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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.

He was born at Pieve di Cadore (Friuli) in Italy,
and died at Venice. He was commonly called during
his lifetime Da Cadore, from the place of his
birth, and has also been designated Il Divino. 
== Childhood ==
Titian was one of a family of four and son of
Gregorio Vecelli, a distinguished
councilor and soldier, and of his wife Lucia.

At the age of ten Titian was brought to Venice and
placed by his brother with the celebrated
mosaicist, Sebastian Zuccato, but at the end of
four or five years he entered the studio of the
aged painter Giovanni Bellini, at that time the
most noted artist in the city. There he found a
group of young men about his own age, among them
Giovanni Palma da Serinalta, Lorenzo Lotto,
Sebastiano del Piombo|Sebastiano Luciani, and
Giorgio da Castelfranco, nicknamed Giorgione. 
== Early work ==
A fresco of Hercules on the Morosini Palace is
said to have been one of his
earliest works; others were the Virgin and Child,
in the Vienna Belvedere, and the Visitation of
Mary and Elizabeth (from the convent of S.
Andrea), now in the Venetian Academy. 

Titian entered into partnership with Giorgione,
and it is difficult to distinguish their early
works.  The earliest known work of Titian, the
little Ecce Homo of the Scuola di San Rocco, was
long regarded as the work of Giorgione. And the
same confusion or uncertainty is connected with
more than one of the Sacred Conversations.


The two young masters were likewise recognized as
the two  leaders of their new school of Arte
moderna, that is of painting made  more  flexible,
freed from symmetry and the remnants of hieratic
conventions  still  to  be  found  in  the  works
of Giovanni Bellini.

In 1507–1508 Giorgione was commissioned by
the state to execute frescoes on the re-erected
Fondaco de Tedeschi. Titian and Morto da Feltre
worked along with him, and some fragments of
Titian's paintings remain. Some of their work is
known to us in part through the engraving of
Fontana. 

An idea of Titian's  talent  in  fresco  may  be
gained from those he painted, in 1511,  at  Padua
in the Carmelites|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 from the life of St.
Anthony of Padua, 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. 

Among  the religious paintings of this period may
be mentioned that of Antwerp (city)|Antwerp,  The 
Doges of Venice|Doge  Pesaro  presented  to St.
Peter by Alexander VI (1508),  and  the  beautiful
 Mark the Evangelist|St. Mark surrounded by Sts.
Saint Cosmas|Cosmas and Saint Damian|Damian,
Sebastian and Rocco (Venice, S. Maria della
Salute, c. 1511).

Already the young master was in possession of his
type of Mary, the mother of Jesus|Virgins with
powerful  shoulders  and  somewhat  rounded 
countenances,  and  in particular  he had
elaborated an extremely refined type of Christ,
the most  beautiful  example  of  which  is  the 
wonderful Christ of The Tribute  Money,  at
Dresden, a face whose delicacy, spirituality, and
moral  charm  have  never been surpassed by any
other School. From the same  period  seems to date
the Triumph of Faith, a subject borrowed from
Girolamo Savonarola|Savonarola's famous treatise,
The Triumph of the Cross, and treated  with  a
magnificent fire in the spirit of Mantegna's
cartoons and  Albrecht Dürer|Dürer's  prints  of
the Triumph of Maximilian (cf. Male, L'art
réligieux en France à la fin du moyen âge,
1908, 296 sqq.). 

But what may be called the most enduring  works 
of Titian's youth are the secular and
indeterminately allegorical ones.  An example  is
the charming picture of The Three Ages of Man, in
the Ellesmere Gallery;  such  especially is the
masterpiece in the Cassino Borghese, Profane  and 
Sacred Love, whose meaning has never been
successfully penetrated.

From Padua Titian in 1512 returned to Venice; and
in 1513 he obtained a broker's patent in the
Fondaco de Tedeschi (state-warehouse for the
German people|German merchants), termed La
Sanseria or Senseria (a privilege much coveted by
rising or risen artists), and became
superintendent of the government works, being
especially charged to complete 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, upon the death of Bellini, that he came into
actual enjoyment of his patent.  At the same date
an arrangement for painting was entered into with
Titian alone, to the exclusion of other artists
who had heretofore been associated with him. The
patent yielded him a good annuity of 20 crowns and
exempted him from certain taxes he being bound in
return to paint likenesses of the successive Doges
of Venice|Doges of his time at the fixed price of
eight crowns each. The actual number which he
executed was five.

