Titian (c. 1487–1576)

Italian painter. He was one of the greatest artists of the High Renaissance. During his long career he was court painter to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and to his son, Philip II of Spain. He produced a vast number of portraits, religious paintings, and mythological scenes, including Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23; National Gallery, London) and Venus and Adonis (1554; Prado, Madrid).

The most famous of his early works are Flora (c. 1515; Uffizi, Florence), the so-called Sacred and Profane Love (c. 1516; Borghese, Rome), Man with a Glove (c. 1520; Louvre, Paris), and Christ and the Tribute Money (Gemäldegalerie Alter Meister, Dresden). After about 1518 his reputation rose rapidly, and the great religious works The Assumption of the Virgin (Church of the Frari, Venice) and The Entombment (Louvre, Paris) belong to this period. In 1533 he was introduced to the Emperor Charles V, who sat for his portrait. The admiration of Charles V and his successor, Philip II, for Titian accounts for the presence of so many of his masterpieces in the imperial collections and the Prado, Madrid. Titian was now internationally famous, and European rulers competed for his ‘poetical compositions’ or poesie (as he termed his mythological scenes with their sumptuous nude figures) and for his portraits.

He worked in a number of centres: in Venice, where in 1537 he painted his Battle of Cadore (destroyed by fire in 1577); in Milan, where in 1541 he was with the emperor; in Rome, in 1545, at the invitation of the pope; and in Augsburg, in 1548, where he painted Philip of Spain. From this time onwards he painted mainly in Venice, producing late works profound in feeling and characterized by remarkable developments in technique. He died of the plague; his son and assistant Orazio died in the same epidemic. Velázquez, Rubens, and Poussin are among the many great artists inspired by Titian's achievement.

Titian was born in Pieve di Cadore, in the Venetian Alps (from which his landscape backgrounds seem often to derive). When he was nine years old he was apprenticed to mosaicists in Venice, afterwards becoming the pupil of Giovanni Bellini, like Giorgione, with whom he worked. It is assumed that they collaborated 1507–08 on the decoration of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi (now destroyed). Titian seems to have finished pictures left incomplete at Giorgione's death 1510 (for example the Concert, Pitti Gallery, Florence, and the Sleeping Venus, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, which provided a model for Titian's Venus of Urbino 1538, Uffizi, Florence).

From the sensuous and poetic suggestion of Giorgione he quickly developed a personal style. His method was complex and deliberate. He laid cooler tones over a solid foundation of red earth colour, and applied films or glazes of transparent colour at intervals, sometimes softening the effect with a finger rather than the brush and adding crisp touches of definition. In this way he achieved his inimitable depth of colour and feeling of rich texture. In the style of his old age, a broken richness of colour and a preoccupation with effects of light might be called ‘Impressionist’.

His quality as a portrait painter is evident in many works, including the Portrait of a Man, formerly called Ariosto (National Gallery, London), Charles V (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), the portraits of his daughter Lavinia (as Salome, Prado; as Pomona, Berlin; also in the three-quarter-length in Vienna), and the magnificent self-portrait in old age (Prado).

Among his masterpieces of pictorial fable and nude painting are the three paintings intended for the palace of Alfonso I of Este at Ferrara, the Bacchus and Ariadne, the Bacchanal, and Worship of Venus (Prado); the several versions of Venus and Adonis (Prado; National Gallery, London; Metropolitan Museum, New York); and the Danaë (Prado and Naples). In addition to the religious subjects already mentioned, the Presentation in the Temple (Accademia, Venice) is superb in its concentration of dramatic effect. The Pietà (Accademia, Venice), left unfinished and completed by Palma Giovane (c. 1548–1628), has been well described as a ‘mournful hymn to Death’.