Titian: The Venetian Master of Color

Titian was born around 1488–90 in Pieve di Cadore, a small village high in the Alps, north of Venice. At nine he was sent to Venice to train, first with a master of mosaics, then in the workshop of the Bellini family, where his real teacher was Giovanni Bellini, the greatest Venetian painter of the day.¹

As a young man he worked closely with another of Bellini's followers, Giorgione. Their early works are so close that telling them apart is still nearly impossible. After Giorgione's death in 1510, Titian even finished the landscape of Giorgione's Sleeping Venus.¹

Britannica notes that Titian's early works clearly show his schooling in the Bellini workshop.¹ This small Madonna and Child at the Met dates from those years.

Venice, a city of water and reflected light, shaped its painters, as we saw with Canaletto and Turner centuries later.

Between 1516 and 1518 Titian painted the Assumption for the high altar of Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice: the Virgin rising to heaven amid a half-circle of angels while the apostles below gesture in astonishment. When it was unveiled, it was quickly recognized as the work of a very great genius.¹

His Pesaro Madonna (1519–26) created a new type of composition, flooded with sunlight and shadow, that later inspired Baroque masters such as Rubens and Van Dyck.¹

Bacchus and Ariadne was painted for Alfonso I d'Este's rooms in his castle at Ferrara. Its gaiety, pagan abandon and humor make it, for Britannica, one of the miracles of Renaissance art. Warm, rich color balances the deliberately asymmetrical group of figures.¹

In his paintings of Venus, Titian set a standard of physical beauty that, for Britannica, has never been surpassed.¹

When Rubens visited Madrid in 1628, he spent his time copying Titian's paintings in the royal collection.² Tate also traces the first noticeable impasto, thick textured paint, to Titian and Tintoretto.³