== 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. 

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. 



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

The theme 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 Niccolo (1523,
at  the  Vatican City|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
his most perfect and most studied work, whose
patiently developed plan
is set forth with supreme display of order and
freedom, of 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. 

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. 

To this period belongs  a  still  more
extraordinary work, The Death of St. Peter of
Verona  (1530),  formerly in the Dominican Church
of Basilica di San Zanipolo|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 Order|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
Eugène Delacroix|Delacroix.

The artist continued simultaneously his series of
small Madonna (art)|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
marvelous  work  of  the  same  period,  also  in 
the Louvre, is the
Entombment,  surpassing  all that has been done on
the same subject.
This  was  likewise  the  period of the exquisite
mythological scenes,
such  as  the  famous  Bacchanals  of  Madrid, 
and the Bacchus and
Ariadne  of  London,  perhaps  the  most brilliant
productions of the
neo-pagan  culture  or "Alexandrianism" of the
Renaissance, many times
imitated  but never surpassed even by Peter Paul
Rubens|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
always  remain  the  ideal image of harmonious
beauty and the grace of
life at one of the periods which best knew the
happiness of existence.

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
legitimized their first child, Pornponio, and two
(or perhaps three)
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
come from Cadore and take charge of the household.
The mansion,
difficult now to find, is in the Bin Grande, then
a fashionable
suburb, being in the extreme end of Venice, on the
sea, with beautiful
gardens and a look-out towards Murano.

== Maturity ==

During  the next period  (1530-1550), as was
foreshadowed by his
Martyrdom  of St. Peter, Titian devoted himself
more and more to the
dramatic  style.  From  this time date his
historical scenes, of which
unhappily  it  is  difficult  to judge, the most
characteristic having
been  much  injured  or  destroyed;  thus, the
Battle of Cadore, the
artist's  greatest  effort  to  master  movement
and to express even
tumult,  his most violent attempt to go out of
himself and achieve the
heroic, wherein he rivals the War of Pisa, The
Battle of Anghiari,
and  the  Battle  of  Constantine,  perished  in 
1577,  the year of
Titian's  death,  in  the  fire  which  destroyed
all the old pictures
adorning  the  Doge's Palace. There is extant only
a poor, incomplete
copy  at  the  Uffizi,  and  a  mediocre engraving
by Fontana. In like
manner the Speech of the Marquis del Vasto
(Madrid, 1541) was partly
destroyed by fire. But this portion of the
master's work is adequately
represented  by  the  Presentation  of  the 
Blessed Virgin (Venice,
1539),  one  of his most popular canvasses, and by
the great Ecce Homo
(Vienna,  1541),  one  of  the  most  pathetic 
and  life-like  of
masterpieces.  

The  School  of  Bologna  and  Rubens  (Miracles
of St.
Benedict, St. Francis, etc.) many times borrowed
the distinguished and
magisterial  mise-en-scène,  the  grand and
stirring effect, and these
horses,  soldiers,  lictors, these powerful
stirrings of crowds at the
foot  of  a  stairway, while over all are the
light of torches and the
flapping  of  banners  against the sky, have been
often repeated. 

Less successful  were  the  pendentives  of  the
cupola at Sta. Maria della
Salute (Death of Abel, Sacrifice of Abraham, David
and Goliath).
These  violent  scenes  viewed  in  perspective
from below -- like the
famous  pendentives of the Sistine Chapel -- were
by their very nature
in  unfavorable  situations.  They were
nevertheless much admired and
imitated,  Rubens  among  others  applying  this 
system  to his forty
ceilings  (the  sketches  only  remain)  of  the 
Society of Jesus|Jesuit church at
Antwerp.


