Tiziano Vecellio (Italian: [titˈtsjaːno veˈtʃɛlljo]; c. 1477/88/90 – 27 August 1576), Latinized as Titianus, hence known in English as Titian ( TISH-ən), was an Italian Renaissance painter, the most important artist of Renaissance Venetian painting. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno.
Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of colour, exerted a profound influence not only on painters of the late Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western artists.
His career was successful from the start, and he became sought after by patrons, initially from Venice and its possessions, then joined by the north Italian princes, and finally the Habsburgs and papacy. Along with Giorgione, he is considered a founder of the Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painting. In 1590, the painter and art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo described Titian as "the sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world".
During his long life, Titian's artistic manner changed drastically, but he retained a lifelong interest in colour. Although his mature works may not contain the vivid, luminous tints of his early pieces, they are remarkable and original in their loose brushwork and subtlety of tone.
The exact time or date of Titian's birth is uncertain. When he was an old man he claimed in a letter to Philip II of Spain, to have been born in 1474, but this seems most unlikely. Other writers contemporary to his old age give figures that would equate to birth dates between 1473 and after 1482. Most modern scholars believe a date between 1488 and 1490 is more likely, though his age at death being 99 had been accepted into the 20th century.
He was the son of Gregorio Vecellio and his wife Lucia, of whom little is known. The Vecellio family was well-established in the area, which was ruled by Venice. Titian's grandfather Conte Vecellio was a prominent notary who held a number of offices in the local administration. Three of Conte's sons were notaries, not including Gregorio, who was active as a soldier and closely assciated with the Venetian Arsenal, but worked mainly as a timber merchant and also managed mines in the mountainous Cadore region for their owners.
Ludovico Dolce, who knew Titian, says that Titian had four masters, the first being Sebastiano Zuccato, the second Gentile Bellini, then his brother Giovanni Bellini, and last, Giorgione. No documentation for these relationships has been found. The Zucatti family of artists are best known as mosaicists, but there is no evidence that the painter Sebastiano Zuccato himself was active as a mosaicist, although Joannides says he probably was.
According to Giorgio Vasari, who also knew Titian and included a not always accurrate biography of the artist in his Lives, Titian first studied under Giovanni Bellini. Dolce writes that the boy was sent to Venice at age nine, along with his brother Francesco, to live with an uncle and apprentice to Sebastiano Zuccato. Leaving Zuccato, Titian briefly transferred to the studio of Gentile Bellini, one of the largest and most productive workshops in Venice. Following Gentile's death in 1507 he entered into an apprenticeship with Gentile's younger brother Giovanni, acknowledged by contemporaries as the preeminent Venetian painter of the day. As there is no documentation of Titian's work before 1510, there is no way to know which version, Dolce's or Vasari's, is closer to the truth. Living in the city, Titian found a group of young men about his own age, among them Giovanni Palma da Serinalta, Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano Luciani, and Giorgio da Castelfranco, nicknamed Giorgione. Francesco Vecellio, Titian's older brother, while more workmanlike in his approach to painting and lacking Titian's talent, was able to achieve some notice in his home town of Cadore and the Bellunese area around it.
Giorgio Martinioni mentions in his edition (1663) of Sansovino's guide to Venice a fresco of Hercules painted by Titian above the entrance to the Morosini house, a painting that would have been one of his earliest works, although a year later Marco Boschini rejected this attribution. Others attributed to his early years were the Bellini-esque so-called Gypsy Madonna in Vienna, and The Visitation from the monastery of Sant'Andrea, now in the Accademia, Venice. According to Joannides, features of the Visitation's execution such as the painter's deployment of light to stress the two pregnant women and the focus on colouristic values are qualities to be found in the earliest of Titian's works, and its attribution to him is supported as well by its dramatic expression of movement and the geometry of the arrangement of visual elements on the canvas.
A Man with a Quilted Sleeve is an early portrait, painted around 1509 and described by Giorgio Vasari in 1568. Scholars long believed it depicted Ludovico Ariosto, but now think it is of Gerolamo Barbarigo. Rembrandt had seen A Man with a Quilted Sleeve at auction, and drew a thumbnail sketch of it. Later he was able to examine the painting more closely in the home of the Sicilian merchant Ruffio, who had bought it. The work inspired the Dutch artist to sketch his own self-portrait in 1639 and then to make a similar etching, followed by a self-portrait in oils in 1640.]
