Titian ( Tiziano Vecellio) (b Pieve di Cadore, c.1485; d Venice, 27 Aug. 1576). The greatest painter of the Venetian School and one of the supreme figures of world art. In the course of a very long and highly prolific career he dominated Venice's art during its golden age and also worked for many illustrious patrons outside the city; his paintings have had a profound and enduring influence on European art. Most of his career is well documented, but his early years are somewhat obscure and his date of birth has long been a subject of scholarly debate, for the evidence concerning it is contradictory; certainly he was very old when he died, although probably not quite as old as some accounts suggest (traditionally he lived to be 99).

He was probably a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, and in his early work he came under the spell of Giorgione, with whom he had a close relationship. In 1508 (the first secure point in his career) they collaborated on the external fresco decoration (destroyed) of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (German warehouse) in Venice, and after Giorgione's early death in 1510 Titian is said to have completed a number of paintings that his friend left unfinished. The authorship of certain works (some of them famous) is still disputed between them. Titian's first surviving works that can be precisely dated are three frescos on the life of St Antony of Padua in the Scuola del Santo, Padua (1511), noble and dignified paintings with an almost central Italian firmness and monumentality. Although they show impressive skill in handling fresco, he hardly ever used the medium again, working almost exclusively in oils. In the same year that these murals were painted, Sebastiano del Piombo left Venice for Rome, and with him gone and Giorgione dead, only the aged Bellini stood between Titian and supremacy. After Bellini died in 1516, he was virtually unchallenged as the leading painter in Venice until his own death 60 years later, although in his final decades he worked mainly for foreign patrons, allowing younger artists such as Tintoretto and Veronese to flourish in the domestic arena.

In the second decade of the century Titian moved away from Giorgione's dreamily romantic style and developed a much more robust manner of his own. There is still a good deal of Giorgione's enigmatic poetry in the allegorical Sacred and Profane Love (c.1514, Borghese Gal., Rome), but it is tempered by worldliness, and Titian's style soon became much more dynamic. This is seen particularly clearly in the work that more than any other stamped his authority in Venice—the huge altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18, S. Maria dei Frari, Venice). It is one of the largest pictures he ever painted and one of the greatest, matching the achievements of his most illustrious contemporaries in Rome in grandeur of form and surpassing them in splendour of colour. The soaring movement of the Virgin, rising from the closely packed group of Apostles towards the hovering figure of God the Father, looks forward to the Baroque.

Similar qualities are seen in Titian's two most famous altarpieces of the 1520s: the Virgin and Child with Saints and Members of the Pesaro Family (the Pesaro Altarpiece) (1519–26, S. Maria dei Frari), a bold diagonal composition of great magnificence, and the Death of St Peter Martyr (completed 1530), which he painted for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, having defeated Palma Vecchio and Pordenone in competition for the commission. The painting was destroyed by fire in 1867, but it is known through copies and engravings; trees and figures together form a violent centrifugal composition appropriate to the action, and Vasari described it as ‘the most celebrated, the greatest work…that Titian has ever done’. The young Titian had important secular as well as ecclesiastical commissions, notably a set of three mythological pictures (1518–23) for Alfonso d'Este, his first princely patron—the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal (both in the Prado, Madrid), and Bacchus and Ariadne (NG, London). He was also busy as a portraitist. Many of his early portraits are of unknown sitters, as with the exquisite Man with a Glove (c.1520, Louvre, Paris), but later he painted some of the most famous personalities of the day.

Titian's success brought him a substantial income and from 1531 he lived in a palatial house in Venice, with gardens overlooking the lagoon. In 1533 the Emperor Charles V (see Habsburg) appointed him court painter and elevated him to the rank of count palatine and knight of the Golden Spur. This was an unprecedented honour for a painter, and Ridolfi tells a revealing anecdote concerning the respect Titian was accorded even by the emperor himself: Titian dropped a brush and when Charles picked it up for him he protested, ‘Sire, I am not worthy of such a servant’, to which the emperor replied, ‘Titian is worthy to be served by Caesar.’ Although he had probably had a fairly basic education (he knew no Latin), he does indeed seem to have been at ease in the elevated society of his patrons; contemporary accounts say he was well mannered and a good conversationalist, and his best friend was the celebrated poet Pietro Aretino.