At this time also, the time of his visit to Rome,
the artist began his
series  of  reclining  Venuses  (The Venus of
Urbino of the Uffizi, Venus and Love  at  the 
same museum, Venus and the Organ-Player, Madrid),
in
which  must  be  recognized the effect or the
direct reflection of the
impression  produced  on the master by contact
with ancient sculpture.
Giorgione  had  already dealt with the subject in
the splendid Dresden
picture,  but  here a purple drapery substituted
for its background of
verdure was sufficient to change by its harmonious
coloring the whole
meaning of the scene. 

Furthermore Titian had from the beginning of his
career shown himself to be an
incomparable portrait-painter, in works like La 
Bella  (Eleanora de Gonzaga,  Duchess  of Urbino,
at the Pitti Palace). It is impossible to
enumerate, even briefly, Titian's splendid 
gallery of portraits; princes, or Doges, cardinals
or monks, 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 comparable only to
the greatest,  a  Rembrandt  or a Diego
Velasquez|Velásquez, with the interior life of
the former,  and  the clearness, certainty, and
obviousness of the latter. 

The  last-named  qualities are sufficiently
manifested in the Paul III of  Naples,  or  the 
sketch of the same pope and his two nephews, the
Aretino  of  the  Pitti Palace, the Eleanora of
Portugal (Madrid), and  the  series  of Charles V,
Holy Roman Emperor|King Charles V of the same
museum, the Charles V with a Greyhound (1533), and
especially the Charles V at Mühlberg (1548),  an 
equestrian  picture  which  as  a  symphony of
purples is perhaps the ne plus ultra of the art of
painting.

In 1532, after painting in Bologna a portrait of
the emperor Charles V, he was created a count
palatine and knight of the Golden Spur.  His
children were also made nobles of the empire,
which for a painter was a highly exceptional
honor.

The Venetian government, dissatisfied at Titian's
neglect of the work
for the ducal palace, ordered him in 1538 to
refund the money which he
had received for time unemployed; and Pordenone,
his formidable rival
of recent years, was installed in his place. At
the end of a year,
however, Pordenone died; and Titian, who had
meanwhile applied himself
diligently to painting in the hall the battle of
Cadore, was
reinstated. This great picture, which was burned
with several others
in 1577?, represented in life-size the moment at
which the Venetian
captain, Bartolomeo d'Alviano|D'Alviano, fronted
the enemy, with horses and men crashing
down into the stream. Fontanas engraving, and a
sketch by Titian
himself in the gallery of the Uffizi in Florence,
record the energetic
composition. 

As a matter of professional and worldly success,
his
position from about this time may be regarded as
higher than that of
any other painter known. to history, except
Raffaello Santi|Raphael, Michelangelo
Buonarroti|Michelangelo, and
at a later date Peter Paul Rubens|Rubens. In 1540
he received a pension from D'Avalos,
marquis del Vasto, and an annuity of 200 crowns
(which was afterwards
doubled) from Charles V on the treasury of Milan. 

Another source of
profit for he was always sufficiently keen after
money was a contract,
obtained in 1542, for supplying grain to Cadore,
which he visited with
regularity almost every year, and where he was
both generous and
influential. 

Titian had a
favorite villa on the neighboring Manza Hill, from
which (it may be
inferred) he made his chief observations of
landscape form and effect.
The so-called Titian's mill, constantly
discernible in his studies, is
at Collontola, near Belluno (see R. F. Heaths Life
of Titian, p. 5). 

A visit was paid to Rome in 1546, when he obtained
the freedom of the
city, his immediate predecessor in that honour
having been
Michelangelo Buonarroti|Michelangelo in 1537. He
could at the same time have succeeded the
painter Fra Sebastiano in his lucrative office of
the piombo, and he
made no scruple of becoming a friar for the
purpose; but this project
lapsed through his being summoned away from Venice
in 1547 to paint
Charles V. and others, in Augsburg. He was there
again in 1550, and
executed the portrait of Philip II of Spain|Philip
II., which was sent to England and
proved a potent auxiliary in the suit of the
prince for the hand of
Mary I of England|Queen Mary.