In 1507–1508, Giorgione was commissioned by the state to create exterior frescoes on the recently rebuilt Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a warehouse for the German merchants in the city, which stood next to the Rialto bridge facing the Grand Canal. Titian and Morto da Feltre worked alongside him. Giorgione painted the facade facing the canal in 1508, while Titian painted the facade above the street, probably in 1509. Many contemporary critics found Titian's work more impressive. Only some badly damaged fragments of the paintings remain. Some of their work is known, in part, through the engravings of Fontana.
The relationship between the two young artists evidently contained a significant element of rivalry. Distinguishing between their works during this period remains a subject of scholarly controversy. A substantial number of attributions have moved from Giorgione to Titian in the 20th century, with little traffic the other way. One of the earliest known Titian works, Christ Carrying the Cross in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, depicting the Ecce Homo scene, was long regarded as being by Giorgione.
After Giorgione's early death in 1510, Titian continued to paint Giorgionesque subjects for some time, though his style developed its own features, including the bold and expressive brushwork so characteristic of his later years.
Titian's talent in fresco is shown in those he painted in 1511 at Padua in the Carmelite church and in the Scuola del Santo, some of which have been preserved, among them the Meeting at the Golden Gate, and three scenes (Miracoli di sant'Antonio) from the life of St. Anthony of Padua, Murder of a Young Woman by Her Husband, which depicts The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, A Child Testifying to Its Mother's Innocence, and The Saint Healing the Young Man with a Broken Limb. The Resurrected Christ (Uffizi) also dates to 1511-1512.
In 1512 Titian returned to Venice from Padua; in 1513 he obtained La Senseria (a profitable privilege much coveted by artists) in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. He became superintendent of the government works, especially charged with completing the paintings left unfinished by Giovanni Bellini in the hall of the great council in the ducal palace. He set up an atelier on the Grand Canal at S. Samuele, the precise site being now unknown. It was not until 1516, after the death of Giovanni Bellini, that he came into actual enjoyment of his patent. At the same time he entered an exclusive arrangement for painting. The patent yielded him a good annuity of 20 crowns and exempted him from certain taxes. In return, he was bound to paint likenesses of the successive Doges of his time at the fixed price of eight crowns each. The actual number he painted was five.
During this period (1516–1530), which may be called the period of his mastery and maturity, the artist moved on from his early Giorgionesque style, undertook larger, more complex subjects, and for the first time attempted a monumental style. Giorgione died in 1510 and Giovanni Bellini in 1516, while Sebastiano del Piombo had gone to Rome, leaving Titian unrivaled in the Venetian School. For sixty years he was the undisputed master of Venetian painting.
In 1516, he completed his masterpiece, the Assumption of the Virgin, for the high altar of the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. It is still in situ, and is his largest single panel. This piece of colourism, executed on a grand scale rarely before seen in Italy, created a sensation. The Signoria took note and observed that Titian was neglecting his work in the hall of the great council, but in 1516 he succeeded his master Giovanni Bellini in receiving a pension from the Senate.
In the pictorial structure of the Assumption, the three domains of the composition are occupied by the apostles on earth, the Madonna rising in the sky, and God the Father in heaven looking over all, united to form a compositional whole, unlike the less dynamic and more fragmented renditions of earlier painters. According to Bruce Cole, Titian studied traditional renderings of the Assumption like every artist of the Renaissance. He would have been familiar with Andrea Mantegna's large fresco of the subject executed in Padua's church of the Eremitani in the 1450s, having worked in 1510 on frescoes for the Scuola del Santo in Padua. Nearby Venice on the lagoon isle of Murano there was another example of the subject, painted by Giovanni Bellini and his workshop, that Titian would have known. Although he surely held these previous works in high esteem, his approach to composing his own Assunta was individualistic and innovative.
