, a work that he continued to expand and that reached its final form in 1586. In 1566 he founded the Academia Telesiana, a scientific society. He died at Cosenza.
Telesio believed that sense is the only basis for speculation about nature. His importance lies in his use of Aristotelian concepts to present an essentially physical explanation of natural phenomena. His system depends on two active natures, heat and cold, and an inert mass on which the two natures react. Telesio also introduced approaches to space and time that in some ways foreshadowed Newtonian physics. He numbered CAMPANELLA and Giordano BRUNO among his followers.
Tempesta, Antonio
(1555-1630) Italian engraver, painter, and etcher
Tempesta trained in his native Florence under Jan van der STRAET and also assisted VASARI on the decorative schemes for the Palazzo Vecchio. For much of his life, however, he was based in Rome, where he contributed to the decoration of several palaces, including the Vatican, and of the Villa Farnese at Caprarola. His prints, mainly of hunting and battle scenes, were widely disseminated and copied by other artists.
Tempio Malatestiano
The "temple" of Sigismondo MALATESTA at Rimini. Conceived by Sigismondo as a temple dedicated to the arts and philosophy and as a monument to himself and his third wife, Isotta degli Atti, the Tempio is a remodeling of the 13th-century Gothic church of San Francesco. The interior was begun in 1450 by Mat-teo de’ PASTI, whose work obliterated earlier frescoes by GIOTTO. Chapels were built for Sigismondo and Isotta, with reliefs, notably, of the Arts and Sciences by AGOSTINO DI DUCCIO and a fresco (1451) by PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA that depicts Sigismondo kneeling before St. Sigismund. The exterior is the work of ALBERTI, who designed a classical shell to encase the earlier building. The structure is based on the motif of the Roman triumphal arch, inspired by the arch of Augustus nearby, and was to be surmounted by a dome. Because of his conflict with Pope Pius II, Sigis-mondo abandoned work on the Tempio in 1460.
Ten of War (Italian dieci di liberty et pace)
The Florentine council concerned with the conduct of diplomacy and warfare. It was accountable to the signoria but had considerable freedom in the way it arranged embassies and ran the military establishment. MACHIAVELLI was its secretary for 14 years (1498-1512), and his correspondence from this period gives a detailed picture of the Ten’s operations.
Terence (Publius Terentius Afer)
(195/185-159 bce) Roman comic playwright
An African-born slave, Terence was received into the cultivated Roman circle of Scipio Aemilianus, to whose taste his plays catered. The plays number six, with four of them being adaptations from the Greek comedy of Menander. Terence was much admired by later Roman writers for the purity of his style, and he similarly appealed to Renaissance pedagogues who recommended his plays for school reading and acting. Although he used much the same material as PLAUTUS, Terence’s sentiments are generally more refined, affording, as Renaissance educationists saw it, moral edification as well as stylistic benefit to students.
Teresa of Avila, St. (Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada)
(1515-1582) Spanish Carmelite reformer and mystic
She was born near Avila and, already infused with a heightened religious enthusiasm at the age of seven, set off with her brother Rodrigo for Moorish territory to be beheaded for Christ. Her uncle stopped them. After her mother died she was placed in the Augustinian convent of Sta. Maria de Gracia in 1531. Her spiritual ardour finally compelled her to take up the religious habit and pursue an ascetic life. She entered a Carmelite nunnery in Avila in 1538 and later fell ill and was paralysed as a result of her self-deprivations. In 1554 she recorded her first visions and ecstatic union with God. She became an ardent reformer and in 1562 founded the Convent of the Incarnation of Discalced Carmelite nuns. In subsequent years she wrote The Way of Perfection as a guide for the nuns of her Avila convent and Meditations on the Canticle. In 1567 she and St. JOHN OF THE CROSS began founding other Discalced Carmelite monasteries. Their opponents, the Calced Carmelites, tried to deport her to New Spain but succeeded only in limiting her activities to Toledo. During this difficult time she wrote her most famous work, The Interior Castle. She died in Alba shortly after founding yet another Discalced Carmelite house at Burgos. In 1617 the Spanish cortes declared her "Patroness of Spain," and she was canonized in 1622, along with IGNATIUS LOYOLA, FRANCIS XAVIER, and PHILIP NERI.
St. Teresa of Avila represents, along with St. John of the Cross, the most intense mysticism of the COUNTER-REFORMATION. As a woman in 16th-century Spain, she was not educated in a formal sense, and her writings display a rustic style. Although historians commonly say that in her writings her rapturous religious fantasies are mixed with intense sensual and erotic sentiments, this assertion is exaggerated; in this respect her writings are more moderate than those of St. John of the Cross. The mystical enthusiasm of Teresa has been well captured by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s renowned sculpture St. Teresa in Ecstasy (164552; Sta. Maria della Vittoria, Rome).