Titian had first met the emperor in 1530, when he was crowned in Bologna. Although he made several short visits such as this to towns in northern Italy, he was reluctant to journey far from Venice and he turned down Charles's invitation to go to Spain to paint portraits of the royal family. In the 1540s, however, he overcame his resistance to travelling long distances, visiting Rome in 1545–6 at the invitation of Pope Paul III ( Alessandro Farnese) and then Augsburg in Germany in 1548 to work at Charles's court. He returned to Augsburg in 1550–1. His work in Rome included a celebrated portrait of the pope with his grandsons, Cardinal Alessandro and Ottavio Farnese (Mus. di Capodimonte, Naples), and he brought with him a painting of Danaë (c.1544–5, Mus. di Capodimonte), previously commissioned by the cardinal. It is one of his most gloriously sensuous treatments of the female nude, and a papal legate writing to the cardinal in 1544 stressed its overtly erotic character by comparing it with Titian's own slightly earlier Venus of Urbino (1538, Uffizi, Florence): ‘the nude that Your Reverence saw…in the apartment of the Duke of Urbino [ Guidobaldo della Rovere] looks like a nun compared with this one.’ According to Vasari, Michelangelo praised the colouring of Danaë but found fault with the drawing. Titian's work in Augsburg included Charles V on Horseback (1548, Prado, Madrid), the largest and grandest of all his portraits.

The greatest patron of Titian's later career was Charles's son Philip II of Spain, whom he first met in 1549 in Milan. Initially Philip was unimpressed with Titian's work, finding his brushwork too broad, but he came to admire him above all other painters, and eventually—rather than commissioning specific works from him—he was content to accept whatever the master cared to send him. Like his father, Philip was intensely devout, and Titian's work for him included religious pictures as well as portraits. However, the most famous works he painted for him were a series of seven erotic mythological subjects (c.1550–c.1562) based (sometimes loosely) on Ovid's Metamorphoses: Danaë (a variant of the earlier picture for Cardinal Farnese) and Venus and Adonis (Prado), Perseus and Andromeda (Wallace Coll., London), the Rape of Europa (Gardner Mus., Boston), Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Calisto (Ellesmere Coll., on loan to NG of Scotland), and the Death of Actaeon (NG, London).

Titian referred to these pictures as poesie (poems), and they are indeed highly poetic visions of distant worlds, quite different from the sensual realities of his earlier mythological paintings. By this time his style had changed greatly from that of his youth, with an emphasis on inner feeling rather than external drama, his colours mellow and glowing rather than rich and resonant, and his brushwork loose and almost impressionistic. It has been argued that the extreme freedom of handling in some of his final works is a result of their being unfinished and perhaps partly a consequence of failing eyesight. The situation is complicated by the fact that in his later career Titian is known to have made extensive use of assistants, among them his brother Francesco Vecellio (c.1490–1559/60) and his son Orazio Vecellio (1525–76). Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Titian's final works include some of his most sublime creations, and his career ends with the awe-inspiring Pietà (c.1575–6, Accademia, Venice), which is said to have been intended for his own tomb and was evidently finished after his death by Palma Giovane.

Titian was recognized as a towering genius in his own time (Lomazzo described him as ‘the sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world’) and his reputation as one of the giants of art has never been seriously questioned (it has been commonplace for centuries to describe him as the greatest of all colourists). He was supreme in every major branch of painting practised in his time and his achievements were so varied—ranging from the joyous evocation of pagan antiquity in his early mythologies to the depths of tragedy in his late religious paintings—that he has been an inspiration to artists of very different character. Van Dyck, Poussin, Rubens, and Velázquez are among the painters who have particularly revered him. In many subjects he set patterns that were followed by generations of artists, particularly in portraiture; more than anyone else he was responsible for widening the scope of portraiture beyond the head-and-shoulders type that prevailed in the 15th century, not only by popularizing the half-length and the full-length, but also by varying his poses and introducing accessories such as a dog, a book, or a classical column. In technique he was just as influential, for he was the first to show the limitless expressive potential of oil paint, creating a vibrant pictorial surface in which the artist's personal ‘handwriting’ is evident in every touch of the brush. According to Palma Giovane, ‘in the final stages he worked more with his fingers than with his brush’, and Vasari wrote that his late works ‘are executed with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of colour, with the result that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect at a distance…The method he used is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, for it makes pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but it conceals the labour that has gone into them.’

