# TIZIANO Vecellio [View the canonical artist record]() ## Artist - Lifespan: 1488–1576 - Profession: painter - School: Italian ## Biography The greatest painter of the Venetian School. The evidence for his birthdate is contradictory, but he was certainly very old when he died. He was probably a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, and in his early work he came under the spell of Giorgione, with whom he had a close relationship. In 1508 he assisted him with the external fresco decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice, and after Giorgione's early death in 1510 it fell to Titian to complete a number of his unfinished paintings. The authorship of certain works \(some of them famous\) is still disputed between them. Titian's first major independent commission was for three frescoes on the life of St Antony of Padua in the Scuola del Santo, Padua \(1511\), noble and dignified paintings suggesting an almost central Italian firmness and monumentality. When he returned to Venice, Giorgione having died and Sebastiano having gone to Rome, the aged Bellini alone stood between him and supremacy, and that only until 1516 when Bellini died and Titian became official painter to the Republic. He maintained his position as the leading painter in the city until his death sixty years later. In the second decade of the century Titian broke free from the stylistic domination of Giorgione and developed a manner of his own. Something of a fusion between Titian's worldliness and Giorgione's poetry is seen in the enigmatic allegory known as Sacred and Profane Love \(Borghese Gallery, Rome, c. 1515\), but his style soon became much more dynamic. This work inaugurated a brilliant period in Titian's creative career during which he produced splendid religious, mythological, and portrait paintings, original in conception and vivid with colour and movement. The work that more than any other established his reputation is the huge altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin \(Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice, 1516-18\). It is the largest picture he ever painted and one of the greatest, matching the achievements of his most illustrious contemporaries in Rome in grandeur of form and surpassing them in splendour of colour. The soaring movement of the Virgin, rising from the tempestuous group of Apostles towards the hovering figure of God the Father looks forward to the Baroque. Similar qualities are seen in his two most famous altarpieces of the 1520s: the Pesaro altarpiece \(Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice, 1519-26\), a bold diagonal composition of great magnificence, and The Death of St Peter Martyr \(completed 1530\), which he painted for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, having defeated Palma Vecchio and Pordenone in competition for the commission. The painting was destroyed by fire in 1867, but it is known through copies and engraving; trees and figures together form a violent centrifugal composition suited to the action, and Vasari described it as 'the most celebrated, the greatest work... that Titian has ever done'. Titian had important secular as well as ecclesiastical patrons in this energetic period of his career, one of his most important commissions being three mythological pictures \(1518-23\) for Alfonso d'Este - the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal \(both in the Prado, Madrid\), and the Bacchus and Ariadne \(National Gallery, London\). Outstanding among his portraits of the time is the exquisite Man with a Glove \(Louvre, Paris, c. 1520\). About 1530, the year in which his wife died, a change in Titian's manner becomes apparent. The vivacity of former years gave way to a more restrained and meditative art. He now began to use related rather than contrasting colours in juxtaposition, yellows and pale shades rather than the strong blues and reds of his previous work. In composition too he became less adventurous and used schemes which, compared with some of his earlier works, appear almost archaic. Thus his large Presentation of the Virgin \(Accademia, Venice, 1534-38\) makes use of the relief-like frieze composition dear to the quattrocento. During the 1530s Titian's fame spread throughout Europe. In 1530 he… ## Related artworks - [A Knight of Malta]() - [Adam and Eve]() - [Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence]() - [Angel of the Annunciation]() - [Annunciation]() - [Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle \(detail\)]() - [Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle]() - [Assumption of the Virgin \(detail\)]() - [Assumption of the Virgin \(detail\)]() - [Assumption of the Virgin \(detail\)]() - [Assumption of the Virgin \(detail\)]() - [Assumption of the Virgin]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()