Tiziano Vecellio Titian Giclée Fine Art Prints 9 of 10

Titian (1488 or 1490-1576) was a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, then of Giorgione. Even at the death of his second teacher in 1510, the artist was already famous. His only follower, to him he owed his sense of nature, his command of colour, his manner of suggesting forms. To this were added the ardent temperament and vivid personality which enabled him very quickly to establish himself as a leading figure in Venetian painting in the sixteenth century. He worked on a variety of subjects and genres, including religious paintings, portraits and history canvases.

After 1520, Titian's fame reached its peak. Princes and monarchs were impressed by the magnificent classicism of his works. The artist gave colour a creative power and dramatic tension never before achieved. In 1530 in Bologna he met Emperor Charles V, who became his influential patron and encouraged him to devote himself to intensive portraiture. In order to please the ruler, as well as other noble people in these circles, Titian was able to highlight their taste for glamour and express their greatness.

Around 1540, the artist was in thrall to the Mannerist trends then current in Venice, which are evident in "The Crowning with Thorns" (1543). From 1550 onwards, his studio was active: the painter executed numerous commissions for churches and also recreated mythological scenes for the royal courts. The lovely "Venus with a Mirror", painted for Philip II of Spain, was followed by "Danae", then by "Venus and Adonis", a work of which the artist later produced a number of versions. The colour, laid on in quick and dense strokes, plays perfectly freely with the light, mimicking reality in a more determined and dramatic way. In "Flaying of Marsyas", crimson recoils from the tortured body. In 1576, the artist died of the plague and left unfinished a Pietà, a large-scale composition, complex and shattering, which he dedicated to his tomb.