Titian's greatness as an artist, it appears, was not matched by his character, for he was notoriously avaricious. In spite of his wealth and status, he claimed he was impoverished, and Erwin Panofsky comments that ‘his tax declaration of 1566…would land him in jail today’. However, he was lavish in his hospitality towards his friends, notably Pietro Aretino and the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino. These three were so close that they were known in Venice as the triumvirate, and they used their influence with their respective patrons to further each other's careers.

Titian ( Tiziano Vecellio) (c.1485–1576). The greatest painter of the Venetian School and one of the supreme figures of world art. In the course of a very long and highly prolific career he dominated Venice's art during its golden age and also worked for many illustrious patrons outside the city; his paintings have had a profound and enduring influence on European art. Most of his career is well documented, but his early years are somewhat obscure and his date of birth has long been a subject of scholarly debate, for the evidence concerning it is contradictory; certainly he was very old when he died, although probably not quite as old as some accounts suggest (traditionally he lived to be 99). He was probably a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, and in his early work he came under the spell of Giorgione, with whom he had a close relationship. In 1508 (the first secure point in his career) they collaborated on the external fresco decoration (destroyed) of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (German warehouse) in Venice, and after Giorgione's early death in 1510 Titian is said to have completed a number of paintings that his friend left unfinished. The authorship of certain works (some of them famous) is still disputed between them. Titian's first surviving works that can be precisely dated are three frescos on the life of St Antony of Padua in the Scuola del Santo, Padua (1511), noble and dignified paintings with an almost central Italian firmness and monumentality. Although they show impressive skill in handling fresco, he hardly ever used the medium again, working almost exclusively in oils. In the same year that these murals were painted Sebastiano del Piombo left Venice for Rome, and with him gone and Giorgione dead, only the aged Bellini stood between Titian and supremacy. After Bellini died in 1516, he was virtually unchallenged as the leading painter in Venice until his own death 60 years later, although in his final decades he worked mainly for foreign patrons, allowing younger artists such as Tintoretto and Veronese to flourish in the domestic arena.

In the second decade of the century Titian moved away from Giorgione's dreamily romantic style and developed a much more robust manner of his own. There is still a good deal of Giorgione's enigmatic poetry in the allegorical Sacred and Profane Love (c.1514, Borghese Gal., Rome), but it is tempered by worldliness, and Titian's style soon became much more dynamic. This is seen particularly clearly in the work that more than any other stamped his authority in Venice—the huge altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18, S. Maria dei Frari, Venice). It is one of the largest pictures he ever painted and one of the greatest, matching the achievements of his most illustrious contemporaries in Rome in grandeur of form and surpassing them in splendour of colour. The soaring movement of the Virgin, rising from the closely packed group of Apostles towards the hovering figure of God the Father, looks forward to the Baroque. Similar qualities are seen in Titian's two most famous altarpieces of the 1520s: the Virgin and Child with Saints and Members of the Pesaro Family (the Pesaro Altarpiece) (1519–26, S. Maria dei Frari), a bold diagonal composition of great magnificence, and the Death of St Peter Martyr (completed 1530), which he painted for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, having defeated Palma Vecchio and Pordenone in competition for the commission. The painting was destroyed by fire in 1867, but it is known through copies and engravings; trees and figures together form a violent centrifugal composition appropriate to the action, and Vasari described it as ‘the most celebrated, the greatest work … that Titian has ever done’. The young Titian had important secular as well as ecclesiastical commissions, notably a set of three mythological pictures (1518–23) for Alfonso d' Este, his first princely patron—the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal (both in the Prado, Madrid), and Bacchus and Ariadne (NG, London). He was also busy as a portraitist. Many of his early portraits are of unknown sitters, as with the exquisite Man with a Glove (c.1520, Louvre, Paris), but later he painted some of the most famous personalities of the day.

