Titian: The Master of Colour Who Defined Venetian Painting

A Boy from the Mountains

Tiziano Vecellio, known in English as Titian, was born in Pieve di Cadore, a small town in the Dolomite mountains north of Venice, near Belluno. His exact birth year is unknown and has been debated for centuries. Most modern scholars place it between about 1488 and 1490. In old age Titian himself claimed, in a letter to King Philip II of Spain, to be much older, which would place his birth in the mid-1470s. Historians generally doubt this: an old artist asking a king for payment had good reasons to stress his great age. Whatever the true date, Titian lived a very long life for his time and was active as a painter for about seventy years.

His family, the Vecellio, were respected in Cadore. His father, Gregorio, held local posts and served as a soldier. Cadore belonged to the Republic of Venice, and the mountain landscapes of Titian's childhood, with their blue peaks and wooded slopes, later appeared again and again in the backgrounds of his paintings.

Training in Venice: The Bellini Workshop and Giorgione

According to early biographers, Titian was sent to Venice as a boy, perhaps at the age of about nine or ten, together with his brother Francesco, who also became a painter. He is said to have first learned from the mosaicist Sebastiano Zuccato and then entered the workshop of the Bellini family. Gentile Bellini was then the official painter of the Republic, and his brother Giovanni Bellini was the most admired painter in Venice. From Giovanni, Titian learned the Venetian love of soft light and rich colour built up in oil paint.

The decisive influence on the young artist, however, was Giorgione, a slightly older painter who had developed a new, poetic way of painting: figures blending softly into landscapes, moods more important than stories, and colour laid down directly without detailed preparatory drawings. In 1508 the two worked on frescoes for the outside walls of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the large trading house of the German merchants beside the Rialto Bridge. Only faded fragments survive today. Titian's style was at this stage so close to Giorgione's that experts still argue about who painted some works, such as the famous Pastoral Concert in the Louvre, now usually given to Titian.

In 1511 Titian painted three frescoes with the miracles of Saint Anthony in the Scuola del Santo in Padua. They show his early ability to tell a story with strong, solid figures.

The First Painter of Venice

Giorgione died young, of plague, in 1510, and Giovanni Bellini died in 1516. Titian quickly became the leading painter in the city. In 1513 he offered his services to the Venetian government, and he later received the sanseria, a paid post at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi that in practice made him the official painter of the state. It obliged him, among other things, to paint the portrait of each new doge.

Two works from these years show the range of his talent. Sacred and Profane Love, painted around 1514, probably to celebrate the marriage of the Venetian official Niccolò Aurelio, shows two beautiful women, one richly dressed and one almost nude, seated on either side of a carved fountain in an evening landscape. Its meaning is still debated, but its calm beauty is one of the high points of the Giorgione-inspired style.

Shortly afterwards Titian received a very different commission: a huge altarpiece for the high altar of the Franciscan church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. The Assumption of the Virgin, known as the Assunta, was painted between 1515 and 1518. It is almost seven metres high and shows the Virgin Mary rising to heaven on a cloud, while the apostles below reach up in amazement and God the Father waits above. Its energy, scale and intense reds were something new in Venice, and according to early reports the friars were at first unsure about it. It soon made Titian famous. A few years later he painted another important altarpiece for the same church, the Pesaro Madonna (1519–1526), which broke with tradition by placing the Virgin off-centre, on a diagonal.

Mythologies for the Courts of Italy

Titian's reputation spread beyond Venice to the princely courts of northern Italy. For Duke Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara he painted three large mythological scenes for a private room in the ducal castle, often called the Camerino d'Alabastro (the Alabaster Room). Alfonso had first hoped to obtain works from Raphael and Fra Bartolomeo, but Titian ended up supplying the core of the series: The Worship of Venus, The Bacchanal of the Andrians (both now in the Prado, Madrid) and Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523, National Gallery, London). In the last of these, the wine god leaps from his chariot towards the abandoned princess Ariadne in a burst of movement and brilliant blue and red. Titian also repainted parts of the landscape of Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods, which hung in the same room.

He worked too for Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, and for Francesco Maria della Rovere and his son Guidobaldo, the rulers of Urbino. For Guidobaldo he painted the Venus of Urbino, begun around 1534 and delivered in 1538, now in the Uffizi in Florence. It shows a reclining nude woman in a Venetian palace interior, with a small dog sleeping at her feet and two maids looking into a chest in the background. Building on a composition by Giorgione, it set the pattern for the reclining nude in European painting for centuries.

Painter to an Emperor and a King

Titian's greatest patron was the Habsburg emperor Charles V, the most powerful ruler in Europe. Titian probably met him in Bologna in the early 1530s and painted his portrait. In 1533 the emperor made him a Count Palatine and a Knight of the Golden Spur, rare honours for a painter. An often repeated story says that Charles once picked up a brush that Titian had dropped, but it is probably a legend.

