Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, was the greatest painter of the Venetian school and one of the towering figures of Western art. Born in the Alpine town of Pieve di Cadore around 1488, he trained under Giovanni Bellini and emerged from the shadow of Giorgione to become, by the 1520s, the most sought-after painter in Europe. Emperors, popes, and kings competed for his services, and his career spanned an astonishing seven decades, from the luminous mythologies of his youth to the dark, expressionistic canvases of his final years.
Titian’s contribution to painting was above all the primacy of colour over line. Where Florentine artists built their compositions on precise drawing, Titian constructed his directly with the brush, layering pigment in glazes and scumbles that created effects of unprecedented richness and vibrancy. His Assumption of the Virgin (1518) burst upon Venice like a revelation, its reds and golds blazing from the altar of the Frari. His Venus of Urbino (1538) became the definitive reclining nude, its warm flesh tones and frank gaze inspiring Manet’s Olympia three centuries later.
In his last decades Titian developed a radically loose technique — his contemporary Vasari described him painting with his fingers — that anticipated the painterly freedom of Rembrandt and Velázquez. His late Pietà, left unfinished at his death from plague in 1576, is a shattering meditation on mortality, its forms dissolving into darkness with a modernity that still astonishes.