Titian's success brought him a substantial income and from 1531 he lived in a palatial house in Venice, with gardens overlooking the lagoon. In 1533 the emperor Charles V (see Habsburg) appointed him court painter and elevated him to the rank of count palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur. This was an unprecedented honour for a painter, and Ridolfi tells a revealing anecdote concerning the respect Titian was accorded even by the emperor himself: Titian dropped a brush and when Charles picked it up for him he protested ‘Sire, I am not worthy of such a servant’, to which the emperor replied ‘Titian is worthy to be served by Caesar.’ Although he had probably had a fairly basic education (he knew no Latin), he does indeed seem to have been at ease in the elevated society of his patrons; contemporary accounts say he was well-mannered and a good conversationalist, and his best friend was the celebrated poet Pietro Aretino. Titian had first met the emperor in 1530, when he was crowned in Bologna. Although he made several short visits such as this to towns in northern Italy, he was reluctant to journey far from Venice and he turned down Charles's invitation to go to Spain to paint portraits of the royal family. In the 1540s, however, he overcame his resistance to travelling long distances, visiting Rome in 1545–6 at the invitation of Pope Paul III ( Alessandro Farnese) and then Augsburg in Germany in 1548 to work at Charles's court. He returned to Augsburg in 1550–1. His work in Rome included a celebrated portrait of the pope with his grandsons, Cardinal Alessandro and Ottavio Farnese (Mus. di Capodimonte, Naples), and he brought with him a painting of Danaë (c.1544–5, Mus. di Capodimonte), previously commissioned by the cardinal. It is one of his most gloriously sensuous treatments of the female nude, and a papal legate writing to the cardinal in 1544 stressed its overtly erotic character by comparing it with Titian's own slightly earlier Venus of Urbino (1538, Uffizi, Florence): ‘the nude that Your Reverence saw … in the apartment of the Duke of Urbino [ Guidobaldo della Rovere] looks like a nun compared with this one.’According to Vasari, Michelangelo praised the colouring of Danaë but found fault with the drawing. Titian's work in Augsburg included Charles V on Horseback (1548, Prado, Madrid), the largest and grandest of all his portraits.

The greatest patron of Titian's later career was Charles's son, Philip II of Spain, whom he first met in 1549 in Milan. Initially Philip was unimpressed with Titian's work, finding his brushwork too broad, but he came to admire him above all other painters, and eventually—rather than commissioning specific works from him—he was content to accept whatever the master cared to send him. Like his father, Philip was intensely devout, and Titian's work for him included religious pictures as well as portraits. However, the most famous works he painted for him were a series of seven erotic mythological subjects (c.1550–c.1562) based (sometimes loosely) on Ovid's Metamorphoses: Danaë (a variant of the earlier picture for Cardinal Farnese) and Venus and Adonis (Prado), Perseus and Andromeda (Wallace Coll., London), the Rape of Europa (Gardner Mus., Boston), Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Calisto (Ellesmere Coll., on loan to NG of Scotland), and the Death of Actaeon (NG, London). Titian referred to these pictures as poesie (poems), and they are indeed highly poetic visions of distant worlds, quite different from the sensual realities of his earlier mythological paintings. By this time his style had changed greatly from that of his youth, with an emphasis on inner feeling rather than external drama, his colours mellow and glowing rather than rich and resonant, and his brushwork loose and almost impressionistic. It has been argued that the extreme freedom of handling in some of his final works is a result of their being unfinished and perhaps partly a consequence of failing eyesight. The situation is complicated by the fact that in his later career Titian is known to have made extensive use of assistants, among them his brother Francesco Vecellio (c.1490–1559/60) and his son Orazio Vecellio (1525–76). Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Titian's final works include some of his most sublime creations, and his career ends with the awe-inspiring Pietà (c.1575–6, Accademia, Venice), which is said to have been intended for his own tomb and was evidently finished after his death by Palma Giovane.