Terza rima
A type of rhymed verse introduced by Dante in the DIVINE COMEDY. It consists of triplets of usually 11-syllable lines, the triplets being joined by a rima incatenata or linked rhyme having the pattern aba bcb cdc ded … etc. The chiusa or conclusion is a single line, e.g. … xyx yzy z. Perhaps derived from Provencal forms (sirventes) or from types of sonnet, terza rima acquires a powerful and obvious symbolic value in the Divine Comedy. It was later adapted to many different uses, including satire. PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, and in English CHAUCER, WYATT, DANIEL, Lord Byron, and P. B. Shelley all wrote poems in terza rima.
Teutonic Knights
A military religious order founded in the 12th century and originally attached to the German hospital of St. Mary in Jerusalem. In the 13 th century they were granted territory in eastern Germany from which to subdue Prussia, and with papal support, rapidly increased in wealth and numbers. From 1308 the order’s headquarters was Marienburg on the River Vistula. They protected the merchants of the HANSEATIC LEAGUE, who brought great prosperity to many towns in the Knights’ Baltic territories of Prussia and Livonia. Conflict with Poland brought the crushing defeat of the Knights at Tannenberg (1410) from which the order never wholly recovered, and under the peace of Torun (1466) Poland obtained west Prussia, confining the Knights to the east, which they held as a Polish fief. On their eastern frontiers they continued active into the 16th century against Russian encroachments but the growing nationalism of Poland-Lithuania effectively ended their territorial independence.
Theaters
The important Renaissance innovations in theater building occurred in 15th- and 16th-century Italy. Interest in the Roman plays of PLAUTUS and TERENCE led to the rise of the COMMEDIA ERUDITA; accompanying this was an interest in authentic classical staging. In 1414 the discovery at the monastery of St. Gall of VITRUVIUS’s De ar-chitectura, book five of which dealt with theater design, provided the classicizing stimulus to Italian innovators. The manuscript was printed without its illustrations in about 1486, with them in 1511, and in Italian translation in 1521. Vitruvius’s principles and his emphasis on symmetry, proportion, and acoustics were eagerly adapted, with varying results. A famous woodcut in an edition of Terence (1493) illustrates the imposition of classical style on earlier traditions of staging. (The theatrum (auditorium), placed above a ground storey of arches (fornices), had three tiers for spectactors who faced a proscenium (stage wall), which was divided by columns with curtains between them.) Periaktoi (or, later, telari), triangular devices at either side of the stage, the faces of which were painted with rudimentary scenes and revolved to indicate scene changes, were also adapted from the classical model and were increased in number and improved by Bastiano SANGALLO. LEONARDO DA VINCI was an early experimenter with painted scenery, producing a trompe l’oeil city scene for a performance of Baldassare Taccone’s Danae in 1496. Knowledge of perspective also vastly improved painted sets, a feature that much impressed CASTIGLIONE at the 1513 staging of BIBBIENA’s La calandria in Urbino.
By the early 16th century several temporary theaters had been constructed under the auspices of Italian courts from the Vitruvian model. Although Ferrara had led the way in classical performances (Plautus’s Menaechmi was staged by Duke Ercole d’Este in the palace courtyard in 1486), Vicenza became the center of theater construction. In the 1530s Sebastiano SERLIO built a classically inspired temporary theater for the Vicenzan Accademia Olimpica. He also recorded detailed plans for building a stage and auditorium in a banqueting hall (Regole generali di ar-chitettura, book 2); the stage sets behind the shallow playing area, were designed with pronounced perspective effects, and comedy, tragedy, and satire each had its own characteristic set—a street of palaces for tragedy, houses for comedy, and woodland for satire. PALLADIO, himself a member of the Accademia Olimpica, was commissioned to build the permanent theater. Based on Daniele BAR-BARO’s commentary on Vitruvius (1556), Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico, completed by SCAMOZZI, opened in 1585 with a performance of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. This was the culmination of neoclassical design, although, with its fixed scenery of a piazza and perspective streets, it proved to be dead-end and impractical for performances, even of Roman comedy. A far more flexible arrangement was that of the Teatro Farnese in Parma (1618; destroyed in World War II), built to designs by Giovanni Battista Aleotti (c. 1546-1636); there the proscenium arch and curtained stage made their appearance, with a U-shaped (instead of the previous semicircular) auditorium. Further developments, such as the horseshoe auditorium adopted for opera and ballet, belong to a somewhat later period.