The commission for the Assumption, undertaken in 1515, was soon followed by commissions for major altarpieces at Brescia and Ancona, as well as for the altar of the Pesaro family chapel in the Frari. By 1520 he must have been working on several of these works at once, including the second version of the San Nicolò altarpiece now displayed in the Vatican Pinacoteca.
Merchants in the Dalmatian city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, commissioned a polyptych The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Titian and his workshop, now on the high altar of the cathedral in Ragusa, as well as a recently restored painting by Titian depicting St Blaise, Mary Magdalene, the Archangel Raphael and Tobias in the Dubrovnik Dominican convent.
St Sebastian, painted on a separate panel of a polyptych, was commissioned by a papal legate to Venice, Altobello Averoldi, for the altarpiece of the Church of Santi Nazzaro e Celso in Brescia. Bette Talvacchia alludes to Luba Freedman's discussion of the figure of Sebastian in terms of its reception by a contemporary "learned audience", acquainted with the literature of art, who could be said to have had some claim to connoiseurship. Signed and dated 1522, according to David Rosand it was ready for viewing in 1520. Jacopo Tebaldi, an agent for Alfonso I d'Este, was present for the studio preview, and schemed to purchase it for the duke. Saint Sebastian, bound and wounded, had special status as an intercessor during periodic outbreaks of the plague, and was a very popular subject of sacred painting. Such a figure, intended for a religious context, nonetheless provided an occasion for portrayal of the male nude and could be appreciated as an independent work of art.
To this period belongs a more extraordinary work, The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr (1530), formerly in the Dominican Church of San Zanipolo, and destroyed by a fire in 1867. Only copies and engravings of this proto-Baroque picture remain. It combined extreme violence and a landscape, mostly consisting of a great tree, that pressed into the scene and seems to accentuate the drama in a way that presages the Baroque.
The artist simultaneously continued a series of small Madonnas, which he placed amid beautiful landscapes, in the manner of genre pictures or poetic pastorals. The Virgin with the Rabbit, in the Louvre, is the finished type of these pictures. Another work of the same period, also in the Louvre, is the Entombment. This was also the period of the three large and famous mythological scenes for the camerino of Alfonso d'Este in Ferrara, The Bacchanal of the Andrians and the Worship of Venus in the Museo del Prado and the Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23) in London, "perhaps the most brilliant productions of the neo-pagan culture or 'Alexandrianism' of the Renaissance, many times imitated but never surpassed even by Rubens himself." Finally this was the period when Titian composed the half-length figures and busts of young women, such as Flora in the Uffizi and Woman with a Mirror (or Woman at Her Toilet) in the Louvre. There is some evidence that prostitutes were used as models by Titian and other painters of the time, including some of Venice's famous courtesans. In Syson's view, if this practice was generally known in 16th-century Venetian society, it might have influenced the "reactions and interpretations" by some of the paintings' owners and those who viewed them.
During the next period (1530–1550), Titian developed the style introduced by his dramatic Death of St. Peter Martyr.
Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523), depicts Ariadne, a Cretan princess abandoned by Theseus, whose ship is shown in the distance and who has just left her at the Greek island of Naxos, at the moment when Bacchus arrives. Bacchus, falling immediately in love with Ariadne, leaps from his chariot, drawn by two cheetahs, to be near her. In the mythical love story, Ariadne is frightened by the wine god's raucous retinue and runs away. Bacchus wins her over and they are married, following which he creates from her jewelled wedding crown the constellation of the Corona Borealis, whose stars Titian places in the upper left of the sky to symbolize their eternal love. The painting belongs to a series commissioned from Bellini, Titian, and Dosso Dossi, for the Camerino d'Alabastro (Alabaster Room) in the Ducal Palace, Ferrara, by Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, who in 1510 tried to commission Michelangelo and Raphael for the series.
In early 1508, Titian's father Gregorio had fought with the victorious forces of Bartolomeo d'Alviano at Valle against the armies of Maximilian I. In 1513, Titian applied to the Council of Ten of the Republic of Venice, offering to paint a battle scene in the Sala del Consiglio Maggiore (Hall of the Great Council) of the Ducal Palace. The battle painting, which came to be known as Battle of Cadore, was commissioned in 1513 and documents in the palace archives record that Titian went to work on it immediately, but eventually his enthusiasm for the project diminished and by June 1537, it remained unfinished. A document dated 23 June 1537 records that he had been granted a broker's patent in 1513, contingent on his painting the canvas of the battle scene, and since 5 December 1516 he had been paid the revenues of that appointment. Because he had not fulfilled its terms the council demanded he return all the funds he had received for those years in which he had done no work.