In 1548 Titian travelled across the Alps to the imperial court at Augsburg. There he painted Charles V at Mühlberg (Prado), showing the emperor in armour on horseback after his victory over the Protestant princes in 1547. The painting became the model for many later royal equestrian portraits. Titian also painted the emperor's son, the future Philip II of Spain, who became his main patron after Charles V gave up his thrones in the mid-1550s.

For Philip, Titian created a series of large mythological paintings based mostly on the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid. He called them poesie (poems), because he saw them as painted equivalents of poetry. The series included Danaë, Venus and Adonis, Perseus and Andromeda, Diana and Callisto, The Rape of Europa and Diana and Actaeon (1556–1559). In this last work the hunter Actaeon accidentally stumbles upon the goddess Diana bathing with her nymphs, a moment that will lead to his terrible punishment. In 2009 the National Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland bought it together for 50 million pounds, and the two institutions also acquired Diana and Callisto in 2012.

Portraits, Rome and Michelangelo

Titian was one of the greatest portrait painters in history. Kings, popes, cardinals, writers, merchants and noblewomen wanted to be painted by him. He could show not only how a person looked but also their character and social position, often against a plain dark background with only a few accents of colour. Famous examples include the Man with a Blue Sleeve (National Gallery, London), the portraits of Isabella d'Este and of the writer Pietro Aretino, a close friend who promoted Titian's fame in his letters.

In 1545–1546 Titian visited Rome, the only long stay he made there. He painted Pope Paul III with his grandsons, a strikingly frank group portrait (now in Naples) that he left unfinished when he returned to Venice. He was granted Roman citizenship. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo visited Titian and praised his colour and style, but remarked afterwards that it was a pity the Venetians did not learn to draw better. The comment sums up a famous debate of the Renaissance: Florentine and Roman artists valued disegno (drawing and design), while Venetians like Titian valued colorito (colour and the handling of paint).

How Titian Painted

Titian worked mainly in oil on canvas, which was becoming the standard support in Venice instead of wooden panels. Canvas allowed very large pictures and gave a slightly rough surface that caught light and paint. Rather than making detailed drawings first, Titian usually composed directly on the canvas and changed his mind as he went. X-ray studies of many of his paintings show figures moved, added or painted out.

A later account, passed on from his pupil Palma il Giovane, describes his method in old age:

• he began by laying in the picture with a thick bed of colour, which served as a foundation;
• he then turned the canvas to the wall, sometimes for months, before looking at it again with fresh eyes, like an enemy, to find its faults;
• he built up the figures gradually with many layers and glazes;
• in the final stages he is said to have worked more with his fingers than with the brush, blending tones and softening edges.

This late style became increasingly free. In works such as The Flaying of Marsyas (Kroměříž, Czech Republic) and the Pietà (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice), forms seem to dissolve into flickering patches of colour and light. Vasari noted that Titian's late paintings looked confused from close up but came together perfectly from a distance. Some contemporaries thought they were unfinished; later artists saw them as a revolution.

Family, Workshop and Death

Titian lived with Cecilia, the daughter of a barber from Cadore, who gave him two sons, Pomponio and Orazio. He married her around 1525, and she died in 1530. His daughter Lavinia appears in several of his paintings. Orazio became his father's assistant. From 1531 Titian lived in a large house in the Biri Grande district of Venice, with a garden looking out over the lagoon towards the mountains, where he received friends such as Aretino and the architect Jacopo Sansovino.

Titian ran a busy workshop. Assistants produced copies and versions of his most successful compositions, and he often reworked them himself, which makes questions of attribution difficult. He was also a sharp businessman who constantly wrote to his patrons about payments and pensions.

He died in Venice on 27 August 1576, during a terrible plague epidemic that killed a large part of the city's population; the exact cause of his death is not certain. Orazio died of the plague shortly afterwards. Despite the strict rules during the epidemic, Titian was buried in the Frari, the church that held his Assunta. The Pietà that he had intended for his own tomb was finished after his death by Palma il Giovane.

A Lasting Influence

Titian's influence on European art is enormous. Painters such as Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Diego Velázquez and Rembrandt studied and copied his works, many of which were in the Spanish royal collection. Rubens made copies of several of the poesie, and Velázquez's free, sketch-like brushwork owes much to Titian's late manner. In the nineteenth century, Eugène Delacroix admired him, and Édouard Manet based his scandalous Olympia (1863) on the Venus of Urbino. Titian's portraits fixed the image of the Renaissance ruler, and his mythologies shaped how artists painted ancient stories for centuries.

A few lesser-known details show how far his fame reached. In English, a reddish-golden hair colour is still sometimes called "Titian" or "Titian red", after the women in his paintings. Much of what we know about his life comes from Vasari, who visited him in Venice in 1566, and from his letters to patrons. Above all, Titian showed that colour and the visible movement of the brush could carry as much meaning as line and drawing, an idea that leads directly to modern painting.