As in other fields, Italian Renaissance experimentation was far in advance of the rest of Europe in responding to classical ideas. However, new theaters having their own national characteristics multiplied in the 16th century. The first permanent theater in Paris was a long narrow structure, the Theatre de l’Hotel de Bourgogne, in the rue Mauconseil. It was built in 1548 by the Confrerie de la Passion, a lay society dedicated to performing mysteres; after 1578 it was occasionally let to professional companies. Spanish and Elizabethan English stages remained open air. In Spain the typical stage was raised on scaffolding in a courtyard and surrounded by spectators on balconies or at windows. The unroofed London theaters, such as the Globe (c. 1599) and Swan (c. 1595), reflected a similar evolution from the performances of wandering players given in the yards of inns. Although the acting companies also used indoor theaters, such as that at Blackfriars. A famous sketch of the Swan made c. 1596 shows three tiers of galleries enclosing the courtyard at the back of which is the thatched three-story stage building with the stage projecting in front of it. The public playhouses of London were sited on the south bank of the River Thames among other venues for popular entertainment and attracted an audience from all social classes. This was partly because admission was very cheap for "groundlings" (those who were willing to stand in the area in front of and below the stage); those able and prepared to pay more sat in the galleries or even on stools on the stage.
Theater An Elizabethan theater in which spectators either sat in covered galleries or stood in the open pit. The 1996 replica of the original Globe Theatre in London (1598-1642) is virtually identical to this illustration, except that the galleries form a complete circle round the pit.
Theatine Order (Congregation of Clerks Regular of the Divine Providence)
A religious order founded in 1524 by Gaetano da Thiene (St. Cajetan) and Giampietro Caraffa, Bishop of Chieti (Theate), who later became Pope PAUL IV. Members were bound by vows and lived in common; they held no property, but were not mendicants, and they were distinguished from the secular clergy by their white socks. They engaged in pastoral work to combat heresy, were zealous promoters of the COUNTER-REFORMATION, and sought to remove abuses and to encourage piety in the life of the Church. The order spread from Italy to Spain and central Europe and from 1583 it included some nuns.
Thirty-nine Articles
A set of formulations in which the Anglican Church defined its position on various doctrinal questions. Such formulations had been sought from 1536 onward, but eventually it was Archbishop Matthew PARKER’s industry that led to a definitive text being established at the 1571 Convocation. Eschewing both Roman Catholicism and Anabaptist or Puritan extremes, the Articles, together with the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER and the Ordinal, elucidate the Church of England’s thinking on the main points that had split Christians during the 16th century. In doing so, they embody Anglicanism’s unique compromise between Catholic conservatism and Protestant innovation.
Tibaldi, Pellegrino
(1527-1596) Italian painter, sculptor, and architect
He was born at Puria di Valsolda, near Milan, and following his early training in Emilia, he lived in Rome (1549-53), where he was greatly influenced by DANIELE DA VOLTERRA and even more by MICHELANGELO. This is evident in such works as his Adoration of the Christ Child (1549; Galleria Borghese, Rome). He later worked in Bologna, where he built the Palazzo Poggi (now the university), decorating the Sala di Ulisse there (c. 1554) with illusionistic frescoes; he also designed and decorated a chapel in the church of San Giacomo Maggiore (c. 1555). In Milan in the 1560s and 1570s he was mainly involved in architecture, building the Jesuit church of San Fedele (begun 1569) and the round church of San Sebastiano (1576). In 1567 Cardinal (later St) CHARLES BORROMEO put him in charge of architectural and sculptural additions to Milan cathedral; Tibaldi designed several parts of the Duomo including the screen between the choir and ambulatory. In 1588 he went to Madrid to execute sculpture and paintings for Philip II in the ESCORIAL, only returning to Milan shortly before his death. The paintings of the liberal arts on the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the Escorial’s library, for instance, are his work. The same mannerist style which is found in his paintings is evident in the huge frescoes in the Escorial, in which he breaks down forms into geometric shapes. He was in part responsible for diffusing MANNERISM outside Rome.
