NAME	YEARS	PLACE	ITER
Angioletto con tamburello	1511	Galleria Doria Pamphili	1 e 7
Sacra conversazione	1511	Galleria Doria Pamphili	1 e 7
Il battesimo di Cristo	1512	Pinacoteca Capitolina	1
Amor sacro e profano	1514-1515	Galleria Borghese	1 e 7
Salomè	1515	Galleria Doria Pamphili	1 e 7
Ritratto del violinista	1515	Galleria Spada	5
Madonna in gloria, con bambino e santi	1535	Pinacoteca Vaticana	9
Ritratto del Doge Nicolò Marcello	1542	Pinacoteca Vaticana	9
Ritratto del Cardinale Alessandro Farnese	1545-1546	Tivoli – Villa d'Este	Tivoli
Ritratto Filippo II	1553	Gall. Naz. d'arte antica Palazzo Barberini	3
Venere e Adone	1554	Gall. Naz. d'arte antica Palazzo Barberini	3
Venere che benda Amore	1565 circa	Galleria Borghese	7

Italian painter (Pieve di Cadore around 1488 - Venice 1576).

Modern critic has by now placed Tiziano 's birth date to years 1488 – 90 approximately, that was first thought to have been in years 1476-77 based on the assumption that the artist had died being over a hundred years old. Descendent of a noble family of magistrates, being younger than ten years old he followed his older brother Francesco, that started him off to painting in Sebastiano Zuccato's office, father of the renown moisaic artists Valerio and Francesco. Tradition has it that Zuccato entrusted the child to Gentile Bellini, whose teaching the precocious teenager had preferred over Zuccato's, who better than any other incarnated the pictorial ideal of those times. But mostly it was Giorgione's painting that provided the young student with the sample of perfect painting, from which to derive fundamental elements for his art. Giorgione's teaching was not at all passively received by Tiziano , but was instead so profoundly relived that some of his pictures were at the time though to be Giorgione's work, while he was still alive. This is the origin of one of the most fascinating, complex and debated problems of Italian art. An entire group of works, all of them datable between the 1509 and 1510 approximately, among the most popular due to their pictorial quality and poetic intensity, have been alternatively credited to one or the other of these two artists, or judged as the result of their collaboration, not even the radiographic examination has always served to settle every doubt on the paternity of the paintings or on the measure of Tiziano 's collaboration in Giorgione's works left uncompleted. This is the case of the Venere dormiente ( Sleeping Venus ; Dresda), of the Concerto campestre ( Country Concert ; Louvre), of the Concerto (Galleria Pitti, Florence), of the Adultera ( Adulteress ; Glasgow), and of other works still, for which Tiziano's intervention can be assumed following Giorgione's death. What's certain is that the collaboration between the two must have been very precocious: with Giorgione, Tiziano painted, when he was barely twenty, frescoes that are now almost completely disappeared in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Rialto (1508); the only ones of these to remain are the shadows of the Nuda (Venice, Accademia), by Giorgione, and the so-called Compagno della calza (Venezia, Palazzo Ducale) by Tiziano. Visible traces of Giorgione's teaching can be noted also in the tonal values of successive works, such as Madonna in trono (Prado) and S. Marco tra i quattro Santi (Venice, Sacrestia della Salute), in which the composition scheme of Castelfranco's altarpiece appears interpreted with greater energy in the poses and with neater highlight in the color effects. Tiziano rarely went far from Venice, which he had elected as his homeland, except for brief trips to Ferrara, Mantova, Rome and Augusta di Baviera and for his annual summer holidays in Conigliano. To record one of these exceptional periods of departure from the city, in which (as he himself writes in 1569) he always wanted to “live in mediocre fortune under the shadows of its natural Lords”, there are three frescoes with Tre Miracoli di S. Antonio ( three Miracles by St. Antonio - 1511) painted in Padova in the Scuola del Santo. Among these the one depicting the Miracolo del neonato (Miracle of the newborn) , with the baby releasing his mother from the charge of adultery, reveals better than any other an acquired independent artist personality: the wide zone of lively color, that define the space are perfectly approached and merged in the dramatic action, the expressive variety of the characters has the quality of a portrait and the imprint of a very rich humanity. Already in this period the