Tiziano Vecellio, Latinized as Titianus, hence known in English as Titian, was an Italian Renaissance painter. The most important artist of Renaissance Venetian painting, he was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno.
Paintings by Titian
Venus of Urbino (1538)
The Venus of Urbino (also known as Reclining Venus) is an oil painting by Italian painter Titian, depicting a nude young woman, traditionally identified with the goddess Venus, reclining on a couch or bed in the sumptuous surroundings of a Renaissance palace. Work on the painting seems to have begun anywhere from 1532 or 1534, and was perhaps completed in 1534, but not sold until 1538. It is currently held in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence.
The figure’s pose derives from the Dresden Venus made around 1510–11, traditionally attributed to Giorgione but with the landscape completed by Titian. In this painting, Titian places Venus indoors, meets the viewer’s gaze, and makes her sensuality explicit. Iconographic interpretations of the painting among art historians fall into two groups; both agree that the painting has a powerful erotic charge, but beyond that, it is seen either as a portrait of a courtesan, perhaps Zaffetta, or as a painting celebrating the marriage of its first owner (who according to some may not have commissioned it).
Sacred and Profane Love (1514)
Sacred and Profane Love (Italian: Amor Sacro e Amor Profano) is an oil painting by Titian, probably painted in 1514, early in his career. The painting is presumed to have been commissioned by Niccolò Aurelio, a secretary to the Venetian Council of Ten, whose coat of arms appears on the sarcophagus or fountain, to celebrate his marriage to a young widow, Laura Bagarotto. It perhaps depicts a figure representing the bride dressed in white, sitting beside Cupid and accompanied by the goddess Venus.
The title of the painting is first recorded in 1693, when it was listed in an inventory as Amor Divino e Amor Profano (Divine love and Profane love), and may not represent the original concept at all.
Assumption of the Virgin (Titian) (1517)
The Assumption of the Virgin or Frari Assumption, popularly known as the Assunta, is a large altarpiece panel painting in oils by the Italian Renaissance artist Titian, painted in 1515–1518. It remains in the position it was designed for, on the high altar of the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari or Frari church in Venice. It is the largest altarpiece in the city, with the figures well over life-size, necessitated by the large church, with a considerable distance between the altar and the congregation.
It marked a new direction in Titian's style, reflecting his awareness of the developments in High Renaissance painting further south, in Florence and Rome, by artists including Raphael and Michelangelo. The agitated figures of the Apostles marked a break with the usual meditative stillness of saints in Venetian painting, in the tradition of Giovanni Bellini and others.
Sleeping Venus (Giorgione) (1509)
The Sleeping Venus (Italian: Venere dormiente), also known as the Dresden Venus (Venere di Dresda), is a painting traditionally attributed to the Italian Renaissance painter Giorgione, although it has long been widely thought that Titian completed it after Giorgione's death in 1510. The landscape and sky are generally accepted to be mainly by Titian. In the 21st century, much scholarly opinion has shifted further, to see the nude figure of Venus as also painted by Titian, leaving Giorgione's contribution uncertain. It is in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. After World War II, the painting was briefly in possession of the Soviet Union.
The painting, one of the last works by Giorgione (if it is), portrays a nude woman whose profile seems to echo the rolling contours of the hills in the background. It is the first known reclining nude in Western painting, and together with the Pastoral Concert (Louvre), another painting disputed between Titian and Giorgione, it established "the genre of erotic mythological pastoral", with female nudes in a landscape, accompanied in that case by clothed males. A single nude woman in any position was an unusual subject for a large painting at this date, although it was to become popular for centuries afterwards, as "the reclining female nude became a distinctive feature of Venetian painting".
Flora (Titian) (1517)
Flora is an oil painting by Italian late Renaissance painter Titian, dated to around 1515 and now held at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
The work was reproduced in numerous 16th century etchings. Later, it followed an unclear series of changes of hands at Brussels and Vienna. In the 17th century, it was sold by the Spanish ambassador at Amsterdam to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria and was cited by Rembrandt in his Saskia Dressing as Flora of London and in two portraits in Dresden and New York. Later included in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, it was one of the works exchanged with the Uffizi.
Equestrian Portrait of Charles V (1548)
Equestrian Portrait of Charles V (also Emperor Charles V on Horseback or Charles V at Mühlberg) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Titian. Created between April and September 1548 while Titian was at the imperial court of Augsburg, it is a tribute to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, following his victory in the April 1547 Battle of Mühlberg against the Protestant armies.
The portrait in part gains its impact by its directness and sense of contained power: the horse's strength seems just in check, and Charles' brilliantly shining armour and the painting's deep reds are reminders of battle and heroism. According to Hugh Trevor-Roper, he "does not exult in his victory. He is staid, controlled, pensive, but serene". Titian recorded all of the foreground elements—the horse, its caparison, and the rider's armour—from those used in the actual battle. Both the armour and harness survive, and are kept at the Royal Armoury in Madrid. It was in the Spanish royal collection until transferred to the Museo del Prado in 1827.
