Tizian
Venice’s master of colour.
Titian was active for over sixty years and painted for popes, emperors and kings. The Venetians built their pictures with colour rather than drawing.
Titian, in Italian Tiziano Vecellio, was born in Pieve di Cadore in the Alps north of Venice. The year of his birth is uncertain. In old age he claimed to be older than he probably was, and most scholars today believe he was born around 1488–90. As a child he was sent to Venice, where he was apprenticed to the brothers Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. He also worked with Giorgione, and their early works can be hard to tell apart.
His breakthrough came with the enormous altarpiece The Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari church in Venice, painted in 1516–18. The Virgin is raised heavenwards in a glowing light while the apostles reach up after her below. Later he painted mythological pictures for princes, such as Bacchus and Ariadne in the National Gallery in London, and the Venus of Urbino of 1538 in the Uffizi, a reclining nude woman who became a model for artists right up to Manet.
Titian became the most sought-after portrait painter in Europe. Emperor Charles V ennobled him in 1533, and the 1548 equestrian portrait of the emperor after the Battle of Mühlberg is in the Prado. For Charles’s son Philip II of Spain he painted a series of mythological pictures that he himself called poesie. He also portrayed Pope Paul III.
Titian built the picture with colour more than with drawing. His colours are warm and deep, and the light seems to glow from within. In later life his brushwork grew ever freer. He applied paint with broad strokes and sometimes with his fingers, and pictures such as The Flaying of Marsyas and the late Pietà in the Gallerie dell’Accademia look almost modern. He was married to Cecilia, who died in 1530, and had several children. He died in Venice in 1576 during a plague epidemic.
His career lasted over sixty years. Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt and later the Impressionists studied his way of painting. Titian showed that colour and brushwork could themselves carry a picture’s expression.