Titian

Born Tiziano Vecellio in Pieve di Cadore in the Dolomites and trained in the Venice of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, Titian became the dominant figure of the Venetian school and one of the most consequential painters in the history of Western art — a career that lasted almost eighty years and did not stop evolving. After Giorgione's death in 1510 and Bellini's in 1516, there was no Venetian painter who could challenge him, and none of comparable stature appeared in Venice until Tintoretto and Veronese emerged a generation later. His importance rests on three distinct achievements, any one of which would have been sufficient for a major reputation. The altarpieces — the Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18) for the Frari, the Pesaro Madonna (1526), the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence — established a new scale of monumental religious painting in Venice. The mythologies painted for Alfonso d'Este's camerino in Ferrara and later for Philip II of Spain — the Bacchanals, the Venus and Adonis, the poesie (painted poems) of Diana and Actaeon, the Rape of Europa — brought an unidealized sensuality and physical immediacy to classical subjects that had no precedent. And the late work, produced from his seventies onward with a brushwork of extraordinary looseness — thick impastos, dragged and scraped paint, colors built in layers of glaze and loaded strokes — prefigures the Baroque and anticipates the freedom of 19th-century paint handling. He died in Venice in August 1576, possibly of plague, at an age estimated at anywhere between eighty-five and ninety-three. The Venetian Senate had required that plague victims be buried without ceremony, but made an exception for him. Every major subsequent painter — Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Poussin, Delacroix — studied him; Velázquez copied him at the Escorial; Manet took the composition of the Olympia directly from Titian's Venus of Urbino.