artist was indeed affirming himself as a portraitist, showing his intention of characterizing not only the physical type of the subject but also his intellectual and moral personality, an intention that is witnessed of by the portraits of the supposed Ariosto (London, National Gallery ), the Gentiluomo col pugno sul libro (Washington, National Gallery), the Schiavona (London, National Gallery), ecc. But this is also the time of the Madonna known as the Zingarella ( Little Gipsy Girl ; Vienna) and of the Sacre Famiglie (Uffizi, Vienna, Prado), in which the young saints shine floridly, with gild flesh and blond hair, according to that beauty type that will then be called “ Tizianesque ”, quite different from Giorgione's dreamy and melancholic type. Two masterpieces are instead performed with modes closer to Giorgione's art, namely the Amor sacro e profano (Sacred and Profane Love), in Rome in Galleria Borghese (iter 1 and 7) and the Flora (Florence, Uffizi), supreme expressions of the feminine beauty type fancied by Vecellio albeit in substantial adherence to Giorgione's motifs. The Flora palpitates of human warmness, idealized flawlessly by color in the luminous tenderness of the skin; the two womanly figures of the Amor sacro e profano are creatures of classical monumentality that, if at all, recall the idea of Raffaello's women: sitting on the edges of an ancient sarcophagus, inserted in the background of a luminous landscape, serenely sensual with a splendid sixteenth century naturalism, they have opulent shapes, modeled with a neat firmness that vibrates with vital energy. In 1513 Tiziano had refused Bembo's proposal to go to Rome as a painter in Leone X's court; he stayed in Venice and was able to set his office in S. Samuele, but he could not avoid Giovanni Bellini's hostility, to the degree that only in the year of his former teacher's death (1516) he was able to obtain the most ambitioned of the official recognitions, that is, the task of painting the Assunta , for the Church of the Frari. Yet, non withstanding these adversities, the years around 1515 were a period of intense work for him, that materialized in a remarkable harvest of works ( Cristo della moneta , Dresda; ritratto di Vincenzo Mosti , Florence, Pitti; L'uomo col guanto , Paris, Louvre; Cavaliere di Malta , Florence, Uffizi; Violinista , Rome, Galleria Spada (iter 5); etc.). These are some of the bright samples of Tiziano's portrayal activity, so intense in their resolute nature and in their intimate pictorial vigor, in which the sense of a limpid formal constructiveness slowly takes the lead on the remembrances of Giorgione's lyricism. In the meanwhile Tiziano had received from Alfonso d'Este the commission to realize two paintings with mythological subjects ( Baccanale and Festa di Venere , Prado), which around 1523 another painting ( Bacco ed Arianna ; London, National Gallery) will be added, and had completed (1516-18) the Assunta at the Frari's church. In this masterpiece the artist, even though maybe keeping in mind the Disputa del Sacramento by Raffaello, brilliantly proves his creative newness: from the whole altarpiece breaks forth an identical sense of energy, concrete in the dynamic figures of the Apostles that, with their wonder-filled gestures, determine the spaces of the lower zone, ideal in the image of the Virgin placed in the center of the composition, entirely drenched with light and surrounded by aerial choirs of angels and putti . The third bacchanal painted for Alfonso d'Este ( Bacco e Arianna ) breaks out equally life-breathing, but this time vibrant with pagan sensuality: a warm light intensifies the theme's naturalism, while the bodies with their inebriated movement yet full of classical harmony determine the space's perspective, all around the god wonderfully caught in the act of leaping on the chariot. Thus Tiziano 's naturalism begins to attain a certain definition, it merges together a classical vision with a dramatic dynamism created by color and light. To just about the same time span belong the Vergine adorata da due Santi e dal donatore Alvise Gozzi (Virgin worshiped by two saints and by donor Alvise Gozzi) (Ancona) and the Averoldi polyptych, now in Ss. Nazzaro e Celso church in Brescia; in its central panel oblique flashes of reddish light break the night of the Resurrezione del Cristo , highlighting the powerful anatomy of the Risen One, inspired be the Laocoonte ‘s strong plastic effects; in a side panel, instead, the S. Sebastiano, echoes the setting