When Titian was threatened with withdrawal of the commission and the obligation to refund the payments he had received, a serious competitor, Pordenone, was available to replace him, one who had proved his abilities in the specialized field of painting battle scenes filled with horses and horsemen. Since at least 1520 Pordenone had mounted a powerful challenge to the primacy of Titian in Venice. According to Harold Edwin Wethey, the oil-on-canvas painting finally completed by Titian in 1538 covered the deteriorated fresco, Battlle of Spoleto, executed by Guariento di Arpo in the 14th century. Contemporary or near contemporary sources pertaining to the canvas are contradictory and do not clarify exactly when it was painted or which particular battle it represented. Sansovino says Titian omitted the inscription placed above the former painting by Guariento of the battle of Spoleto.
This major battle scene by Titian was lost—with many other major works by Venetian artists—in the 1577 fire that destroyed all the old pictures in the great chambers of the Doge's Palace (Palazzo Ducale). It depicted in life-size the moment when the Venetian general d'Alviano attacked the enemy, with horses and men crashing down into a river during a heavy rainstorm (according to Vasari). It was Titian's most important attempt at a tumultuous and heroic scene of movement to rival Raphael's The Battle of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, Michelangelo's equally ill-fated Battle of Cascina, and Leonardo da Vinci's The Battle of Anghiari (these last two unfinished). Gillet mentions a "poor, incomplete copy at the Uffizi, and a mediocre engraving by Fontana." This period of Titian's work is still represented by the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin (Venice, 1539), one of his most popular canvasses, and by the Ecce Homo (Vienna, 1541). Despite its loss, the Battle of Cadore had a great influence on Bolognese art and Rubens. His Speech of the Marquis del Vasto (Madrid, 1541) was also partly destroyed by fire.
Esthy Kravitz-Lurie writes that modern scholarly consensus is that the traditional identification of Alfonso d'Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, as the male protagonist in Titian's painting, Allegory of Marriage, now in the Louvre, presents problems of interpretation. It is generally believed to have been finished in 1530–1535. Alfonso d'Avalos wrote a letter in November 1531 to Pietro Aretino, in which he stated that he wished to be portrayed by Titian with his wife and son. Although the letter does not prove that the artist undertook such a commission, the painting subsequently was regarded as a portrait of the military figure. The earliest identification of the painting's protagonist as the warrior d'Avalos is in an inventory of artworks belonging to the English King Charles I, completed in 1639 by Abraham van der Doort, Keeper of Charles I's art collections. As noted by Paul Johannides, van der Doort's reference can be interpreted as 'owned by' rather than as 'representing', suggesting that Alfonso might have been the commissioner of the painting rather than its male subject.
Walter Friedlaender calls Titian's three paintings on the ceiling of Santa Maria della Salute "manifestations of genius unprecedented even in Titian's own work", as expressed in the impassioned power of movement in the composition and in his "daring" use of contrapposti and foreshortening. These represent Cain and Abel, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and David and Goliath. Friedlaender says these paintings, finished in 1544, were greatly influential in the development of Baroque painting, and admired because of his success in projecting powerful movement in the spaces overhead without using a complicated system of perspective. Further, this new mode introduced in the Salute paintings was an important influence on Veronese's decorations in San Sebastiano and on Rubens in his later decorations for the Church of San Carlo Borromeo in Antwerp. At this time also, during his visit to Rome, the artist began a series of reclining Venuses: The Venus of Urbino of the Uffizi, Venus and Love at the same museum, Venus—and the Organ-Player, Madrid, which shows the influence of contact with ancient sculpture. Giorgione had already dealt with the subject in his Dresden picture, finished by Titian.