Titian was recognized as a towering genius in his own time (Lomazzo described him as ‘the sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world’) and his reputation as one of the giants of art has never been seriously questioned (it has been commonplace for centuries to describe him as the greatest of all colourists). He was supreme in every major branch of painting practised in his time and his achievements were so varied—ranging from the joyous evocation of pagan antiquity in his early mythologies to the depths of tragedy in his late religious paintings—that he has been an inspiration to artists of very different character. Van Dyck, Poussin, Rubens, and Velázquez are among the painters who have particularly revered him. In many subjects he set patterns that were followed by generations of artists, particularly in portraiture; more than anyone else he was responsible for widening the scope of portraiture beyond the head-and-shoulders type that prevailed in the 15th century, not only by popularizing the half-length and the full-length, but also by varying his poses and introducing accessories such as a dog, a book, or a classical column. In technique he was just as influential, for he was the first to show the limitless expressive potential of oil paint, creating a vibrant pictorial surface in which the artist's personal ‘handwriting’ is evident in every touch of the brush. According to Palma Giovane, ‘in the final stages he worked more with his fingers than with his brush’, and Vasari wrote that his late works ‘are executed with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of colour, with the result that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect at a distance … The method he used is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, for it makes pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but it conceals the labour that has gone into them.’

Titian's greatness as an artist, it appears, was not matched by his character, for he was notoriously avaricious. In spite of his wealth and status, he claimed he was impoverished, and Erwin Panofsky comments that ‘his tax declaration of 1566 … would land him in jail today’. Titian, however, was lavish in his hospitality towards his friends, notably Pietro Aretino and the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino. These three were so close that they were known in Venice as the triumvirate, and they used their influence with their respective patrons to further each other's careers.

Titian

The Italian painter Titian (c. 1488-1576) was a great master of religious art, a portraitist in demand all over Europe, and the creator of mythological compositions which for inventiveness and decorative beauty have never been surpassed.

Tiziano Vecellio, known in English as Titian, was born at Pieve di Cadore in the Alps north of Venice. Regarding the year of his birth, modern criticism tends to reject the traditional date of 1477. Although the evidence is conflicting, the statements of contemporaries such as Lodovico Dolce and Giorgio Vasari, plus the fact that Titian's earliest works date from 1508, make the birth date of about 1488/1490 more reasonable.

At the age of 9 Titian set out with his brother Francesco for Venice to enter the workshop of the mosaicist Sebastiano Zuccati. Not long thereafter Titian began to study painting with Giovanni Bellini. Soon Titian met Bellini's other pupil, Giorgione, with whom he collaborated on his first certain work (1507-1508), the frescoes on the exterior of the German Merchants' Exchange (Fondaco dei Tedeschi) in Venice, works now known only in 18th-century prints and a few fragments. The two young painters collaborated so closely at this time that their styles are virtually indistinguishable.

Early Works, ca. 1510-1525

Titian's first major independent commission was the three large frescoes in the Confraternity of St. Anthony (Scuola del Santo) in Padua. His early portraits in half length placed behind a horizontal parapet are very closely related to those of Giorgione, for example, two canvases signed with Titian's initials, T. V., the Gentleman in Blue and La Schiavona (London). The triple portrait, the Concert (Florence), is now assigned to Titian with the possibility that Giorgione began the figure at the left. Titian's early religious pictures, such as the Gypsy Madonna and the Madonna of the Cherries (Vienna), maintain similarities to Giovanni Bellini and are notable for their beauty of color and the detached reflective mood which is often characterized as Giorgionesque.

Soon came Titian's first great mythological works: Flora (Florence) and Sacred and Profane Love (ca. 1515; Rome). The complexity of the iconography in the latter painting may be summarized as contrasting the nude Celestial Venus with the clothed Terrestrial Venus. The beauty of the landscape setting and the classical allusions are notable here. Another work from this period is the famous Christ and the Tribute Money (ca. 1516; Dresden).

Titian's fame as an interpreter of classical mythology was firmly established by his three canvases (1518-1523) for the castle of Alfonso d'Este in Ferrara. The literary sources for these compositions are Philostratus's Imagines, Catullus's Carmina, and Ovid's Fastii and Ars amatoria. In the three paintings—the Andrians, the Worship of Venus (Madrid), and Bacchus and Ariadne (London)—Titian recreated the gaiety and abandon of classical legends, devising compositions of unprecedented beauty of color and design and establishing new canons of physical beauty.

