Titian: Guide to the Life and Art of Titian

Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1485–1576), known as Titian, is a Renaissance painter celebrated for his expressive handling of oil paint, dynamic compositions, masterful use of color, and highly naturalistic subject matter. These traits exemplify the Venetian School, of which Titian is considered a founder member. He produced paintings in every major genre of Renaissance painting, including religious altarpieces, mythological allegories, and portraiture.

Titian’s work exemplifies the aesthetics of sixteenth-century Venice: the richness of color, the subtle play of light, the drama of religious and mythological subject matter, and the life-like quality of portraiture. His work gained him an international clientele and prestige during his lifetime.

Titian was active in Venice for his entire life, and the characteristics of his art became synonymous with the style of painting produced in Venice overall. Some of Titian’s accomplishments include:

• Training in Venice: Around 1485, Titian was born to Gregorio and Lucia Vecellio in the mountainous Alpine town of Pieve di Cadore, just north of the Venetian lagoon. He and his brother Francesco trained with some of the most celebrated painters working in Venice at the time, first working in the studio of Gentile Bellini, then transferring to that of his brother, Giovanni Bellini. Titian found a cohort of young painters in Venice who would later gain renown, such as Lorenzo Lotto and Sebastiano Luciani. He later worked for Giorgione, another prominent Venetian painter, collaborating on frescoes for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Upon Giorgione’s death in 1510, Titian succeeded him as the most sought-after painter in sixteenth-century Venice, where he would dominate the artistic scene for another fifty years.
• First major commission: Titian’s first major commission was a painting for the high altar of the Franciscan church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, one of the largest and tallest altarpieces created during the sixteenth century. He painted the Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1515–1518) as if the Virgin’s vertical ascent to heaven, in a swirl of gesture and brilliant color, was happening in real-time. He departed from the established conventions of religious imagery by adding figures with dynamic gestures reaching up for the Virgin and painting heaven as if it were a fiery sunset. His innovations made him one of the most in-demand artists working in Venice at the time.
• Duke of Ferrara: Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1523), another depiction of mythical antiquity, was one of a series of paintings commissioned by Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, for his Ducal Palace. Others are The Worship of Venus (1518–1519) and The Bacchanal of the Andrians (1523–1526).
• Visual poetry: Titian’s innovations were not limited to religious subject matter. His paintings of poesie or visual poetry—such as in his Danaë (1553)—referenced ancient mythology rediscovered during the Renaissance era.
• Influence: Titian was highly influential to succeeding generations of painters, both for his chosen subjects and his inspired use of paint. Other notable painters of his time, such as Tintoretto (born Jacopo Robusti), could hardly escape comparison to his work. Later masters of European oil painting, such as Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt, were inspired by his work and drew upon it to create their effects and styles.
• International fame: Titian gained international fame through his secular portraiture. He is often grouped with names like Velazquez and Rembrandt as among the best at capturing the force of the sitters’ personalities. However, their faces are often idealized to showcase them in the best possible light. Titian fulfilled commissions for some of the most illustrious patrons of this era, such as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain, Pope Paul III, and the rulers of northern Italian courts. Over his long life, Titian became fabulously wealthy, and in terms of successful contemporaneous painters, Raphael and Michelangelo were probably his only true peers.

Titian’s painterly style evolved quite dramatically throughout his life. Generally speaking, his brushwork became looser and freer as he aged.

• Drawings: Unlike many of his peers, Titian did not frequently produce carefully composed drawings in preparation for his paintings. He often worked out the composition directly on the canvas.
• Frescoes: The fresco was a popular medium at the time, and here too Titian distinguished himself. Few of these examples of Titian’s artistry remain, but those that do, such as those in the Carmelite church in Padua, show his proficiency in the medium.
• Mastery of oil paint: Some of Titian’s early works—such as Madonna and Child with Members of the Pesaro Family (1519–1526)—maintain a highly realistic style similar to both of his teachers. He introduces a soft sensuality and tonality to the image by gradually adding layer after layer of oil paint onto the surface to create a glowing richness.
• Painting method: Titian would paint patches of similar hues next to one another, so when viewed at a distance, the colors optically blend to look like a believably three-dimensional texture. His method of creating believably three-dimensional objects and textures demonstrates his mastery of the medium.
• Mid-career expressiveness: In his mid-life, Titian’s handling of oil paint shows confidence and bravura that demonstrates his mastery of the expressive power of painting. His painting style becomes even looser, and he applies paint in thick, impasto strokes onto the canvas. Perhaps the best examples of Titian’s ability to convey texture and atmosphere through painting are his mythological paintings based on Ovid’s Metamorphosis, like The Rape of Europa (c. 1560–1562) and Diana and Callisto (1556–1559).
• Darkening palette: In his old age, Titian’s color palette grew darker, earthy, and more shadowy, and his paint handling became even looser. The paintings he created in the final years of his life have a rougher texture because of the scumbling (the mixing of wet-on-wet paint) on the surface of the canvas. Instead of carefully planning out his compositions, the artist seems to have frequently changed his mind as he was painting—adding and removing figures, shifting poses and gestures, and often working and re-working the fall of light and shadow. The resulting images, such as the Flaying of Marsyas (1570–1576), are more brooding and haunting than any of his previous art pieces.

Titian was one of the most essential and versatile painters of the Italian Renaissance and one of the greatest Venetian painters of the sixteenth century. Some of his most famous works include:

1. 1. Man with a Blue Sleeve (1509): This painting, part of the National Gallery’s collection in London, is one of the best examples of realistic portraiture that Titian created for clients in Venice. His portraits were the genre that most increased his fame in Venice during his lifetime.
2. 2. Sacred and Profane Love (1514): This painting shows two women, one fully clothed and one nearly nude, on either side of a sarcophagus or a fountain. The painting hangs in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.
3. 3. Assumption of the Virgin (c.1515–1518): This is one of the largest altarpieces painted on a wood panel in the world, measuring more than twenty-two feet tall. It was Titian’s first major commission, and when it was unveiled it garnered him fame and notoriety. The altarpiece is at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice.
4. 4. Madonna and Child with Members of the Pesaro Family (1519–1526): Painted for the same church as his notable Assumption of the Virgin (1516–1518), this painting reinvented the sacred conversation composition from paintings in the Middle Ages and made it relevant in the sixteenth-century.
5. 5. Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523): This is one of Titian’s most recognizable and beautifully painted mythological paintings created for the King of Spain. The painting is at the National Gallery in London.
6. 6. Venus of Urbino (1538): This painting is one of the most famous female nudes painted during the Renaissance. Venus of Urbino is part of the collection at the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence.
7. 7. Venus and Adonis (1554): Many versions of this painting, which depicts Venus attempting to prevent Adonis from embarking on a fateful hunt, exist in significant art collections and museums. The most confidently dated and attributed version, from 1554, hangs in the Prado Museum of Madrid, Spain.
8. 8. The Allegory of Age Governed by Prudence (c. 1565–1570): Scholars believe this oil painting contains one of the few self-portraits by Titian; it also includes his son Orazio, and his nephew Marco Vecellio.
9. 9. Pietà (1576): Titian left this painting, one of his very last, only partially completed at the time of his death. This treatment of a familiar Christian theme—the Virgin Mary cradling a dead Christ—is a prime example of his late, looser, more expressive approach to painting. It hangs in the Gallerie dell' Accademia in Venice.

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