== Final Years ==

During  the  last  twenty-five years of his life
(1550-1576) the artist,
more and more absorbed in his work as a
portrait-painter and also more
self-critical,  an insatiable perfectionist,
finished  only a few great works. 

Some of his pictures he kept for ten years  in 
his  studio,  never  wearying  of  returning  to 
them  and retouching  them,  constantly  adding 
new  expressions  at  once more refined,  concise,
 and  subtle.  

For each of the problems which he successively
undertook he furnished a
new  and more perfect formula. He never again
equaled the emotion and
tragedy of the Crowning with Thorns (Louvre), in
the expression of the
mysterious  and  the  divine  he  never  equaled 
the  poetry  of the
Pilgrims  of  Emmaus, while in superb and heroic
brilliancy he never
again  executed  anything  more  grand  than The
Doge Grimani adoring
Faith (Venice, Doge's  Palace), or the Trinity, of
Madrid. 

On the other  hand  from  the  standpoint  of 
flesh  tints,  his most moving pictures  are those
of his old age, the Dan of Naples and of Madrid,
the  Antiope  of  the  Louvre, the Rape of Europa
(Boston, Gardner collection),  etc.  He  even 
attempted  problems  of  chiaroscuro  in fantastic
 night  effects  (Martyrdom of St. Laurence,
Church of the Jesuits,  Venice; St. Jerome,
Louvre). In the domain of the real he  always 
remained  equally strong, sure, and master of
himself; his portraits  of  Philip II of
Spain|Philip II (Madrid), those of his daughter,
Lavinia, and those of himself are numbered among
his masterpieces.

Vecelli had affianced his daughter Lavinia, the
beautiful girl whom he loved deeply and painted
various times, to Cornelio Sarcinelli of
Serravalle; she had succeeded her aunt Orsa, now
deceased, as the manager of the household, which,
with the lordly income that Titian made by this
time, was placed on a corresponding footing. The
marriage took place in 1554. She died in
childbirth in 1560. 

He was at the Council of Trent towards 1555, of
which his admirable picture or finished sketch in
the Louvre bears record. 

Titian's friend Aretino died suddenly in 1556, and
another
close intimate, the sculptor and architect Jacopo
Sansovino, in 1570.

In September 1565 Titian went to Cadore and
designed the decorations
for the church at Pieve, partly executed by his
pupils. One of these
is a Transfiguration, another an Annunciation (now
in S. Salvatore,
Venice), inscribed Titianus fecit, by way of
protest (it is said)
against the disparagement of some persons who
cavilled at the veteran's
failing handicraft. 

He continued to accept commissions to the last. He
had selected as the place for his burial the
chapel of the Crucifix in
the church of the Fran; and, in return for a
grave, he offered the
Franciscans a picture of the Pietà, representing
himself and his son
Orazio before the Saviour, another figure in the
composition being a
sibyl. This work he nearly finished; but some
differences arose
regarding it, and he then settled to be interred
in his native Pieve.

Titian was ninety-nine years of age (more or less)
when the plague,
which was then raging in Venice, seized him, and
carried him off on 27 August 1576. He was the only
victim of that plague outbreak to be given a
church burial and was interred in the Frari (Santa
Maria Gloriosa dei Frari), as at first intended,
and his Pietà was finished by Palma Giovane. He
lies near his own famous painting, the Madonna di
Ca' Pesaro. No
memorial marked his grave, until by Austrian
command Antonio Canova|Canova executed
the monument so well known to sightseers. 

Immediately after Titian's
own death, his son and pictorial assistant Orazio
died, of the same
epidemic. His sumptuous mansion was plundered
during the plague by
thieves.
== Critique ==
Ever since Titian rose into celebrity the general
verdict has been
that he is the greatest of painters, considered
technically. In the
first place neither the method of fresco painting
nor work of the
colossal scale to which fresco painting ministers
is here in question.