An epoch-making work of Titian's early period is the Assumption of the Virgin (1516-1518; Venice). It marked the triumph of the High Renaissance in Venetian painting by virtue of the monumentality of the composition and the grandiose conception of the Virgin soaring with arms outstretched to heaven.

The Years 1525-1540

During the 1520s Titian produced masterpieces: the Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Aloysius (1520; Ancona), the Resurrection altar (1522; Brescia), and the Pesaro Madonna (1519-1526; Venice). The diagonal composition of the last, set against a great portico with giant columns, and the luminosity of color, light, and atmosphere established a new formula for Venetian altars which continued into the following century. During this period the artist created the tragic Entombment (ca. 1526-1532; Paris).

The Martyrdom of St. Peter Martyr (ca. 1526-1530; destroyed 1867), once regarded as Titian's greatest masterpiece, involved a new feeling for heroic and dramatic action which is explained by Titian's acquaintance with the art of Michelangelo and the central Italians. Jacopo Sansovino and Sebastiano del Piombo came to Venice in 1527 after the sack of Rome, bringing to the Venetian more direct knowledge of artistic developments in the papal city.

Titian had formed a liaison with Cecilia, a young woman from Cadore with whom he had two sons, Pomponio in 1524 and Orazio in 1525. During her severe illness in 1525 the artist married her, and she lived another 5 years. They had two daughters, one of whom, Lavinia, survived. Titian was so prosperous that in 1531 he rented a luxurious palace, known as the Casa Grande, where he lived for the rest of his life.

An event of great importance in Titian's career was his trip to Bologna to attend the coronation of Charles V as Holy Roman emperor on Feb. 24, 1530. At this time the artist painted his first portrait of the Emperor in armor. The earliest surviving portrait, however, is Charles V with a Hound (Madrid), painted in February 1533 on Charles's second visit to Bologna. In May Charles V showed his appreciation of the artist's genius by making him a knight of the Golden Spur and Count Palatine.

At the same period Titian found time to provide a variety of works for several of his princely patrons: the Madonna and Child with St. Catherine for Ferrara (London), the Madonna with the Rabbit for the Gonzagas (Paris), and 11 portraits of Roman emperors (destroyed) for the Gonzagas. For the Duke of Urbino he painted the portraits Duke Francesco Maria I della Rovere and Duchess Eleanora and the famous Venus of Urbino (1538-1539; Florence). In Venice he supplied the large processional composition of the Presentation of the Virgin (1534-1538) with its array of portraits of contemporaries.

The Years 1540-1555

The next decade carried Titian even farther afield geographically and artistically. His Christ before Pilate (1543; Vienna) involves a new complexity of design in which the flight of steps rises obliquely and the figures in their variety of gestures and poses create a stir and excitement, denoting a change in style, charged with drama, which goes beyond Renaissance balance and repose toward the excitement of mannerist art. The Old Testament series of ceiling paintings (1543-1544) in S. Maria della Salute, Venice, planned to be seen from below, reflects Titian's interest in spatial illusionism introduced by Giulio Romano in his decorative works in the Palazzo del Te, Mantua.

A great event in Titian's life at this time was his sojourn in Rome from September 1545 until June 1546, at the invitation of Pope Paul III. For the first time Titian saw the glories of ancient Rome as well as the Renaissance masterpieces of Raphael and Michelangelo. He himself produced masterpieces during this stay in Rome: Paul III and His Grandsons (Naples), a presentation of a dramatic encounter between the aged pope and his scheming grandsons, one of the most psychologically revealing works in the history of portraiture; and the official state portrait, Paul III without Berretta (Naples).

Back in Venice, Titian painted the Christ Crowned with Thorns (ca. 1545-1550; Paris), an interpretation in which the violent action and muscular physiques seem to reflect his familiarity with Hellenistic sculpture and Michelangelo's paintings, which he had seen in Rome. Titian's Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (1548-1557; Venice) was also in the new heroic vein, but even more epoch-making in the originality of its new diagonal structure of composition and the mood-evoking atmosphere.