Tinctoris, Johannes
(c. 1435-c. 1511) Franco-Flemish music theorist and composer
Born at Nivelles, he may have known Guillaume DUFAY while a singer at Cambrai in 1460. In 1463 Tinctoris was instructor of the choirboys at Orleans cathedral. Around 1472 he was appointed tutor to the daughter of the king of Naples and maintained connections with the court there for at least the next 15 years. Tinctoris composed some music, but is remembered as one of the most important music theorists of his day; he wrote 12 treatises, two of which were printed. The most important of these is his Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, the oldest printed music dictionary, in which 299 musical terms are defined. His other writings treat the aesthetics of music, its educational and therapeutic roles, and its use in religion, as well as composition and improvisation. His writings furnish great insight into the music of the Renaissance.
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti)
(1518-1594) Italian painter Born in Venice, where he spent most of his life, Tintoretto acquired his nickname (meaning "little dyer") by reference to his father’s trade as a dyer (tintore). Although few details of his life are known, Tintoretto was briefly (according to his 1642 biographer, Carlo Ridolfi) a pupil of TITIAN, from whom he certainly learnt much about the handling of color. He was also familiar—possibly through prints and engravings—with the works of MICHELANGELO from whom he inherited a deep interest in draftsmanship. Ridolfi is the source for the story that Tintoretto wrote up in his studio as his prescription for painting: "Il disegno di Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano." Tintoretto also apparently used wax and clay models, which he set in a box with a light in order to experiment with different lighting effects. His early paintings are notable for their daring use of color and unconventional groups of figures: among them are his masterly Last Supper (1547; San Marcuola) and St. Mark Reviving a Slave or The Miracle of the Slave (1548; Accademia, Venice), the latter being one of four commissioned by the Scuola di San Marco, the enthusiastic reception of which established Tintoretto’s fortunes.
Tintoretto was later influenced by Paolo VERONESE with whom he collaborated on the important commission for the decoration of the interior of the doge’s palace in Venice after the fire of 1577; there he executed the massive paintings of The Siege of Zara (1584-87) and Paradise (1588) and a portrait sequence of 72 doges, among numerous other paintings glorifying Venice. A deeply religious man, Tintoretto often worked for religious institutions, most notably the Scuola di San Rocco, for whom he painted an extensive cycle of wall and ceiling paintings (1565-87), including scenes from the Old and New Testaments, in which he demonstrated his skill in depicting different light effects and experimented with certain illusionistic devices.
Always a prolific artist, he completed the huge Crucifixion in the Sala dell’ Albergo there in 1565, and the decorative scheme for the Scuola and adjacent church comprise over 50 major paintings. The dramatic swooping flight of the angels and the startled Virgin in the Annunciation are just one example of Tintoretto’s ability to imbue familiar scenes with drama, and his manipulation of figures and chiaroscuro in these paintings mark him out as a leading artist in the mannerist mode. Tintoretto had learnt to paint rapidly as a young man while collaborating with SCHIAVONE on frescoes in the Palazzo Zen. In later years his sons Domenico and Marco and his daughter Marietta worked as his assistants. Other notable works include many portraits and the famous Susanna Bathing (c. 1550; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). The voluptuous Venetian nude exemplified in the figure of Susanna also found a place in several of Tintoretto’s paintings on mythological subjects, such as the Dresden Liberation of Arsinoe and the London Origin of the Milky Way. Tintoretto died of a fever and was buried in the church of the Madonna dell’ Orto, for which he had painted three of his greatest pictures, the virtuoso pyramidal composition of The Presentation of the Virgin, The Worship of the Golden Calf, and The Last Judgment.
Tirso de Molina (Gabriel Tellez)
(1583-1648) Spanish playwright
Very little is known for certain of Tirso’s early life. It has been argued that he was the illegitimate son of the duke of Osuna but there are serious objections to the theory. He studied at Alcala, became a Mercedarian friar (1601) and probably lived in Toledo (1605-15), where he may have written the first of some 400 plays, about 86 of which (some of doubtful ascription) are extant. He traveled extensively and after 1625, when he was reprimanded by the council of Castile for too frankly portraying vice on stage, abandoned the theater. He became official chronicler of his order in 1637, producing a recently discovered Histo-ria general de la orden de Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, and died as a prior of a Mercedarian monastery.
