Titian

Titian, born Tiziano Vecellio, was the leading painter of Renaissance Venice and one of the most influential artists in European history. Over a career of some sixty years he excelled at altarpieces, portraits and scenes from classical myth, and his rich colour and increasingly loose, expressive brushwork shaped painters from Rubens to Rembrandt and Velázquez. His patrons ran from the Venetian state to Emperor Charles V and King Philip II of Spain.

Titian was born at Pieve di Cadore, a mountain district in the Dolomites ruled by the Republic of Venice. The year is uncertain. In old age he told Philip II that he had been born in 1474, and for centuries he was believed to have died at 99, but most modern scholars place his birth between 1488 and 1490. His family were local notables; his father Gregorio was a soldier, timber merchant and mine manager.

According to a writer who knew him, he was sent to Venice at about nine to live with an uncle and train with a mosaicist, then moved to the large workshop of Gentile Bellini and afterwards to Gentile's brother Giovanni, the city's leading painter. Neither this account nor rival versions can be confirmed, since no work by Titian is documented before 1510. He fell in with a circle of young painters including Giorgione, with whom he painted frescoes on the German merchants' warehouse by the Rialto around 1508–1509. The two were rivals, and many pictures once given to Giorgione are now attributed to Titian.

With the deaths of Giorgione in 1510 and Giovanni Bellini in 1516, Titian was left unchallenged in the city. His breakthrough was the Assumption of the Virgin, commissioned in 1515 for the high altar of the Frari church, a huge panel whose scale and colour caused a sensation; it is still in place. For Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, he painted lively mythological scenes, among them Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523). In 1523 the Venetian state granted him a broker's office that marked him as its quasi-official painter, though he took until 1538 to finish the battle picture he owed in return.

In 1533, after painting Charles V at Bologna, Titian was made a count palatine and a knight, an honour almost unknown for a painter. He crossed the Alps to join the emperor at Augsburg in 1548, where he painted the equestrian portrait celebrating Charles's victory at Mühlberg. He also portrayed Pope Paul III and was given the freedom of Rome during a visit in 1545–1546. His reclining nudes, such as the Venus of Urbino, were eagerly sought by princes and cardinals.

From the 1550s commissions from Charles and his son Philip II of Spain dominated his output. For Philip he painted the poesie, large mythological canvases drawn mainly from Ovid, including Diana and Actaeon and The Rape of Europa. To meet demand he ran his workshop on almost industrial lines, with assistants producing replicas that he then retouched.

Titian's late paintings are loosely handled and dark in tone, built up and reworked over many years. His last work, a Pietà intended for his own tomb, shows the aged painter kneeling before the dead Christ. He died in Venice on 27 August 1576, during an outbreak of plague, aged somewhere between 86 and 90, and was buried in the Frari. His son and assistant Orazio died of the plague shortly afterwards.

Contemporaries contrasted Titian's colour with the emphasis on drawing of Michelangelo and Florence, and the debate between colour and design shaped art theory for centuries. In 1590 the theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo called him "the sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world". Rembrandt based self-portraits on one of his early portraits, and his Venetian ceiling paintings influenced Rubens and the Baroque.

Our 1500 map shows the Republic of Venice and its mainland territories as Titian began his career, and the 1530 map shows the Habsburg power of Charles V at the height of his patronage.