Titian

I

Introduction

Titian (c. 1485-1576), Venetian painter, regarded from his own time to the present day as one of the greatest artists who has ever lived. He spent almost all his life in Venice, but he worked for an international clientele of royalty and nobles. In the course of his very long career he developed a free and expressive technique that revolutionized the art of painting, for he was the first to show how brushwork could be used as the personal signature of the artist. He was equally great as a portraitist and as a painter of religious and mythological scenes, and he has exerted a profound and lasting influence.

Titian was born in Pieve di Cadore, a small town in the Italian Alps about 110 km (70 mi) north of Venice. His real name was Tiziano Vecellio (“Titian” is simply the Anglicized form of his name by which he has become familiarly known). He was one of four children of Gregorio Vecellio, who held various administrative posts in the town and seems to have been fairly prosperous. The date of Titian’s birth is uncertain and has long been a matter of controversy, for there are various pieces of conflicting evidence about it. He was traditionally held to have lived to be 99 (and one source suggests he was 103 when he died), but most scholars now believe that he was probably born around the mid-1480s rather than the mid-1470s.

II

Influence of Bellini and Giorgione

Although certain details of Titian’s career remain uncertain up to about 1510, there is no reason to doubt the long-standing tradition that his main teacher was Giovanni Bellini, the most illustrious Venetian painter of his generation. Another probable pupil of Bellini was the brilliant and innovative Giorgione, with whom Titian had a close working relationship. They collaborated on frescos for the exterior of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the German Exchange) in Venice in 1508 (only ruined fragments of the paintings survive) and after Giorgione’s early death in 1510, Titian is said to have completed several pictures that the former had left unfinished. Their work was evidently very similar at this time, and there has been considerable controversy about the attribution of certain paintings to one or the other of them. The most famous example is probably the Concert Champêtre (c. 1510, Musée du Louvre, Paris). This was long regarded as one of Giorgione’s masterpieces, but many authorities now think it is by Titian. It shows the poetic, pastoral mood associated with Giorgione’s work that Titian also adopted for a while.

III

Early Independent Work

Titian’s first securely dated surviving paintings are The Miracles of St Anthony (1511), three frescos of scenes from the life of St Anthony of Padua, in the Scuola di San Antonio, Padua. These narratives, in which the ample figures are imbued with a sense of anguished, impulsive life, are presented as realistically conceived events within vividly and rather impressionistically realized landscapes. After this he rarely worked in fresco again. Working in oils, Titian would progressively enrich Giorgione’s idyllic style. Bodies and fabrics would take on an increasingly sensuous density and splendour, landscape settings become more resonant, colours deep and intense but harmonious, as in The Three Ages of Man (c. 1513, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) and Sacred and Profane Love (c. 1515, Galleria Borghese, Rome).

When Titian returned to Venice from Padua, the situation was ripe for his career to flourish, for both the other young painters of comparable talent had disappeared from the scene, Giorgione having died and Sebastiano del Piombo having moved to Rome. In 1516 Giovanni Bellini died and Titian succeeded him as official painter to the Venetian republic. For the next 60 years, until his own death in 1576, he was the dominant figure in the city’s art.

IV

Altarpieces and Mythological Works

The painting with which Titian first overwhelmingly stamped his authority was The Assumption of the Virgin (1516-1518), a huge altarpiece about 7 m (23 ft) high for the church of Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice. It is still above the main altar (in the position for which it was painted) and its strong colours, golden light, and massive, gesticulating figures are designed to be impressive when seen from afar but nevertheless remain plausible in terms of ordinary experience. In another great work for the same church, The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints and Members of the Pesaro Family (1519-1526), usually known as the Pesaro Altarpiece, Titian effected a crucial change in the Renaissance sacre conversazioni (paintings of the Virgin enthroned among saints) by placing the Virgin, traditionally at the composition’s centre, halfway up its right side, and by painting behind her in diagonal recession two giant columns that soar out of the picture’s space. This new scheme was widely adopted by later artists, such as Paolo Veronese and the Carracci family, and, with its evocation of movement and infinity, it opened the way to the Baroque style. The most dynamic of all Titian’s paintings of this period was The Death of St Peter Martyr (1530, now destroyed but known through copies and engravings) for another important Venetian church, San Giovanni e Paolo, in which the violent action of the martyrdom was echoed in the convulsion of trees and sky. It was regarded by many of Titian’s contemporaries as his greatest work.

While he was working on these great altarpieces, Titian was also carrying out major secular commissions. These included decorations (mainly destroyed by fire in 1577) for the Doges’ Palace in Venice and a series of mythological paintings for Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, among them the famous Bacchus and Ariadne (1522-1523, National Gallery, London), one of his most colourful and exuberant works.