Lisa Jardine says a competitive acquisitiveness was necessary for the increased production of extravagantly expensive works of art during the Renaissance. A painter who wanted to establish his reputation was obliged to stimulate a commercial demand for his art, rather than to build it on some imagined basis of intellectual value. Titian's canvases of voluptuous naked women reclining in seductive poses were regarded as learned "visual explorations of allegories drawn from classical Latin literature" by art historians of the 19th-century. More recent scholarship has revealed contemporary correspondence indicating these works of art were created to satisfy a strong demand for erotically charged paintings of nudes in blatantly sexual poses, and meant to be hung in the bedrooms of the nobilty. When in 1542 Cardinal Alessandro Farnese saw the painting now known as The Venus of Urbino at the duke's summer palace, he made haste to commission from Titian a similar nude for himself, the first in a series representing Danaë and the golden shower.
The Farnese Danaë (1544–1546) is a masterful demonstration of Titian's painterly use of colour, imbuing the painting, according to Janson, with "unrivaled richness and complexity of colour". Janson contrasts Titian's embrace of the sensual and emotional appeal of colore with Michelangelo's more intellectual emphasis on disegno, or design, as seen in the detailed drawings of figures made in preparation for his painted compositions. Danaë was one of several mythological paintings, or "poesie" ("poems"), as the painter called them. This painting was done for Cardinal Farnese, but a later variant was produced for Philip II (while he was still crown prince), for whom Titian painted many of his most important mythological paintings. Although Michelangelo adjudged this piece deficient from his point of view regarding the importance of preliminary drawings for a composition, Titian and his studio produced several versions for other patrons.
From the beginning of his career, Titian was a virtuoso portrait-painter, demonstrated in works such as La Bella (Eleanora de Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, at the Palazzo Pitti). He 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". Concerning portraiture and portrait-painters, the art historian Kenneth Clark writes: "The portrait is a thorn in the side of the student of aesthetics. Having established to his satisfaction that art does not consist in imitation, he must face the fact that three of the greatest artists who ever lived, Titian, Rembrandt, and Velázquez, gave the best of their talents to painting portraits."
These qualities show in the Portrait of Pope Paul III of Naples, or the sketch of the same Pope Paul III and his Grandsons, the Portrait of Pietro Aretino of the Pitti Palace, the Portrait of Isabella of Portugal (Madrid), and the series of Emperor Charles V of the same museum, the Charles V with a Greyhound (1533), and especially the Equestrian Portrait of Charles V (1548), an equestrian picture in a symphony of purples. This state portrait of Charles V (1548) at the Battle of Mühlberg established a new genre, that of the grand equestrian portrait. The composition is steeped both in the Roman tradition of equestrian sculpture and in the medieval representations of an ideal Christian knight, but the weary figure and face have a subtlety few such representations attempt. In 1533, after painting a portrait of the Emperor Charles V in Bologna, he was made a Count Palatine and knight of the Golden Spur. His children were also made nobles of the Empire, which for a painter was an exceptional honour.
This appointment allowed him to gain royal patronage and work on prestigious commissions. 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. As recounted by Sophie Bostock, Titian was appointed "First Painter to the Most Serene Republic of Venice" upon the death of Giovanni Bellini, and his fame throughout Europe increased accordingly. Titian, like Gentile Bellini, was one of the first artists to be granted noble status by a monarch—only the work and person of Michelangelo were held in such high esteem. In a self-portrait from the 1550s, he depicts himself clothed in the rich attire of a patrician, including the heavy gold chain bestowed on him by Charles V in 1533. In 1540 he received a pension from d'Avalos, marquis del Vasto, and an annuity of 200 crowns (which was afterwards doubled) from Charles V from the treasury of Milan. Another source of profit, for he was always aware of money, was a contract obtained in 1542 for supplying grain to Cadore, where he visited almost every year and where he was both generous and influential. Titian had a villa on the Manza Hill in front of the church (Chiesa dei Santi Pietro e Paolo) of Castello Roganzuolo, where he painted a triptych. The so-called Titian's mill, frequently discernible in his studies, is at Collontola, near Belluno.