on one of Michelangelo's Schiavo, thereby affirming how much Tiziano had strengthened his ability of reaching a reliable constructive solidity with the study of the Tuscan sculptor's works. Between 1519 and 1526 Tiziano worked at the Deposizione (Paris, Luovre) for the Gonzaga. The work which was a model for Van Dyck and all of the seventeenth century, derives its composition scheme from Raffaello, but it interprets his suggestions with an intense and very personal dramatic sense because of the nature's pathetic participation in the divine drama. Tiziano leads us to this sensation with the burning atmosphere of the sunset that soaks the desolate landscape and the character's anguished sorrow with blood-red reflections, the figures are elliptically disposed around Christ's dead body in a last, silent, gaze-colloquy. A model that will also be followed by the subsequent artists is that of the famed altarpiece of Ca' Pesaro (Venice, Frari); it presents a noticeable iconographic innovation depicting the Virgin on the painting's right side, so to let the gaze freely and deeply penetrate the air and light perspective that circulates around the imposing columns of the upper half of the painting. The characters too, all of them portraits in their own right, are set in an unusual way, on an ascending diagonal line, and linked to each other by the ample fluent draping. Unfortunately, what Vasari considered to be Tiziano 's masterpiece, that is to say the Martirio di S. Pietro for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, was lost; it would allegedly represent the culmination of Tiziano 's naturalism. After year 1530 the artist's modes, indeed, suffer a alteration: Vecellio dedicates greater attention to the landscape, qualifying it in a more objective vision that changes its relationship with man; the human figure, instead of constituting the dominant element of the depiction, inserts itself in the environment with confident intimacy. This can be noted in the Madonna del Coniglio (Louvre), with nature's splendid backdrop under the sunset's light, or in the Madonna con il Bambino , S. Caterina e S. Giovannino (London, National Gallery), with its marvelous agreement of greens, now gentler, now darker in the wide landscape against the coarse, blue vision of the mountains in the horizon. In these paintings, conceived as Sacred Conversations , the color becomes softer, the shapes lose every naturalistic overbearing-ness acquiring a sweet serenity from the crepuscular landscape. Verona's Assunta (around 1535) is calmer, with a color blend that is more delicate than the Frari's Assunta painted in his youth; Tiziano accomplishes a pictorial symphony, calm and resonant, simple yet lush, in the Presentazione al Tempio (1538-40) of the Accademia di Venezia, that is interesting also because it offered a composition model for both Veronese and Tintoretto. Meanwhile the maestro's first encounter with Carlo V (1529), had taken place; later, this ruler, during Tiziano 's second sojourn in Bologna (1532-33), was definitely conquered by the painter's art, so much that he named him his official portraitist, endowed him with many privileges and honored him with his friendship. Tiziano 's fame and fortune grew because of this, and from 1532 he could count on the generous liberality of the dukes of Urbino. His activity as a portraitist became particularly prominent, although it was completely loosened from the initial closeness to Giorgione and addressed to grasp in a sumptuous and refined painting the dignity and splendor of the noble purchasers( Carlo V col cane , Prado; Ippolito de' Medici , Pitti; Isabella d'Este , Vienna; Francesco I , Louvre; Francesco Maria della Rovere , Uffizi; Eleonora Gonzaga , Uffizi; Alfonso d'Avalos , Paris; etc.). The aulic nobility of these official portraits is matched by one of Vecellio's freshest creations, that portrayal of an unknown lady of Uribino's court so-called the Bella (Pitti), a fiery celebration of feminine beauty expressed without intellectualistic complications, that finds an echo in the Venere d'Urbino (Uffizi) where the same unidentified model is depicted. And this is the first example of laying Venuses, a theme that was then reprised many times by Tiziano , as it occurred with other themes as well, to justify with the pretext of the mythological subject the daring of representing a feminine nude ( Venere del Pardo , Louvre; Danae , Naples, Madrid, Leningrad and Vienna; series of the Veneri con organista , Madrid, Berlin and