Titian

Tiziano Vecellio — known as Titian — was born around 1488 in the mountain town of Pieve di Cadore in the Venetian hinterland. He came to Venice as a child, trained first under Giovanni Bellini and then alongside Giorgione, the painter whose revolutionary approach to atmospheric colour and the reclining nude would shape Titian's early development. By the 1510s, following Giorgione's death in 1510, Titian had established himself as the dominant painter in Venice — a position he would hold, without serious challenge, for the next six decades.

Titian's achievement is fundamentally chromatic. Where Florentine and Roman painters built their images on disegno — on drawing, contour, and sculptural modelling — Titian built them in colour: in the warm, luminous, deeply saturated oil glazes that give Venetian painting its particular character. He was, more than any single Renaissance painter, responsible for demonstrating the capacity of oil on canvas to capture the surfaces of the world — silk, flesh, sky, water — with a sensuous immediacy that no other medium could approach.

He worked in every genre: mythological painting, portraiture, religious altarpieces, and devotional panels. His patrons included the Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain, who between them gave him the most prestigious secular commissions of the sixteenth century. He died in August 1576, during the plague that swept Venice, at an age that may have been eighty-eight — the oldest of the canonical Renaissance masters, and in many respects the most productive.

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