He visited Rome in 1546 and obtained the freedom of the city—his immediate predecessor in that honor having been Michelangelo in 1537. He could at the same time have succeeded the painter Sebastiano del Piombo in his lucrative office as holder of the piombo or Papal seal, and he was prepared to take Holy Orders for the purpose; but the project lapsed through his being summoned away from Venice in 1547 to paint Charles V and others in Augsburg. He was there again in 1550, and executed the portrait of Philip II, which was sent to England and was useful in Philip's suit for the hand of Queen Mary.
During the last twenty-six years of his life (1550–1576), Titian 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—returning to them and retouching them, constantly adding new expressions at once more refined, concise, and subtle. He also finished many copies that his pupils made of his earlier works. This caused problems of attribution and priority among versions of his works—which were also widely copied and faked outside his studio during his lifetime and afterwards.
For Philip II, he painted a series of large mythological paintings known as the "poesie", mostly from Ovid, which scholars regard as among his greatest works. Thanks to the prudishness of Philip's successors, these were later mostly given as gifts, and only two remain in the Prado. Titian was producing religious works for Philip at the same time, some of which—the ones inside Ribeira Palace—are known to have been destroyed during the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. The "poesie" series contained the following works:
In 1623, when Prince Charles of England was to be married to Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, "[h]er enormous dowry was to be partially paid in pictures. Prince Charles had asked for all of Titian's Poesie". When Charles cancelled the wedding, "Titian's Poesie, not yet shipped, were taken out of their crates and hung back up on the walls of the Spanish royal palace".
The poesie, except for The Death of Actaeon, were brought together for the first time in nearly 500 years in an exhibition in 2020 and 2021 that travelled from the National Gallery in London, to the Museo del Prado in Madrid, to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where it closed on January 2, 2022.
Another painting that apparently remained in his studio at his death, and has been much less well known until recent decades, is the powerful, even "repellent" Flaying of Marsyas (Kroměříž, Czech Republic). Another violent masterpiece is Tarquin and Lucretia (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum).
According to the art historian Louis Gillet:
For each of the problems which he successively undertook he furnished a new and more perfect formula. He never again equalled the emotion and tragedy of the "Crowning with Thorns" (Louvre), in the expression of the mysterious and the divine he never equalled the poetry of the "Pilgrims of Emmaus", while in superb and heroic brilliancy he never again executed anything more grand than "The Doge Grimani adoring Faith" (Venice, Doge's Palace), or the "Trinity", of Madrid. On the other hand from the standpoint of flesh tints, his most moving pictures are those of his old age, the "Dana" of Naples and of Madrid, the "Antiope" of the Louvre, the "Rape of Europa" (Boston, Gardner collection), etc. He even attempted problems of chiaroscuro in fantastic night effects ("Martyrdom of St. Laurence", Church of the Jesuits, Venice; "St. Jerome," Louvre). In the domain of the real he always remained equally strong, sure, and master of himself; his portraits of Philip II (Madrid), those of his daughter, Lavinia, and those of himself are numbered among his masterpieces.
Titian had engaged his daughter Lavinia, the beautiful girl whom he loved deeply and painted various times, to Cornelio Sarcinelli of Serravalle. She had succeeded her aunt Orsa, then deceased, as the manager of the household, which, with the lordly income that Titian made by this time, placed her on a corresponding footing. Lavinia's marriage to Cornelio took place in 1554. She died in childbirth in 1560.
Titian was at the Council of Trent towards 1555, of which there is a finished sketch in the Louvre. His friend Aretino died suddenly in 1556, and another close intimate, the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino, in 1570. In September 1565 Titian went to Cadore and designed the decorations for the church at Pieve, partly executed by his pupils. One of these is a Transfiguration, another an Annunciation (now in San Salvatore, Venice), inscribed Titianus fecit, by way of protest (it is said) against the disparagement of some persons who caviled at the veteran's failing handicraft.
Around 1560, Titian painted the oil on canvas Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria, a derivative on the motif of Madonna and Child. It is suggested that members of Titian's Venice workshop probably painted the curtain and Luke, because of the lower quality of those parts.