The Feast of the Gods (1529)
The Feast of the Gods (Italian: Il festino degli dei) is an oil painting by the Italian Renaissance master Giovanni Bellini, with substantial additions in stages to the left and center landscape by Dosso Dossi and Titian. It is one of the few mythological pictures by the Venetian artist. Completed in 1514, it was his last major work. It is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., which calls it "one of the greatest Renaissance paintings in the United States".
The painting is the first major depiction of the subject of the "Feast of the Gods" in Renaissance art, which was to remain in currency until the end of Northern Mannerism over a century later. It has several similarities to another, much less sophisticated, treatment painted by the Florentine artist Bartolomeo di Giovanni in the 1490s, now in the Louvre.
Allegory of Prudence (1550)
The Allegory of Prudence (c. 1550–1565) is an oil-on-canvas painting attributed to the Italian artist Titian and his assistants. The painting portrays three human heads, each facing in a different direction, above three animal heads (from left to right, a wolf, a lion and a dog). It is in the National Gallery, London.
The painting is usually interpreted as operating on a number of levels. At the first level, the different ages of the three human heads represent the three ages of man (from left to right: old age, maturity and youth), a subject that Titian had depicted 50 years earlier in his The Three Ages of Man. The different directions in which they are facing reflect a second, wider concept of time itself as having a past, present and future. This theme is repeated in the animal heads: an animal with three heads (wolf, lion, dog) to represent the passage of time (past, present, future) is associated with Serapis in Macrobius's Saturnalia, and associated with Apollo by Petrarch, and the iconography is repeated for example in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna (1499), the Hieroglyphica of Pierio Valeriano (1556), and the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa (1643). The third level, from which the painting has acquired its present name, is suggested by a barely visible inscription above the portraits: EX PRÆTE/RITO // PRÆSENS PRVDEN/TER AGIT // NI FVTVRA / ACTIONĒ DE/TVRPET (Latin for "from the experience of the past, the present acts prudently, lest it spoil future actions".)
Bacchus and Ariadne (1520)
Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523) is an oil painting by Titian. It is one of a cycle of paintings on mythological subjects produced for Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, for the Camerino d'Alabastro – a private room in his palazzo in Ferrara decorated with paintings based on classical texts. An advance payment was given to Raphael, who originally held the commission for the subject of a Triumph of Bacchus.
At the time of Raphael's death in 1520, only a preliminary drawing was completed. The commission was then handed to Titian. In the case of Bacchus and Ariadne, the subject matter was derived from the Roman poets Catullus and Ovid, and perhaps other classical authors.
Diana and Actaeon (Titian) (1557)
Diana and Actaeon is a large painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian, finished in 1556–1559, and is considered amongst Titian's greatest works. It portrays the moment in which the hunter Actaeon comes across the goddess Diana and her nymphs as they are bathing. Diana is furious, and will turn Actaeon into a stag, who is then pursued and killed by his own hounds, a scene Titian later painted in his The Death of Actaeon (National Gallery).
The story is typically located in woodland with very few structures aside from small works like walls and fountains. Titian adjusts this traditional setting by placing his characters in the arched stone ruins of a forest temple. Diana is the pale woman second from the right. She is wearing a crown with a crescent moon on it and is being covered by the dark skinned woman at the extreme right who may be her servant. The nymphs display a variety of reactions, and a variety of nude poses.
Pesaro Madonna (1522)
The Pesaro Madonna (Italian: Pala Pesaro) (better known as the Madonna di Ca' Pesaro) is a painting by the late Italian Renaissance master Titian, commissioned by Jacopo Pesaro, whose family acquired in 1518 the chapel in the Frari Basilica in Venice for which the work was painted, and where it remains today. Jacopo was Bishop of Paphos, in Cyprus, and had been named commander of the papal fleet by the Borgia pope, Alexander VI. This painting recalls one of Titian's earliest paintings, Jacopo Pesaro being presented by Pope Alexander VI to Saint Peter, c. 1510-11
Titian depicts his patron in a devotional stance, kneeling before the Virgin and presented to her by Saint Peter. Prominently displayed on the step is Saint Peter's key; its diagonal plane, leading toward the Virgin, parallels that of Jacopo. The Virgin's position at the top of the steps alludes to her celestial role as Madonna della Scala (Madonna of the Stairs) and as the Stairway to Heaven. Titian used his wife, who died in childbirth soon after, as the model for the Virgin Mary in this work.
The Rape of Europa (Titian) (1560)
The Rape of Europa is a painting by the Venetian artist Titian, painted c. 1560–1562. It is in the permanent collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston. The oil-on-canvas painting measures 178 by 205 centimetres (70 in × 81 in).
The title of the painting refers to the mythological story of the abduction of Europa by Zeus (Jupiter to the Romans). In the myth, the god assumed the form of a bull and enticed Europa to climb onto his back. Once there, the bull rode into the sea and carried her to Crete, where he revealed his real identity. Europa became the first Queen of Crete, and had three children with Zeus. When Zeus finally departed Crete, he gifted her three parting gifts, a necklace, a javelin, and a bronze guard.