Tiziano Vecellio

Titian dominated Venetian painting for sixty years and changed what oil paint could do. Born Tiziano Vecellio at Pieve di Cadore in the Dolomites around 1488, he was sent to Venice as a boy, trained under the Bellini, and worked alongside Giorgione, whose manner he absorbed and whose unfinished pictures he completed after his early death in 1510. The Assumption of the Virgin, installed in the Frari in 1518, made his reputation: a seven-metre altarpiece in which the Virgin rises on a mass of cloud and cherubim in red and gold, visible the length of the nave. He became painter to the Venetian republic and then to the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino and above all to Charles V, who made him a count palatine and is said to have picked up a fallen brush for him — an act contemporaries found remarkable, since it treated a painter as a gentleman. His technique changed the medium. He built pictures in many thin glazes over a coloured ground, working wet into wet, and in his late work applied paint with his fingers as well as brushes. Palma Giovane described him turning canvases to the wall for months and returning to them as if they were enemies. Contours dissolve, and form is carried by broken colour rather than by drawn line. The late mythologies painted for Philip II — Diana and Actaeon, the Rape of Europa — and the Flaying of Marsyas are among the most freely handled paintings before the nineteenth century. He died in Venice in 1576 during the plague, probably of it, in his late eighties.

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