He continued to accept commissions to the end of his life. Like many of his late works, Titian's last painting, the Pietà, is a dramatic, nocturnal scene of suffering. He apparently intended it for his own tomb chapel. He had selected, as his burial place, the chapel of the Crucifix in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, the church of the Franciscan Order. In payment for a grave, he offered the Franciscans a picture of the Pietà that represented himself and his son Orazio, with a sibyl, before the Savior. He nearly finished this work, but differences arose regarding it, and he settled on being interred in his native Pieve. Yet he ended up being interred in the Frari.
While the plague raged in Venice, Titian died on 27 August 1576. Depending on his unknown birthdate (see above), he was somewhere from his late eighties or even close to 100. Titian was interred in the Frari (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari), as first intended, and his Pietà was finished by Palma il Giovane. He lies near his own famous painting, the Madonna di Ca' Pesaro. No memorial marked his grave. Much later the Austrian rulers of Venice commissioned Antonio Canova to sculpt the large monument still in the church.
Very shortly after Titian's death, his son, assistant and sole heir Orazio, also died of the plague, greatly complicating the settlement of his estate, as he had made no will.
Titian's wife, Cecilia, was a barber's daughter from his hometown of Pieve di Cadore. As a young woman she had been his housekeeper and mistress for some five years. Cecilia had already borne Titian two sons, Pomponio and Orazio, when in 1525 she fell seriously ill. Titian, wishing to legitimize the children, married her. Cecilia recovered, the marriage was a happy one, and they had another daughter who died in infancy. In August 1530 Cecilia died. Titian remarried, but little information is known about his second wife; she was possibly the mother of his daughter Lavinia. Titian had a fourth child, Emilia, the result of an affair, possibly with a housekeeper. His favourite child was Orazio, who became his assistant.
In 1531, Titian moved his two sons and infant daughter to a new house on the northern edge of Venice in Biri Grande. The casa da stazio had two floors, the lower probably used for storage, and the upper as his dwelling place. His workshop, built of masonry and wood, was separated from the rest of the house. The grounds featured a private garden where he could air-dry his paintings and hide them from observation. The house had direct access to the lagoon, allowing the paintings to be shipped easily to patrons. His sister Orsa came from Pieve di Cadore to help manage the household and his business affairs.
In about 1526 he had become acquainted with Pietro Aretino, the influential and audacious figure who features in the chronicles of the time. Philip Cottrell considers that a crucial element in Titian's success internationally was the endorsement of the satirist Aretino, who arrived in Venice in March 1527, and rarely left the city until he died in 1556. Aretino began friendships with Titian and with the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino, also new arrived from central Italy. The three were so close they were known popularly in Venice as "the triumvirate", and effectively became the centre of the city's artistic establishment, around which revolved a group of lesser artists. Aretino enlisted Titian and Sansovino to join him in pursuing the patronage of Federico II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and by the autumn of 1527 the Marquis had received a portrait of Aretino, now lost, from Titian's hand. Numerous important commissions and an introduction to the Emperor Charles V followed.
The Italian painter Tintoretto was brought when he was very young to Titian's studio by his father. Tom Nichols says Tintoretto probably entered Titian's workshop during the period of 1530–1539, but only for a very brief time, and that he likely switched to another Venetian studio. Ridolfi tells in his Life of Tintoretto (1642) that after being cast out of Titian's studio, the young Tintoretto realized he could "become a painter by studying the canvases of Titian and the reliefs of Michelangelo Buonarroti". To remind himself of this aspiration he wrote on the walls of his rooms a motto for his striving: "il disegno di Michelangelo e il colorito di Tiziano" ("Michelangelo's design and Titian's colour").
Several other members of the Vecelli family tried a hand at painting. Francesco Vecellio, Titian's older brother, worked as his assistant in 1511, then gave up painting for a while to become a soldier. Francesco worked for much of his career in Venice, and shared his brother's workshop in Venice until the early 1550s, often working side-by-side with him. Francesco got most of his commissions from the interior regions of Veneto, especially from Belluno and Cadore. Historical documents show that these commissions were carried out at the family workshop. Numerous works executed in Belluno and Cadore are attributed to Francesco, including altarpieces in the Church of Santa Maria Annunziata, Sedico, the Church of Santa Croce, Belluno (now at the Old Masters Staatliche Museum in Berlin), the Church of Madonna della Difesa, San Vito di Cadore, and the Church of Santa Maria Nascente, Pieve di Cadore.