Florence; Venere e Adone , London and Madrid; Venere con suonatore di liuto , New York and Cambridge; Diana e Callisto , Vienna; Diana e Atteone , London; etc.).The scheme of the Venere d'Urbino painted for Guidobaldo della Rovere in 1538, seems to draw from Giorgione's Venere dormiente (Dresda). Really, nothing can be further from the innocent sleep of Giorgione's goddess as the idle indolence of Tiziano 's young woman, laying sensually on the bed inside a luxury room, while a puppy near her curls up in its sleep and the maids attend to their daily work. Mannerist infiltrations can already be spotted in the works of the fourth decade of that century, for instance in the Maddalena (Pitti). They a acquire greater evidence in the post-1540 works, as a reflex of a particular moment that had come to take place in the Venetian cultural and artistic work of that period: Pordenone's proto-mannerist examples had prepared the ground; in Venice the cult to Michelangelo was spreading increasingly; in 1539 Francesco Salviati was in Venice with his pupil Giuseppe Porta, which stayed there permanently; add to this the interest aroused by the works of Gulio Romano and Primaticcio, active in Mantova (and, by commission of Federico Gonzaga duke of Mantova, Tiziano was working in those years on some Portraits of Roman Emperors that were afterwards lost). These are the circumstances that explain the artist's fleeting approach to mannerism and the appearance in his works of the strong chromatic contrasts, of the violent emphasis, of the strongly plastic and contorted shapes that characterize the Incoronazione di Spine (Louvre). But Vecellio, although he also had been fascinated by Michelangelo, overcame with his innate balance the inner drama implicit in the new pictorial current, returning quite soon to his vision of individual as lord of life and dominator of the world. His color re-acquires once again it luminosity and gradually all of the abstract accents that were not in agreement with the maestro's artistic temperament, disappear: already in Vienna's Ecce Homo (1543) the tones are calm and the expression seems to be more composed. Even though Tiziano , summoned there by the Farnese dukes, stayed in Rome in 1545-46 , the solution to the mannerist crisis appears as completely solved in the portrait of Paolo III (Naples, Capodimonte), so robust in the determination of the forms and so vibrant of a entirely naturalistic life. A subtle psychological penetration of the characters and of the historical environment gleams through his next masterpiece, the portrait of Paolo III con I nipoti (Naples, Capodimonte), that leaves room to guess, in the attitude of the old pope and mostly on that of his nephew Ottavio Farnese, the treacherous game of ambition and thirst for power. Tiziano 's fame as a portraitist was by then very high, and it couldn't have been otherwise given the brutal sincerity with which the artist had evidenced Pietro Aretino's cynical and violent temper (1545) in his portrait (Pitti). The portrait of the Famiglia Vendramin (London, National Gallery) should be shortly subsequent, around 1552, it was conceived as a Sacred Conversation, but it's an assurgent and unforgettable apotheosis of human existence in merit of its sumptuous fullness and of the incorruptible splendor of the pictorial matter. But even higher proof of his portraitist genius was given by Tiziano when, only one year after his return to Venice from Rome, he was invited by Carlo V to go to Augusta, where the emperor had indicted the Empire's Diet (1548) to celebrate the victory in Mühlberg against the Smalcalda League. The presence in the Bavarian city of the pompous imperial court and of many rulers of the German states was, for the artist, a stimulating occasion for an exceptional series of portraits ( Carlo V seduto , Monaco; Isabella di Portogallo , Madrid; Nicola Perrenot , Besançon; Antonio Perrenot , Kansas City; Giovanni Federico di Sassonia , Vienna; ecc.), all of them magnificent, yet all overwhelmed by the equestrian portrait Carlo V a cavallo (Prado), true heroic exaltation of the royal power of Mühlberg's victor. The emperor s depicted on the battle-field, rigid, in the rich armor, on the brown pawing horse; the solitude of the scene, wrapped in the sunset's warm tonalities, light's reflections on the cuirass, the contrast between the reds of the saddle-cloth and brownish mantle of the horse assume accents of solemn epic-ness. This intense industriousness as a portraitist did not however