Titian was the most important painter of the 16th century Venetian school. He was equally skilled in portraits, landscapes, and mythological and religious subjects. Over his long career, Titian's style changed dramatically from the vivid colors of his early works to looser brushwork and subtle polychromatic modulations in his later pieces. Titian was recognized as one of the greatest painters of his time, on par with Raphael, Michelangelo, and later Rubens. He excelled at portraits and was a masterful painter of mythological and religious subjects. Titian had an unrivaled position in Venetian painting for sixty years until his death from the plague in 1576 at the age of

1. Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (1488 – 1576) known in English as
Titian was the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian
school. Equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and
mythological and religious subjects, Titian was recognized by his
contemporaries as "The Sun Amidst Small Stars" (recalling the famous
final line of Dante's Paradiso).
During the course of his long life, Titian's artistic manner changed
drastically but he retained a lifelong interest in color. Although his
mature works may not contain the vivid, luminous tints of his early
pieces, their loose brushwork and subtlety of polychromatic
modulations are without precedent in the history of Western art.
Self-Portrait, c. 1567; Museo
del Prado, Madrid
High Renaissance
As a matter of professional and worldly success his position
from about this time is regarded as equal only to that of
Raphael, Michelangelo, and at a later date Rubens.
Titian: Self-Portrait , c.
1550-1562, Staatliche Museen,
Berlin, Germany.

2. Giovanni Bellini self
portrait
There Titian found a group of young men about his
own age, among them Giorgio da Castelfranco,
nicknamed Giorgione, that Titian joined as an
assistant. Soon, the two young masters were
likewise recognized as the leaders of a new school
characterized by more flexible, freed from
symmetry and the remnants of hieratic conventions
still found in the paintings of Giovanni Bellini.
Giorgione self
portrait
In 1513 Titian obtained a broker's patent, termed La Sanseria or Senseria (a privilege much
coveted by rising or risen artists) and became superintendent of the government works.
Titian was the eldest son of Gregorio Vecelli (superintendent of the castle of Pieve di Cadore) and his
wife Lucia. The family was well-established in the area, which was ruled by Venice.
Giorgione died in 1510 and Giovanni Bellini in 1516, leaving Titian for sixty years unrivaled in the
Venetian School. During 1516–1530, which may be called the period of his mastery and maturity,
Titian moved on from his early Giorgionesque style, undertook larger and more complex subjects and
of a monumental style.
At the age of about ten, Titian was sent to Venice to enter the studio of the
elderly Gentile Bellini and later his brother Giovanni Bellini, at that time the
leading artists in the city.

3. Titian painted the likenesses of princes, or Doges, cardinals or monks,
and artists or writers. No other painter was so successful in extracting
from each physiognomy so many traits at once characteristic and
beautiful. Among portrait-painters Titian is compared to Rembrandt and
Velázquez, with the interior life of the former, and the clearness,
certainty, and obviousness of the latter.
Titian: Empress Isabel of
Portugal
Titian: Portrait of a Musician
Titian: Portrait of the Doge
Francesco Venier
Titian: La Bella
(Eleanora de Gonzaga,
Duchess of Urbino, at
the Pitti Palace)
Titian, a masterful portrait-painter!
Titian: Portrait of an Old
Man (Pietro Cardinal
Bembo)

4. Titian: Portrait of Jacopo
(Giacomo) Dolfin
Titian: Portrait of Tomaso or
Vincenzo MostiTitian: Portrait of a
Man in a Red Cap
Titian, a masterful portrait-painter!
Titian: Portrait of
Ippolito dei Medici

5. Titian, a masterful portrait-painter!
Titian: Portrait
of Ariosto
(early work)
Titian: Portrait of
Antonio Anselmi
Titian:Portrait
of a Man
Titian
Title:Daniele
Barbarous

6. Titian: The Young
Englishman
Titian: A Knight of Maltat
Titian, a masterful
portrait-painter!
Titian Title:Man With a Glove Titian:Young Man with
Cap and Glovea

7. Titian: Profane Love Titian: Flora Titian: Portrait of Laura de Dianti
Titian: Portrait
of a Young
Woman
Titian:
Woman with
a Mirror
Titian, a masterful portrait-painter!
Titian: Portrait of a Lady
1555 (NGA, Washington)