Tom Nichols describes how over time Titian's relatives such as his brother Francesco, and his younger cousins Marco and Cesare played more prominent roles in the Titian workshop at Biri Grande. Titian produced the so-called Allegory of Prudence, in the early 1570s, representing his growing desire for artistic continuity in a family succession. Nichols thinks it likely that Erwin Panofsky is correct in suggesting that the allegory depicting the heads of wolf, lion and dog represents portraits of Titian, Orazio and (possibly) Marco as the three generations of the Vecellio family workshop. This ideal image, however, required manipulation of the geneological and historical facts on Titian's part. Marco (1545–c. 1611), was not, as the image seems to imply, Orazio’s son, but instead a distant second cousin who had come to Venice from Cadore about 1560, and probably played an active role in the workshop only in the last decade of Titian's life. He created several productions in the ducal palace, the Meeting of Charles V and Clement VII in 1529; in San Giacomo di Rialto, an Annunciation; in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Christ Fulminant. A son of Marco, named Tiziano (or Tizianello), painted early in the 17th century. He made a name for himself as a portraitist, but is best known for writing a biography of his relative Titian, published in 1622.
Few of the pupils and assistants of Titian became well known in their own right; for some being his assistant was probably a lifetime career. Paris Bordone and Bonifazio Veronese were his assistants during some points in their careers. Giulio Clovio said Titian employed El Greco (or Dominikos Theotokopoulos) in his last years. Polidoro da Lanciano is said to have been a follower or pupil of Titian. Other followers were Nadalino da Murano, Damiano Mazza, and Gaspare Nervesa.
Titian never attempted engraving, but he was very conscious of the importance of printmaking as a means to expand his reputation. In the period 1515–1520 he designed a number of woodcuts, including an enormous and impressive one of The Drowning of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea, in twelve blocks, intended as wall decoration as a substitute for paintings; and collaborated with Domenico Campagnola and others, who produced additional prints based on his paintings and drawings. Much later he provided drawings based on his paintings to Cornelis Cort from the Netherlands who engraved them. Martino Rota followed Cort from about 1558 to 1568.
Titian employed an extensive array of pigments and it can be said that he availed himself of virtually all available pigments of his time. In addition to the common pigments of the Renaissance period, such as ultramarine, vermilion, lead-tin yellow, ochres, and azurite, he also used the rare pigments realgar and orpiment.
Titian hair has been used to describe red hair, almost always on women, since the 19th century. Anne Shirley, from Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, is described as having Titian hair when 15:
Well, we heard him say—didn't we, Jane?—'Who is that girl on the platform with the splendid Titian hair? She has a face I should like to paint.' There now, Anne. But what does Titian hair mean?" "Being interpreted it means plain red, I guess," laughed Anne. "Titian was a very famous artist who liked to paint red-haired women."
The art historian Peter Humfrey says some three hundred items are catalogued in his book Titian: The Complete Paintings, but that if all the paintings issued from the artist's workshop had been included, that number might have been doubled. According to Joanna Woods-Marsden, Humfrey's list of 300 pictures includes twenty lost works whose appearance was recorded in paintings or print, for a total of 280 surviving works. His catalogue supplants the catalogue raisonne published by Harold Wethey in 1969. She points out that assembling such a catalogue presents complications for the cataloguer, but a list of Titian's corpus, as Humfrey notes, is made more difficult by the fact that Titian relied heavily on workshop assistants, with lesser standards.
Two of Titian's works in private hands were put up for sale in 2008. One of these, Diana and Actaeon, was purchased by the National Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland on 2 February 2009 for £50 million. The galleries had until 31 December 2008 to make the purchase before the work would be offered to private collectors, but the deadline was extended. The sale created controversy with politicians who argued that the money could have been spent more wisely during a deepening recession. The Scottish Government offered £12.5 million and £10 million came from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The rest of the money came from the National Gallery and from private donations. The other painting, Diana and Callisto, was bought jointly by the National Gallery and National Galleries of Scotland in 2012.
General info from Wikipedia.org