Titian's province is that of oil painting, and of
painting on a scale
which, though often large and grand, is not
colossal either in
dimension or in inspiration. Titian may properly
be regarded as the
greatest manipulator of paint in relation to
colour, tone, luminosity,
richness, texture, surface and harmony, and with a
view to-the
production of a pictorial whole conveying to the
eye a true, dignified
and beautiful impression of its general subject
matter and of the
objects of sense which form its constituent parts.
In this sense
Titian has never been deposed from his sovereignty
in painting, nor
can one forecast the time in which he will be
deposed. For the complex
of qualities which we sum up in the words colour,
handling and general
force and harmony of effect, he stands unmatched,
although in
particular items of forcible or impressive
execution-not to speak of
creative invention-some painters, one in one
respect and another in
another, may indisputably be preferred to him. 

He carried to its acme
that great colourist conception of the Venetian
school of which the
first masterpieces are due to the two Bellini, to
Canpaccio, and, with
more fully developed suavity of manner, to
Giorgione. Pre-eminent
inventive power or sublimity
of intellect he never evinced. Even in energy of
action and more
especially in majesty or affluence of composition
the palm is not his;
it is (so far as concerns the Venetian school)
assignable to
Tintoretto. 

Titian is a painter who by wondrous magic of
genius and
of art satisfies the eye, and through the eye the
feelings, sometimes
the mind.

Titian's pictures abound with memories of his home
country and of the
region which led from the hill-summits of Cadore
to the queen-city of
the Adriatic Sea|Adriatic. He was almost the first
painter to exhibit an
appreciation of mountains, mainly those of a
turreted type,
exemplified in the Dolomites. Indeed he gave to
landscape generally a
new and original vitality, expressing the quality
of the objects of
nature and their control over the sentiments and
imagination with a
force that had never before been approached. The
earliest Italian
picture expressly designated as landscape was one
which Vecelli sent
in 1552 to Philip II. 

His productive faculty was immense, even when we
allow for the abnormal length of his professional
career. In Italy,
England and elsewhere more than a thousand
pictures figure as
Titian's; of these about 250 may be regarded as
dubious or spurious.
There are, for instance, 6 pictures in the
National Gallery, London,
18 in the Louvre, 16 in the Pitti, 18 in the
Uffizi, 7 in the Naples
Museum, 8 in the Venetian Academy (besides the
series in the private
meeting-hall) and 41 in the Madrid Museum. In the
National Gallery 3
other works used to be assigned to Titian, but are
now regarded rather
as examples of his school.
== Family ==
Several other artists of the Vecelli family
followed in the wake of Titian. Francesco Vecelli,
his elder brother, was introduced to painting by
Titian (it is said at the age of twelve, but
chronology will hardly admit of this), and painted
in the church of S. Vito in Cadore a picture of
the titular saint armed. This was a noteworthy
performance, of which Titian (the usual story)
became jealous; so Francesco was diverted from
painting
to soldiering, and afterwards to mercantile life. 

Marco Vecelli, called Marco di Tiziano, Titian's
nephew, born in 1545, was constantly with the
master in his old age, and, learned his methods of
work. He has left some able productions in the
ducal palace, the Meeting of Charles V. and Pope
Clement VII|Clement VII. in 1529 ; in S. Giacomo
di Rialto, an Annunciation ; in SS. Giovani e
Paolo, Christ Fulminant. A son of Marco, named
Tiziano (or Tizianello), painted early in the 17th
century. 

From a different branch of the family came
Fabrizio di Ettore, a painter who died in 1580.
His brother Cesare, who also left some pictures,
is well known by his book of engraved costumes,
Abiti antichi e moderni. Tommaso Vecelli, also a
painter, died in 1620. There was another relative,
Girolamo Dante, who, being a scholar and assistant
of Titian, was called Girolamo di Tiziano. Various
pictures of his were touched up by the master, and
are difficult to distinguish from originals. 

Apart from members of his family, the scholars of
Titian were not numerous; Paris Bordone and
Bonifazio were the two of superior excellence. El
Greco (or Domenico Theotocopuli) was employed by
the master to engrave from his works. It is said
that Titian himself engraved on copper and on
wood, but this may well be questioned.

==External links==
commons|Titian
*http://www.abcgallery.com/T/titian/titian.html
Titian at Olga's Gallery
*http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/t/tiziano/i
ndex.html Tiziano Vecellio at Web Gallery of Art