8. Titian, a masterful portrait-painter!
Titian: Ranuccio Farnese
1542 (NGA, Washington)
Titian: The Concert
Titian: Clarice Strozzi

9. Titian: St Nicholas
Titian: St Matthew
Titian: St Jerome
Titian, a masterful
mythological and
religious subjects painter!
Titian: St Dominic

10. Titian: The Venus of Urbino
Titian:Venus and Cupid with an Organist Titian: Danae and the Shower of Gold
Titian: Diana and Actaeon
Titian, a masterful mythological
and religious subjects painter!
Titian: Venus Blindfolding
Cupid 1570 (NGA,
Washington)

11. Titian: St Mary
Magdalene
Titian: Mater Dolorosa
Titian: Mater Dolorosao
Titian:
Polyptych of
the
Resurrection:
Virgin
Annunciate
Titian:
Salome
Titian, a masterful mythological and religious subjects painter!
Salome, or Judith religious
work, also functions as an
idealized portrait of a beauty, a
genre developed by Titian,
supposedly often using
Venetian courtesansas models.

12. Titian: Sacred and Profane Love, 1514,
(Galleria Borghese, Rome)
Titian: Cupid with the Wheel of Fortune Titian: Wisdom
Titian: Allegory of Time Governed
by Prudence (c. 1565–1570) is
thought to depict Titian, his son
Orazio, and a young cousin,
Marco Vecellio.
Titian, a masterful mythological and
religious subjects painter!
Sacred and Profane Love is one of the most
famous paintings of Renaissance Italy. It
perhaps depicts a Venetian bride dressed in
white, sitting beside Cupid and being
assisted by Venus in person; or the well
dressed woman is Profane Love while the
nude woman is Sacred Love.

13. Titian, a masterful mythological and
religious subjects painter!
The Crowning with Thorns, year 1542-1543 (Louvre). Commissioned by the confraternity of Santa
Maria delle Grazie in Milan; brought to France after the Napoleonic conquest of the city in 1797; once
considered it to be the greatest picture ever painted.
Titian: Supper at
Emmaus
Titian:
Ecce
Homo
Titian: The
Scourging
of Christ

14. Titian, a masterful mythological and religious subjects painter!
Titian: Pesaro Madonna,
(better known as the
Madonna di Ca' Pesaro)
(c. 1519–1526)
Titian: Assumption of
the Virgin, 1516,
completed for the high
altar of the church of
the Frari.
Pesaro Madonna: perhaps his most studied work; a
new conception of the traditional groups of donors
and holy persons moving in different aerial space
and plans; Titian's patron is shown in a devotional
pose, kneeling before the Virgin (Titian' wife, who
died in childbirth soon after, was used as the model)
and presented to her by Saint Peter with his key
leading toward the Virgin (at the top of the steps
alludes to her celestial role as Madonna della Scala
and the Stairway to Heaven); the large red banner
displays the papal arms, those of Jacopo below, and
olive leaves as symbol of peace; a turbaned Turk
and a Moor refer to Jacopo's victory over the Turks
in 1502; at the right, Saint Francis of Assisi links the
five kneeling Pesaro family to Christ, suggest-ing
that salvation can be achieved; behind Saint Francis
is Saint Anthony of Padua; the members of the
donor's family are motionless; all the other figures
gesture energetically and occupy diagonal planes;
infant angels appear on the cloud above; the light of
Venice, sparkling in its waterways, illuminate this
painting.
The pictorial structure of the Assumption unites and superimposes scenes on different levels -
earth and heaven, the temporal and the infinite - on its golden background, a homage to the
tradition of Venetian mosaics. This approach was continued in a series of works that finally
reached a classic formula in the Pesaro Madonna.

