Titian

Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio (c. 1488-90 – August 27, 1576), commonly known as Titian, was one of the greatest 16th century Renaissance painters of Venice, Italy.

Growth

Giorgione died in 1510 and the aged Bellini in 1516, leaving Titian after the production of such masterpieces without a rival in the Venetian School. For sixty years he was to be the absolute and undisputed head, the official master, and as it were the painter laureate of the Republic Serenissime. As early as 1516 he succeeded his old master Bellini as the pensioner of the Senate.

Related Topics:
1510 - 1516

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During this period (1516–1530) which may be called the period of his bloom and maturity, the artist freed himself from the traditions of his youth, undertook a class of more complex subjects and for the first time attempted the monumental style.

Related Topics:
1516 - 1530

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In 1518 he produced, for the high altar of the church of the Frari, one of his most world-renowned masterpieces, the Assumption of the Madonna, now in the

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Venetian Academy. It excited a vast sensation, being indeed the most

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extraordinary piece of colourist execution on a great scale which Italy had yet seen. The signoria took note of the facts and did not fail to observe that Titian was neglecting his work in the hall of the great council.

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The theme of the Assumption—that of uniting in the same

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composition two or three scenes superimposed on different levels,

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earth and heaven, the temporal and the infinite—was continued in a

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series of works such as the retable of San Domenico at Ancona (1520),

Related Topics:
Ancona - 1520

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the retable of Brescia (1522), and the retable of San Niccolo (1523,

Related Topics:
1522 - 1523

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at the Vatican), each time attaining to a higher and more perfect conception, finally reaching an unsurpassable formula in the Pesaro retable, (1526), in the Church of the Frari at Venice. This perhaps is

Related Topics:
Vatican - 1526

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his most perfect and most studied work, whose patiently developed plan

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is set forth with supreme display of order and freedom, of originality

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and style. Here Titian gave a new conception of the traditional groups

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of donors and holy persons moving in aerial space, the plans and

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different degrees set in an architectural framework.

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Vecelli was now at the height of his fame; and towards 1521, following the production of a figure of St Sebastian for the papal legate in Brescia (a work of which there are numerous replicas), purchasers became extremely urgent for his productions.

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To this period belongs a still more extraordinary work, The Death of St. Peter of Verona (1530), formerly in the Dominican Church of San Zanipolo, and destroyed by an Austrian shell in 1867. There now exist only copies of this sublime picture (there is an excellent one at Paris in the Ecole des Beaux Arts). The association of the landscape with a scene of murder—a rapidly brutal scene of slaying, a cry rising above the old oak-trees, a Dominican escaping the ambush, and over all the shudder and stir of the dark branches—this is all, but never perhaps has tragedy more swift, startling, and pathetic been depicted even by Tintoretto or Delacroix.

Related Topics:
1530 - San Zanipolo - 1867 - Paris - Ecole des Beaux Arts - Dominican - Tintoretto - Delacroix

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The artist continued simultaneously his series of small Madonnas which he treated more and more amid beautiful landscapes in the manner of genre pictures or poetic pastorals, the Virgin with the Rabbit in the Louvre being the finished type of these pictures. Another

Related Topics:
Madonnas - Louvre

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marvelous work of the same period, also in the Louvre, is the

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Entombment, surpassing all that has been done on the same subject.

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This was likewise the period of the exquisite mythological scenes,

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such as the famous Bacchanals of Madrid, and the Bacchus and

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Ariadne of London, perhaps the most brilliant productions of the

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neo-pagan culture or "Alexandrianism" of the Renaissance, many times

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imitated but never surpassed even by Rubens himself. Finally this was the period of perfect mastery when the artist composed the half-length figures and busts of young women, such as Flora of the Uffizi, or The Young Woman at Her Toilet in the Louvre (also called, without reason, Laura de Dianti or The Mistress of Titian), and which will

Related Topics:
Rubens - Uffizi

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always remain the ideal image of harmonious beauty and the grace of

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life at one of the periods which best knew the happiness of existence.

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In 1525, after some irregular living and a consequent fever, he married a lady of whom only the Christian name, Cecilia, has come down to us; he hereby

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legitimized their first child, Pornponio, and two (or perhaps three)

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others followed. Towards 1526 he became acquainted, and soon exceedingly intimate, with Pietro Aretino, the literary bravo, of influence and audacity hitherto unexampled, who figures so strangely in the chronicles of the time. Titian sent a portrait of him to Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. A great affliction befell him in August 1530 in the death of his wife. He then, with his three children, one of them being the infant Lavinia, whose birth had been fatal to the mother, removed to a new home and got his sister Orsa to

Related Topics:
1526 - Pietro Aretino - Mantua - 1530

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come from Cadore and take charge of the household. The mansion,

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difficult now to find, is in the Bin Grande, then a fashionable

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suburb, being in the extreme end of Venice, on the sea, with beautiful

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gardens and a look-out towards Murano.

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