Titian - Ritratto Di Ranuccio Farnese (1542)

Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio (; 27 August 1576), known in English as Titian ( ), was an Italian (Venetian) painter of the Renaissance, considered the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno. During his lifetime he was often called ''da Cadore'', 'from Cadore', taken from his native region.

Recognized by his contemporaries as "The Sun Amidst Small Stars" (recalling the final line of Dante's '' Paradiso''), 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, exercised 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.

During the course of 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, their loose brushwork and subtlety of tone were without precedent in the history of Western painting.

Biography

Early years

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, King of Spain, to have been born in 1474, but this seems most unlikely. Cecil Gould, The Sixteenth Century Italian Schools, National Gallery Catalogues, p. 265, London, 1975, Other writers contemporary to his old age give figures that would equate to birthdates 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. Gregorio was superintendent of the castle of Pieve di Cadore and managed local mines for their owners.David Jaffé (ed), Titian, The National Gallery Company/Yale, p. 11, London 2003, Gregorio was also a distinguished councilor and soldier. Many relatives, including Titian's grandfather, were notaries, and the family were well-established in the area, which was ruled by Venice.

At the age of about ten to twelve Titian and his brother Francesco (who perhaps followed later) were sent to an uncle in Venice to find an apprenticeship with a painter. The minor painter Sebastian Zuccato, whose sons became well-known mosaicists, and who may have been a family friend, arranged for the brothers to enter the studio of the elderly Gentile Bellini, from which they later transferred to that of his brother Giovanni Bellini. At that time the Bellinis, especially Giovanni, were the leading artists in the city. There 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, later became a painter of some note in Venice.

A fresco of Hercules on the Morosini Palace is said to have been one of Titian's earliest works. Others were the Bellini-esque so-called '' Gypsy Madonna'' in Vienna, and the ''Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth'' (from the convent of Sant'Andrea), now in the Accademia, Venice.

'' 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 borrowed the composition for his self-portraits.

Titian joined Giorgione as an assistant, but many contemporary critics already found Titian's work more impressive—for example, in exterior frescoes (now almost totally destroyed) that they collaborated on for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (state-warehouse for the German merchants). Their relationship evidently contained a significant element of rivalry. Distinguishing between their work 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 by Giorgione.

The two young masters were likewise recognized as the leaders of their new school of ''arte moderna'', which is characterized by paintings made more flexible, freed from symmetry and the remnants of hieratic conventions still found in the works of Giovanni Bellini.

In 1507–1508, Giorgione was commissioned by the state to create frescoes on the re-erected Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Titian and Morto da Feltre worked along with him, and some fragments of paintings remain, probably by Giorgione. Some of their work is known, in part, through the engravings of Fontana. After Giorgione's early death in 1510, Titian continued to paint Giorgionesque subjects for some time, though his style developed its own features, including bold and expressive brushwork.

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, The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, which depicts the ''Murder of a Young Woman by Her 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.

Growth

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, leaving Titian unrivaled in the Venetian School. For sixty years he was the undisputed master of Venetian painting. In 1516, he completed his famous masterpiece, the ''Assumption of the Virgin'', for the high altar of the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, where it is still ''in situ''. 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.

The pictorial structure of the ''Assumption''—that of uniting in the same composition two or three scenes superimposed on different levels, earth and heaven, the temporal and the infinite—was continued in a series of works such as the retable of San Domenico at Ancona (1520), the retable of Brescia (1522), and the retable of San Niccolò (1523), in the Vatican Museums, each time attaining to a higher and more perfect conception. He finally reached a classic formula in the '' Pesaro Madonna'', better known as the Madonna di Ca' Pesaro (c. 1519–1526), also for the Frari church. This is perhaps his most studied work, whose patiently developed plan is set forth with supreme display of order and freedom, originality and style. Here Titian gave a new conception of the traditional groups of donors and holy persons moving in aerial space, the plans and different degrees set in an architectural framework.

Titian was then at the height of his fame, and towards 1521, following the production of a figure of St. Sebastian for the papal legate in Brescia (of which there are numerous replicas), purchasers pressed for his work.

To this period belongs a more extraordinary work, ''The Death of St. Peter Martyr'' (1530), formerly in the Dominican Church of San Zanipolo, and destroyed by an Austrian shell 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 looks forward to 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, probably courtesans, such as '' Flora'' of the Uffizi, or ''Woman with a Mirror'' in the Louvre (th
scientific images of this painting
are available, with explanations, on the website of the French Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France).

Maturity

Titian's skill with colour is exemplified by his '' Danaë'', one of several mythological paintings, or "poesie" ("poems") as the painter called them. This painting was done for Alessandro Farnese, but a later variant was produced for Philip II, for whom Titian painted many of his most important mythological paintings. Although Michelangelo adjudged this piece deficient from the point of view of drawing, Titian and his studio produced several versions for other patrons.

Another famous painting is ''Bacchus and Ariadne'', depicting Theseus, whose ship is shown in the distance and who has just left Ariadne at Naxos, when Bacchus arrives, jumping from his chariot, drawn by two cheetahs, and falling immediately in love with Ariadne. Bacchus raised her to heaven. Her constellation is shown in the sky. 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 even tried to commission Michelangelo and Raphael.

During the next period (1530–1550), Titian developed the style introduced by his dramatic ''Death of St. Peter Martyr''. In 1538, the Venetian government, dissatisfied with Titian's neglect of his work for the ducal palace, ordered him to refund the money he had received, and Il Pordenone, his rival of recent years, was installed in his place. However, at the end of a year Pordenone died, and Titian, who meanwhile applied himself diligently to painting in the hall the ''Battle of Cadore'', was reinstated.

This major battle scene 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. It depicted in life-size the moment when the Venetian general d'Alviano attacked the enemy, with horses and men crashing down into a stream. It was Titian's most important attempt at a tumultuous and heroic scene of movement to rival Raphael's ''Battle of Constantine'', Michelangelo's equally ill-fated ''Battle of Cascina'', and Leonardo da Vinci's ''The Battle of Anghiari'' (these last two unfinished). There remains only a poor, incomplete copy at the Uffizi, and a mediocre engraving by Fontana. The ''Speech of the Marquis del Vasto'' (Madrid, 1541) was also partly destroyed by fire. But this period of the master'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 painting had a great influence on Bolognese art and Rubens, both in the handling of details and the general effect of horses, soldiers, lictors, powerful stirrings of crowds at the foot of a stairway, lit by torches with the flapping of banners against the sky.

Less successful were the pendentives of the cupola at Santa Maria della Salute (''Death of Abel'', ''Sacrifice of Abraham'', ''David and Goliath''). These violent scenes viewed in perspective from below were by their very nature in unfavourable situations. They were nevertheless much admired and imitated, Rubens among others applying this system to his forty ceilings (the sketches only remain) of the Jesuit church at 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, but here a purple drapery substituted for a landscape background changed, by its harmonious colouring, the whole meaning of the scene.

From the beginning of his career, Titian was a masterful portrait-painter, in works like ''La Bella'' (Eleanora de Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, at the Pitti Palace). 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". Among portrait-painters Titian is compared to Rembrandt and Velázquez, with the interior life of the former, and the clearness, certainty, and obviousness of the latter.

These qualities show in the ''Portrait of Pope Paul III

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