slow down Tiziano 's activity as author of sacred and profane scenes. His growing maturity is instead manifested in the fulfilled hedonism of the mythological and profane scenes ( Venere col suonatore d'organo , Prado; Danae , Prado; Adone e Venere , Prado; etc.) performed by him for Philip II of Spain (1553 onwards) or for other purchasers. And it's meaningful that exactly in this order of subjects, in Vecellio's last years, a shift towards an extreme impressionism is carried out. If in the Venere che benda Amore (around 1565), Galleria Borghese in Rome (iter 1 e 7), the artist seems to return to the happy world of his youth, reliving the pagan myth of a miraculous fusion of nature and of idea, in the Danae (Prado) the figures of the nymph carelessly lying on the alcove and of the old-lady stretched out collecting the golden rain in her folded apron, seem almost lacking weight: the contours have lost every determinedness, they shade out in halos and dissolve in gorgeous impastos, filtrated by thick shadows. Thus Tiziano seems to verily become the great precursor of modern impressionism, although this last one of his stylistic attitudes actually reveals the fall of the Renaissance illusion that had exalted man as the dominator and lord of the universe. The marriage of his beloved daughter Lavinia (1555), the deaths of Aretino (1556), Carlo V (1558, and of Tiziano 's brother Francesco (1559): the world of things and affections he had so loved was disappearing from around the old artist, leaving him alone with his poetic ghosts to take consciousness of the vanity of life. This is how he appears to us in his self-portrait (Prado), where he depicts himself at eighty years of age with the brush in his hand and a face consumed by the years; thus he entrusts the message of his secret anguish to the entirely inner dramatic imprint of his extreme creations, from the Annunciazione of the church of S. Salvatore in Venice (around 1564-66) to the late version of the Deposizione (around 1566; Prado). And even when in the Incoronazione di spine in Monaco (around 1570) he forcefully re-takes the composition scheme realized in the work of identical subject, now in the Louvre, approximately twenty-five years earlier, he really infuses in it a completely different spirit, so much that the declared mannerist inspiration of the precedent painting now is as if dissolved by the darting lights that transform into larvae the figures of Christ's brutal persecutors. No less dramatic approach, although entrusted to a mythological subject dear to the Renaissance's tradition, is contained by both versions (Cambridge and Vienna) of the Tarquinio e Lucrezia , staggering ghosts in a dissolved chromatic atmosphere that expresses with Shakespearian intensity the man's violent lust and the woman's desperate repulse. As far as to leave, as testament and Christian conclusion of his very lengthy creator activity, the Pietà of Venice's Accademia, completed with reverent care by Palma in Giovane after his death. “Very healthy and fortunate was Tiziano , more than any other has ever been before him; and he has never had from heaven other than favors and happiness”. Thus wrote Vasari shortly before the artist passed away in his Venetian home, deserted at the time on account of the plague that raged in the city. And to who remembers how in a little over seventy years of uninterrupted activity the artist had created an imposing collection of masterpieces, that matches, if not surpasses, Rembrandt's or Ruben's immense production, and how from this exceptional and titanic greatness the had derived riches and honors perhaps superior to those, extraordinary in their own right, of Raffaello; in sum when we think of the very long trail with which he accompanied Italian art almost until the Baroque's front door; then, that judgment given by Vasari, although dictated by an involuntary misunderstanding, will seem justified. That the superb security and the outstanding multiplicity of Vecellio's interests really appear to dominate the crisis that travailed the civil, religious and artistic history of his time. But when we observe the livid and hoarse yellows of his Pietà , that blow a cold breath of death, then Tiziano 's human and earthly happiness appears entirely solved in this spiritual testament full of intensely dramatic religious accents. And the memory that men hold of him is no longer entrusted to the passing wealth of the honors that made of him an envied man, but only to the immortal message of his art.