15. Titian: Federigo
Gonzaga, Duke of
Mantua
Titian: Portrait of Charles V with a Dog,
1533 (Prado, Madrid).
In 1533, after painting a portrait of Charles V, Titian was made a Count Palatine and knight of the
Golden Spur and his children also made nobles of the Empire.
Charles (Holy Roman Emperor) painted in 1532 by Jakob
Seisenegger, but didn't please its subject.
In about 1526 he had became intimate, with Pietro Aretino, the influential and audacious
figure who features so strangely in the chronicles of the time. Titian sent a portrait of him
to Gonzaga, duke of Mantua.
Towards 1521 Titian was now at the height of his fame. Cecilia—a barber's daughter from his hometown village of
Cadore—was a young woman who had been his housekeeper and mistress for some five years. Cecilia had
already borne Titian two fine sons, Pomponio and Orazio (who became his assistant), when in 1525 she fell
seriously ill. Titian, wishing to legitimize the children, married her. The marriage was a happy one. In 1530 his
wife died giving birth to daughter Lavinia.
Titian, a masterful portrait-painter!
This new version is similar to its
predecessor but completely transforms its
composition, stylising Charles' body by
increasing the size of the fur wrap,
decreasing the size of the doublet, raising
the position of the eyes and lowering the
horizon to make Charles fill the space. He
is also shown approaching the viewer and
the space around him has been emptied
and simplified, with warmer colours than in
the original. It later inspired Goya's 1799
Charles IV in his Hunting Clothes.

16. Equestrian Portrait of
Charles V (1548)
Portrait of Pope Paul III
Titian portrays Charles heroically, but places him in a calm dawn setting with no
signs of battle, achieving a feeling of steadiness and control, yet steely, gaze into
the distance. The sense of forward motion is suggested by the angle of the spear
and charging horse. The skyscape is considered Titian's best, and has been
described as flaming and shadowed, with gold light fighting with blue, deathly
clouds set against a landscape which suggests the immensities of space that
Charles dominates and the brooding, inner landscape of the soul.
Titian's portrait of
Philip as prince
Titian, a masterful portrait-painter!
Note: the lance alludes to Saint George, the traditional
image of a military knight-saint; the red around Charles
represents the Catholic faith in the wars of the 16th
century. Dürer's 1513 engraving Knight, Death and the
Devil, rides through dark woods, passing figures
representing evil and mortality. In contrast Charles
emerges from a dark wood into an open, though
brooding landscape.
Titianj visited Rome in 1546, and obtained the freedom of
the city—his immediate predecessor in that honor having
been Michelangelo in 1537. Summoned from Venice in
1547 to paint Charles V, he returned in 1550 and
executed the portrait of Philip II which was sent to
England and proved useful in Philip's suit for the hand of
Queen Mary.

17. During the last twenty-six years of his life (1550–1576) the artist worked mainly for Philip II and as a
portrait-painter. He became more self-critical, an insatiable perfectionist, keeping some pictures in his
studio for ten years, never wearying of returning to them and retouching them, constantly adding new
expressions at once more refined, concise, and subtle.
He had selected as the place for his
burial the chapel of the Crucifix in the
Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, the
church of the Franciscan Order; in
return for a grave, he offered the
Franciscans a picture of the Pietà.
Titian was probably in his late eighties when the plague raging
in Venice took him on 27 August 1576. He was the only victim
of the Venice plague to be given a church burial. He was
interred in the Frari (Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari), as at first
intended. He lies near his own famous painting, the Madonna di
Ca' Pesaro. No memorial marked his grave, until much later the
Austrian rulers of Venice commissioned Canova to provide the
large monument. Immediately after Titian's own death, his son
and assistant Orazio died of the same epidemic. His sumptuous
mansion was plundered during the plague by thieves.
The picture represents the Madonna supporting the body of
Christ, with the help of a kneeling Nicodemus. The latter is
probably a self- portrait of Titian, represented as if he saw his
also upcoming death in the Christ's face. On the left, standing,
is Mary Magdalene. A small self-portrait, together with his son
Orazio, is shown in the base of one of the columns surrounding
the niche. The picture is generally considered Titian's last: an
inscription in the lower part of the picture notes that it was
finished by Palma the Younger.
Titian: Pietà, year1575–1575, Oil on canvas, 389 cm ×
351 cm (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice). Pietà is the
last painting by Titian

18. References
artDatabase art app on the App Store
Wikipedia http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titian
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tita/
hd_tita.htm
Titian, the complete works http://www.titian-tizianovecellio.org
The National Gallery, UK, http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/titian
bio. http://www.biography.com/people/titian-21322389
Web Museum http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/titian/
BBC Paintings http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/-titian
Artcyclopedia http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/titian.html