Renaissance
Titian (1488–1576)
Italian Venetian Renaissance painter.
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, c. 1488 – 1576) was the presiding genius of the Venetian Renaissance and, for the better part of a century, the most celebrated painter in Europe. Born in Pieve di Cadore in the Dolomites, he trained in Venice under Giovanni Bellini and beside Giorgione, whose poetic, atmospheric manner he absorbed and then transformed. Where Florence prized disegno — drawing — Venice, and Titian above all, made colorito its rival: colour and the loaded, glowing brush as the true engine of painting, worked in oil on canvas.
His range was total. He gave Venice the soaring Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari; he invented the reclining mythological nude in the Venus of Urbino; he painted for Alfonso d'Este the sensuous poesie such as Bacchus and Ariadne; and he was the supreme portraitist of his age, immortalising popes, emperors, and his sharp-tongued friend the writer Pietro Aretino. Emperor Charles V made him a count palatine and knight, and Philip II of Spain became his devoted patron — an unheard-of elevation for a painter.
Titian lived into great old age, and his late style is one of the summits of Western art. The finished polish of his youth loosened into a broken, open handling of dragged and dabbed paint — 'painted more with the fingers than the brush,' as his pupil Palma il Giovane recalled — that dissolves form into light and feeling. His unfinished late Pietà, intended for his own tomb, carries this manner to the edge of abstraction. That freedom opened the road that Rubens, Velázquez, and Rembrandt would travel.
The words the record keeps using: sensuous, glowing, majestic, painterly, warm, vital, free.
At a glance
- Lived 1488–1576
- Origin Italian (Venetian)
- Worked in Rome
- Era Renaissance
- Movements Venetian Renaissance
- Mediums Oil on panel, Oil on canvas
- Techniques Oil glazing, Impasto, Alla prima (wet-in-wet)
Works in the archive
- Assumption of the Virgin (Assunta), 1516 (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)
The towering high altarpiece of the Frari, painted when Titian was still young, which made his reputation at a stroke. The Virgin, borne aloft on a bank of cloud and cherubs, is received by God the Father above while… - Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520 (National Gallery, London (NG35))
One of a series of mythological 'poesie' painted for Alfonso d'Este's camerino in Ferrara, showing the god Bacchus leaping from his chariot at the instant he first sees Ariadne, abandoned on the shore of Naxos. His… - Venus of Urbino, 1534 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)
A reclining nude, painted for the Duke of Urbino, who transformed Giorgione's sleeping Venus into a frankly awake, sensual woman meeting the viewer's gaze from a contemporary Venetian bedchamber. Maidservants search a… - Portrait of Pietro Aretino, 1545 (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence)
A portrait of Titian's close friend the satirist, poet, and 'scourge of princes' Pietro Aretino, one of the most formidable literary personalities of the age. Aretino turns aside with an air of restless power, his heavy… - Pietà, 1576 (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice)
Titian's last great work, left unfinished at his death in the plague of 1576 and intended for his own tomb in the Frari. The dead Christ is supported by the Virgin as the aged Nicodemus — a self-portrait of the painter…
What was said
Titian's pupil Palma il Giovane recalled that the master blocked in his pictures with a mass of bold colour, then turned them to the wall and left them for months; returning as if to a rival's work, he corrected and rebuilt the flesh through many glazes, and in the final touches worked the paint as much with his fingers as with the brush, bringing the figures to living presence.
Vasari, visiting the aged Titian in Venice, praised his colorito above all living painters, and observed that his late works were executed with broad, bold strokes and blots that seem crude close up but resolve at a distance into life itself — achieved, he noted, only through immense labour and judgement.
In his widely published letters, Titian's friend Pietro Aretino celebrated the painter's power to render living flesh and natural light, describing a Venetian sunset in a famous letter as a scene only Titian's brush could have painted.
Lineage
Learned from Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini
Passed on to Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez
What would Titian make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Titian", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Titian · Keep a life moment the way Titian would · Pictures made after Titian