It used to be said that Titian, when a child, painted upon the wall of the Casa Sampieri, with flower-juice, a Madonna and Infant with a boy-angel; but modern connoisseurs say that the picture is a common work, of a date later than Titian’s decease. He was still a child when sent by his parents to Venice, to an uncle’s house. There he was placed under an art-teacher, who may perhaps have been Sebastiano Zuccato, a mosaicist and painter now forgotten. He next became a pupil of Gentile Bellini, whom he left after a while, because the master considered him too offhand in work. Here he had the opportunity of studying many fine antiques. His last instructor was Giovanni Bellini; but Titian was not altogether satisfied with his tutoring. The youth was a contemporary of Giorgione and Palma (Vecchio); when his period of pupilage expired, he is surmised to have entered into a sort of partnership with Giorgione. A fresco of Hercules on the Morosini Palace is said to have been one of his earliest works; others were the Virgin and Child, in the Vienna Belvedere, and the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth (from the convent of S. Andrea), now in the Venetian academy. In 1507-8 Giorgione was commissioned by the state to execute frescos on the re-erected Fondaco de’ Tedeschi. Titian and Morto da Feltre worked along with him, and some fragments of Titian’s paintings, which are reputed to have surpassed Giorgione’s, are still discernible. According to one account, Giorgione was nettled at this superiority, and denied Titian admittance to his house thenceforth. Stories of jealousies between painters are rife in all regions, and in none more than in the Venetian,—various statements of this kind applying to Titian himself. One should neither accept nor reject them uninquiringly; counter-evidence of some weight can be cited for Vecelli’s vindication in relation to Moroni, Correggio, Lotto, and Coello. Towards 1511, after the cessation of the League of Cambrai—which had endeavoured to shatter the power of the Venetian republic, and had at any rate succeeded in clipping the wings of the lion of St Mark—Vecelli went to Padua, and painted in the Scuola di S. Antonio a series of frescos, which continue to be an object of high curiosity to the students of his genius, although they cannot be matched against his finest achievements in oil painting. Another fresco, dated 1523, is St Christopher carrying the Infant Christ, at the foot of the doge’s steps in the ducal palace of Venice. From Padua Titian in 1512 returned to Venice; and in 1513 he obtained a broker’s patent in the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi, termed “La Sanseria” or “Senseria” (a privilege much coveted by rising or risen artists), and became superintendent of the Government works, being especially charged to complete the paintings left unfinished by Giovanni Bellini in the hall of the great council in the ducal palace. He set up an atelier on the Grand Canal, at S. Samuele,—the precise site being now unknown. It was not until 1516, upon the death of Bellini, that he came into actual enjoyment of his patent; at the same date an arrangement for painting was entered into with Titian alone, to the exclusion of other artists who had heretofore been associated with him. The patent yielded him a good annuity —120 crowns—and exempted him from certain taxes,—he being bound in return to paint likenesses of the successive doges of his time at the fixed price of eight crowns each. The actual number which he executed was five. Titian, it may be well to note as a landmark in this all but centenarian life of incessant artistic labour and productiveness, was now in the fortieth year of his age. The same year, 1516, witnessed his first journey to Ferrara. Two years later was produced, for the high altar of the church of the Frari, one of his most world-renowned masterpieces, the Assumption of the Madonna, now in the Venetian academy. It excited a vast sensation, being indeed the most extraordinary piece of colourist execution on a great scale which Italy had yet seen. The signoria took note of the facts, and did not fail to observe that Titian was neglecting his work in the hall of the great council.

Vecelli was now at the height of his fame; and towards 1521, following the production of a figure of St Sebastian for the papal legate in Brescia (a work of which there are numerous replicas), purchasers became extremely urgent for his productions. It may have been about 1523, after some irregular living and a consequent fever, that he married a lady of whom only the Christian name, Cecilia, has come down to us; her first child, Pomponio, was born in 1525, and two (or perhaps three) others followed. Towards 1526 he became acquainted, and soon exceedingly intimate, with Pietro Aretino, the literary bravo, of influence and audacity hitherto unexampled, who figures so strangely in the chronicles of the time. Titian sent a portrait of him to Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. A great affliction befell him in August 1530, in the death of his wife. He then, with his three children—one of them being the infant Lavinia, whose birth had been fatal to the mother—removed to a new home, and got his sister Orsa to come from Cadore and take charge of the household. The mansion, difficult now to find, is in the Biri Grande, then a fashionable suburb, being in the extreme end of Venice on the sea, with beautiful gardens and a look-out towards Murano. In 1532 he painted in Bologna a portrait of the emperor Charles V., and was created a count palatine and knight of the Golden Spur, his children also being made nobles of the empire,—for a painter, honours of an unexampled kind.