Five collections of his plays were published during his lifetime, as well as two miscellanies (1621, 1635) of tales, plays, and poems set in Decameron-like frameworks. The most distinguished disciple of Lope de VEGA, Tirso wrote comedies of intrigue and plays on historical and religious themes. A number of these are notable for the prominent roles given to women. His most popular intrigue comedy was El vergonzoso en palacio (The shy man in the palace; 1611); but he is now best known for two plays on theological issues of faith, the acceptance or refusal of grace, and salvation: El condenado por desconfiado and El burlador de Sevilla (both 1620s). The last introduced one of the most memorable of Spanish fictions, the story of the heartless seducer Don Juan Tenorio.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio)
(c. 1490-1576) Italian painter The old tradition that Titian attained the age of 99 is very doubtful, and his birth date is plausibly given by VASARI as around 1490. Titian was born in Pieve di Cadore and moved south to Venice at age nine to train as a painter. There he was taught by Gentile and Giovanni BELLINI and assisted GIORGIONE, by whom his early work was strongly influenced, with frescoes commissioned for the German merchants’ warehouse. He visited Padua in 1511 to paint frescoes in the Scuola del Santo and then returned to Venice where he executed a number of works that show him gradually moving beyond the Giorgionesque idiom. These include some celebrated half-lengths of beautiful women (the so-called Vanity in Munich and the Uffizi Flora among them), some accomplished portraits, the allegories of The Three Ages of Man (Edinburgh, Sutherland loan) and Sacred and Profane Love (Galleria Borghese, Rome), and the first of his great mythological pieces, The Worship of Venus (Prado, Madrid) and Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery, London). Also in this period he received his first major public commission: an Assumption of the Virgin for the high altar of Sta. Maria dei Frari, Venice (1516-18), a masterpiece of dramatic animation and vivid coloring. He also painted the Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro (1523) for the same church. Another early altarpiece (1522) is the Resurrection triptych, with its notable figure of St. Sebastian, in SS. Nazaro e Celso, Brescia.
In 1516 Titian had obtained the post of official painter to the Venetian Republic but that did not stop him from accepting commissions from Duke Alfonso d’Este of Fer-rara (1516), the Gonzagas in Mantua (1523), and the DELLA ROVERE FAMILY in Urbino (1532). He painted fine portraits for all of these, and his portrait (1535-38; Kress Collection, National Gallery, Washington) of Doge Andrea Gritti exemplifies Titian’s extraordinary ability to capture both the dignity and pathos of the old age of the powerful. In 1530 Titian was introduced to Emperor CHARLES V at Bologna, and his full-length portrait of the emperor with his hound (1532; Prado) ensured his appointment as court painter, with the title of count palatine (1533). Titian also painted several other portraits of Charles that are now lost, but two that have survived are those painted in Augsburg in 1548: an equestrian portrait commemorating Charles’s victory at MUHLBERG (Prado) and a full-length seated figure in black (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). On a second visit to Augsburg (1550-51), Titian was probably entrusted with the commission for the great devotional picture known as the Gloria or Trinity (1551-54; Prado), in which the emperor, wrapped in his winding sheet, kneels in adoration. The emperor’s sister, MARY OF HUNGARY, regent of the Netherlands, was also an enthusiastic collector of Titian’s work.
PHILIP II of Spain continued his father’s patronage of Titian. At the end of 1548 the artist traveled to Milan to meet the prince; one fruit of this first encounter may have been the Venus with Cupid and an Organist (Berlin), in which the organist appears to be a portrait of Philip. The famous series of erotic poesies (see POESY) for Philip was begun in the early 1550s with Danae (Prado). Titian was also invited to paint a Martyrdom of St. Laurence (1564-67) for the central altar of the church of the ESCO-RIAL. The Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto (1571-75; Prado) was the last of Titian’s works to be sent to Spain and shows how heavily the aged artist was by then relying upon his assistants.
Besides the pictures painted for his Hapsburg patrons and the ducal families of Italy, Titian continued to execute commissions for the Venetian Republic, including the lost Battle of Cadoro, completed in 1538, for the Sala del Gran Consiglio. Another of Titian’s patrons was Pope PAUL III, the first portrait of whom was painted in Bologna in 1543. In 1545 Titian traveled to Rome, where he met Michelangelo and painted another portrait of the pope, this time with his grandsons (1546; Museo Nazionale, Naples); the group poignantly captures the tension between the frail elderly pope, the scheming Ottavio, and the indifferent Alessandro (see FARNESE FAMILY). The charming portrait of two-year-old Clarice Strozzi (1542) shows a very different aspect of Titian’s abilities. In the 1550s he also painted several portraits of his daughter Lavinia and a self-portrait now in Berlin.
Although Titian’s output of portraits, and religious, mythological, and historical paintings was aided, particularly in his declining years, by numerous assistants in his Venetian studio—Vasari, who visited Titian in 1566, describes their practice—the quantity and quality of the work he produced throughout his long life is astonishing. His last painting was a Pietd (1576; Accademia, Venice) intended for his own tomb in the Frari. He left it unfinished and it was completed by PALMA GIOVANE.