In January 1548 Titian set forth for Augsburg, called there by Charles V. In his celebrated equestrian portrait, Charles V at Mühlberg (Madrid), which commemorates the victory over the German Protestants, Titian established a type of equestrian state portrait that presents the ruler as a symbol of power. Charles V Seated (Munich) is an intimate record of the sickly monarch. In October 1548 Titian returned to Venice, but Charles V recalled him to Augsburg in October 1550. Of the several portraits he executed of members of the Emperor's court, the most important is that of the youthful Prince Philip (later Philip II) in armor, a work which set a standard for state portraits. During the 1550s the Hapsburgs continued to be Titian's most important patrons. For Charles V he painted three superb devotional panels: two of the Mater Dolorosa and the Trinity (generally known as La Gloria; Madrid).

Late Works, 1555-1576

Philip II soon ordered religious pictures from Titian for the monastery of the Escorial: the magnificent Crucifixion (ca. 1555), the Entombment (1559; now Madrid), and the Adoration of the Kings (1559). Philip II's numerous commissions for the Escorial in the 1560s included two versions of the Agony in the Garden, two of Christ Carrying the Cross (now in Madrid), and the Last Supper (1557-1564). During the same period Titian also executed mythological works for Philip II that are among the supreme products of his genius in the pathbreaking methods of design and sheer beauty of form and color: Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon (both Edinburgh), Perseus and Andromeda (London, Wallace Collection), and the Rape of Europa (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum).

Titian's late style is notable for new developments in the oblique organization of compositions which point the way to later baroque designs. His brushwork is free and illusionistic, suggesting the forms rather than precisely describing them, and the tones are fused, often blended with the fingers rather than the brush. This style can be seen in the late pictures already cited, as well as in single figures of saints: the St. Margaret (Madrid) with its superb landscape, St. Sebastian, the Magdalen (Leningrad), and St. Jerome (Escorial).

To the end Titian continued to plumb the depths of human character in masterpieces of portraiture, such as Jacopo Strada (1567-1568; Vienna), his self-portraits (ca. 1550, Berlin; ca. 1570, Madrid), and the triple portrait with Orazio and Marco (ca. 1570; London). Titian's late religious pictures convey a mood of universal tragedy, as in the majestic Annunciation (ca. 1565; Venice), the very late Christ Crowned with Thorns (Munich), and the Pietà (Venice), unfinished at his death and intended for his own sepulchral chapel.

On Aug. 27, 1576, Titian died in his spacious palace in Venice, universally recognized as one of the greatest masters of all time. He was interred in the church of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

Further Reading

The first major work on Titian, and the first attempt to separate the artist's originals from copies, was Joseph A. Crowe and Giovanni B. Cavalcaselle, Life and Times of Titian (1877). Hans Tietze, Tizian (2 vols., 1936; published in an abbreviated volume in English in two editions, 1937 and 1950), includes only a selection of major works. After a dearth of monographs for more than 3 decades, several important books have appeared: Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (1970), dealing with thematic material; and Harold E. Wethey's comprehensive catalogue raisonné, Titian, vol. 1: The Religious Paintings (1969), vol. 2: Titian's Portraits (1971), and vol. 3: Titian's Mythological and Historical Paintings (1973). □

Titian (1490–1576)

Painter of Venice who is regarded by many as one of the finest artists of the late Renaissance, and whose works display a mastery of color, design, and painting technique. Born as Tiziano Vecellio in the village of Pieve di Cadore in northern Italy, he left at the age of nine to make his way in Venice, where he first joined the workshop of a mosaic artist, Sebastiano Zuccati. Titian next apprenticed in the Venetian workshop of Gentile Bellini. He became a close friend of Giorgione, whose works had an important influence on Titian's own. One of his early commissions was a fresco painting for the walls of the German Merchant's Foundation, where he collaborated with Giorgione. At the age of twenty-one Titian decorated the Scuola del Santo of the Confraternity of Saint Anthony in Padua with frescoes of Saint Anthony. Titian's most famous early work is an altarpiece, entitled Assumption of the Virgin, a monumental painting completed in the Santa Maria Gloriosa church of Venice.