The Venetian Government, dissatisfied at Titian’s neglect of the work for the ducal palace, ordered him in 1538 to refund the money which he had received for time unemployed; and Pordenone, his formidable rival of recent years, was installed in his place. At the end of a year, however, Pordenone died; and Titian, who had meanwhile applied himself diligently to painting in the hall the battle of Cadore, was reinstated. This great picture, which was burned with several others in 1577, represented in life-size the moment at which the Venetian captain, D’Alviano, fronted the enemy, with horses and men crashing down into the stream. Fontana’s engraving, and a sketch by Titian himself in the gallery of the Uffizi in Florence, record the energetic composition. As a matter of professional and worldly success, his position from about this time may be regarded as higher than that of any other painter known to history, except Raphael, Michelangelo, and at a later date Rubens. In 1540 he received a pension from D’Avalos, Marquis del Vasto, and an annuity of 200 crowns (which was afterwards doubled) from Charles V. on the treasury of Milan. Another source of profit— for he was always sufficiently keen after money—was a contract, obtained in 1542, for supplying grain to Cadore, which he visited with regularity almost every year, and where he was both generous and influential. This reminds us of Shakespeare and his relations to his birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon; and indeed the great Venetian and the greater Englishman had something akin in the essentially natural tone of their inspiration and performance, and in the personal tendency of each to look after practical success and “the main chance” rather than to work out aspirations and pursue ideals. Titian had a favourite villa on the neighbouring Manza Hill, from which (it may be inferred) he made his chief observations of landscape form and effect. The so-called Titian’s mill, constantly discernible in his studies, is at Collontola, near Belluno. A visit was paid to Rome in 1546, when he obtained the freedom of the city, his immediate predecessor in that honour having been Michelangelo in 1537. He could at the same time have succeeded the painter Fra Sebastiano in his lucrative office of the piombo, and he made no scruple of becoming a friar for the purpose; but this project lapsed through his being summoned away from Venice in 1547 to paint Charles V. and others in Augsburg. He was there again in 1550, and executed the portrait of Philip II., which was sent to England and proved a potent auxiliary in the suit of the prince for the hand of Queen Mary. In the preceding year Vecelli had affianced his daughter Lavinia, the beautiful girl whom he loved deeply and painted various times, to Cornelio Sarcinelli of Serravalle; she had succeeded her aunt Orsa, now deceased, as the manager of the household, which, with the lordly income that Titian made by this time, was placed on a corresponding footing. The marriage took place in 1554. She died in childbirth in 1560. The years 1551 and 1552 were among those in which Titian worked least assiduously,—a circumstance which need excite no surprise in the case of a man aged about seventy-five. He was at the council of Trent towards 1555, of which his admirable picture or finished sketch in the Louvre bears record. He was never in Spain, notwithstanding the many statements which have been made in the affirmative. Titian’s friend Aretino died suddenly in 1556, and another close intimate, the sculptor and architect Sansovino, in 1570. With his European fame, and many sources of wealth, Vecelli is the last man one would suppose to have been under the necessity of writing querulous and dunning letters for payment, especially when the defaulter addressed was lord of Spain and of the American Indies ; yet he had constantly to complain that his pictures remained unpaid for and his pensions in arrear, and in the very year of his death (February) he recites the many pictures which he had sent within the preceding twenty years without receiving their price. In fact, there is ground for thinking that all his pensions and privileges, large as they were nominally, brought in but precarious returns. It has been pointed out that in the summer of 1566 (when he was elected into the Florentine academy) he made an official declaration of his income, and put down the various items apparently below their value, not naming at all his salary or pensions. Possibly there was but too much reason for the omission.

In September 1565 Titian went to Cadore and designed the decorations for the church at Pieve, partly executed by his pupils. One of these is a Transfiguration, another an Annunciation (now in S. Salvatore, Venice), inscribed “Titianus fecit fecit,” by way of protest (it is said) against the disparagement of some persons who cavilled at the veteran’s failing handicraft. He continued to accept commissions to the last. He had selected as the place for his burial the chapel of the Crucifix in the church of the Frari; and, in return for a grave, he offered the Franciscans a picture of the Pietà, representing himself and his son Orazio before the Saviour, another figure in the composition being a sibyl. This work he nearly finished; but some differences arose regarding it, and he then settled to be interred in his native Pieve. Titian was ninety-nine years of age (more or less) when the plague, which was then raging in

Venice, seized him, and carried him off on 27th August 1576. He was buried in the church of the Frari, as at first intended, and his Pietà was finished by Palma Giovane. He lies near his own famous painting, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. No memorial marked his grave, until by Austrian command Canova executed the monument so well known to sightseers. Immediately after Titian’s own death, his son and pictorial assistant Orazio died of the same epidemic. His sumptuous mansion was plundered during the plague by thieves, who prowled about, scarce controlled.

Titian was a man of correct features and handsome person, with an uncommon air of penetrating observation and self-possessed composure,—a Venetian presence worthy to pair with any of those “most potent, grave, and reverend signors” whom his pencil has transmitted to posterity. He was highly distinguished, courteous, and winning in society, personally unassuming, and a fine speaker, enjoying (as is said by Vasari, who saw him in the spring of 1566) health and prosperity unequalled. The numerous heads currently named Titian’s Mistress might dispose us to regard the painter as a man of more than usually relaxed morals; the fact is, however, that these titles are mere fancy-names, and no inference one way or the other can be drawn from them. He gave splendid entertainments at times; and it is related that, when Henry III. of France passed through Venice on his way from Poland to take the French throne, he called on Titian with a train of nobles, and the painter presented him as a gift with all the pictures of which he inquired the price. He was not a man of universal genius or varied faculty and accomplishment, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; his one great and supreme endowment was that of painting.

Ever since Titian rose into celebrity the general verdict has been that he is the greatest of painters, considered technically. In the first place neither the method of fresco painting nor work of the colossal scale to which fresco painting ministers is here in question. Titian’s province is that of oil painting, and of painting on a scale which, though often large and grand, is not colossal either in dimension or in inspiration. Titian may properly be regarded as the greatest manipulator of paint in relation to colour, tone, luminosity, richness, texture, surface, and harmony, and with a view to the production of a pictorial whole conveying to the eye a true, dignified, and beautiful impression of its general subjectmatter and of the objects of sense which form its constituent parts. In this sense Titian has never been deposed from his sovereignty in painting, nor can one forecast the time in which he will be deposed. For the complex of qualities which we sum up in the words colour, handling, and general force and harmony of effect, he stands unmatched, although in particular items of forcible or impressive execution—not to speak of creative invention—some painters, one in one respect and another in another, may indisputably be preferred to him. He carried to its acme that great colourist conception of the Venetian school of which the first masterpieces are due to the two Bellini, to Carpaccio, and, with more fully developed suavity of manner, to Giorgione. Pre-eminent inventive power or sublimity of intellect he never evinced. Even in energy of action and more especially in majesty or affluence of composition the palm is not his; it is (so far as concerns the Venetian school) assignable to Tintoretto. Titian is a painter who by wondrous magic of genius and of art satisfies the eye, and through the eye the feelings,—sometimes the mind.

Titian’s pictures abound with memories of his home-country and of the region which led from the hill-summits of Cadore to the queen-city of the Adriatic. He was almost the first painter to exhibit an appreciation of mountains, mainly those of a turreted type, exemplified in the Dolomites. Indeed he gave to landscape generally a new and original vitality, expressing the quality of the objects of nature and their control over the sentiments and imagination with a force that had never before been approached. The earliest Italian picture expressly designated as “landscape” was one which Vecelli sent in 1552 to Philip II. His productive faculty was immense, even when we allow for the abnormal length of his professional career, ∑n Italy, England, and elsewhere more than a thousand pictures figure as Titian’s; of these about 250 may be regarded as dubious or spurious. There are, for instance, 9 pictures in the London National Gallery, 18 in the Louvre, 16 in the Pitti, 18 in the Uffizi, 7 in the Naples museum, 8 in the Venetian academy (besides the series in the private meeting-hall), and 41 in the Madrid museum.

Naturally a good deal of attention has been given by artists, connoisseurs, and experts to probing the secret of how Titian managed to obtain such astonishing results in colour and surface. The upshot of this research is but meagre; the secret seems to be not so much one of workmanship as of faculty. His figures were put in with the brush dipped in a brown solution, and then altered and worked up as his intention developed. The later pictures were touched off rapidly, telling well from a distant view. He himself averred that after his visit to Rome in 1546 he had greatly improved in art; and in his very last days he said—certainly with the modesty of genius, perhaps also with some of the tenacity of old age —that he was then beginning to understand what painting meant. In his earlier pictures the gamut of colour· rests mainly upon red and green, in the later ones upon deep yellow and blue. The pigments which he used were nothing unusual; indeed they were both few and common. Palma Gio vane records that Vecelli would set pictures aside for months, and afterwards, examining them with a stern countenance as if they were his mortal enemies, would set to work upon them like a man possessed; also that he kept many pictures in progress at the same time, turning from one to the other, and that in his final operations he worked far more with finger than with brush. It has been said, and probably with truth, that he tried to emulate Palma Vecchio in softness as well as Giorgione in richness. Michelangelo’s verdict after inspecting the picture of Danae in the Rain of Gold, executed in 1546, has often been quoted. He said, “That man would have had no equal if art had done as much for him as nature.” He was thinking principally of severity and majesty of draughtsmanship, for he added, “Pity that in Venice they don’t learn how to draw well.” As a draughtsman of the human figure Titian was not only competent but good and fine, and he is reported to have studied anatomy deeply; but one can easily understand that he fell not a little short of the standard of Michelangelo, and even of other leading Florentines. He was wont to paint in a nude figure with Venetian red, supplemented by a little lake in the contour and towards the extremities. He observed that a colourist ought to manipulate white, black, and red, and that the carnations cannot be done in a first painting, but by replicating various tints and mingling the colours. He distanced all predecessors in the study of colour as applied to draperies,—working on the principle (in which Giorgione may perhaps have forestalled him) that red comes forward to the eye, yellow retains the rays of light, and blue assimilates to shadow. In his subject-pictures the figures are not very numerous, and the attitudes are mostly reserved; even in bacchanals or battles the athletic display has more of facility than of furor. His architectural scenes were sometimes executed by other persons, especially the Rosas of Brescia. The glow of late afternoon, or the passionate ardour of early sundown, was much affected by Titian in the lighting of his pictures....