Other famous early works include Flora, Madonna of the Cherries, Presentation of the Virgin, Christ and the Tribute Money, Christ Crowned with Thorns, and Sacred and Profane Love, in which the artist contrasts clothed and nude figures of the goddess Venus. These paintings made the artist's reputation in Venice, and word of Titian's mastery was soon spreading throughout Europe. His work was in demand by popes, by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, by King Philip II of Spain, and by the Dukes of Ferrara and Urbino, important art patrons of Italy. For Alfonso d'Este, the Duke of Ferrara, Titian completed three famous mythological paintings, Andrians, Worship of Venus, and Bacchus and Ariadne. For the Gonzaga ruler of Mantua, he painted a Madonna with a Rabbit and a series of portraits of Roman emperors, which were eventually destroyed.

Titian's deep colors, rich textures, and complex, carefully balanced designs give his paintings an air of elegance and serenity. Art historians consider his paintings Worship of Venus, Bacchus and Ariadne, and the Venus of Urbino as among the finest masterpieces of the late Renaissance, and among the best examples of the “Venetian school” of painting. The many commissions he received made him a wealthy man, and by the 1530s Titian had settled himself into the Casa Grande, one of the finest mansions of Venice, where he entertained a devoted following of students, writers, and nobles.

In 1545, the artist moved to Rome at the invitation of Pope Paul III. In Rome he met Michelangelo and was deeply influenced by the ruins of the ancient city as well as the art of Michelangelo and Raphael. He was offered commissions for works by prelates of the church and also executed portraits of the popes, including a profound portrait known as Paul III and His Grandsons, that explores the complex and mistrustful relationship between the members of a privileged and powerful family. Michelangelo's strong, sculptural figures influenced the figures in Titian's Christ Crowned with Thorns and Martyrdom of St. Lawrence.

Charles V, who had met the artist in Bologna in 1530 on the occasion of his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor, invited Titian to Germany in 1548. Charles made Titian an honorary count of the Palatine, and Titian repaid the compliment by painting the emperor into La Gloria, completed in 1554. An equestrian portrait of the emperor as he rode to victory at the Battle of Mühlberg became one of the most famous royal portraits of the Renaissance. For King Philip II of Spain, he completed several works on mythological themes, including Perseus and Andromeda, Diana and Callisto, and The Rape of Europa. Several major works, including Adam and Eve and the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, were painted for the monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial near Madrid; in the royal palace of the Escorial Titian painted Christ Carrying the Cross, The Last Supper, and Agony in the Garden. Titian's last painting is the Pietà, a work he intended to decorate his tomb. The painter's original use of perspective, foreshortening, and his technique of blending colors to mask outlines of figures and objects were taken up by painters of the Mannerist and Baroque styles who would dominate art after the end of the Renaissance.

See Also: Bellini, Gentile; Giorgione; Michelangelo Buonarroti; Tintoretto, Jacopo; Venice

Titian (1485–1576) Venetian painter, b. Tiziano Vecellio. He trained first with Giovanni Bellini, and then with Giorgione. His reputation was established with the monumental The Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18). Titian combined the balance of High Renaissance composition with a new dynamism, which heralded the baroque. He favoured vivid, simple colours, and often silhouetted dark forms against a light background. His finest mythological paintings include Bacchanal (c.1518) and the earthy Bacchus and Ariadne (1522–23). In 1533, Emperor Charles V appointed Titian as court painter, and his Charles V at Mühlberg (1548) is one of the earliest equestrian portraits. From 1550, Titian prroduced erotic mythologies for Philip II of Spain, such as The Rape of Europa (1562). His last work was the astonishingly powerful Pietà, which he designed for his own tomb. Titian's oil technique was freer and more expressive than any earlier style, and he had a revolutionary influence on later artists.

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk; http://www.nga.gov; http://mcu.es

Titian (probably 1487/90–1576), Tiziano Vecellio or Vecelli, Venetian painter. From 1516 he was the acknowledged head of the Venetian school. His famous Assumption (completed in 1518 for the High Altar of Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice) is of high craftsmanship, but lacks religious feeling. On the other hand, his Crowning with Thorns (c.1542; Louvre) and Ecce Homo (1543; Vienna) are fraught with tragic emotion. The compositions of his later years increasingly emphasize dramatic effect.

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