Details

Name

Tiziano Vecellio

Brief Biography

about 1488/90–1576, Italian

Occupation

Painter

Description

The greatest Venetian painter of the 1500s, Titian was also, like Raphael (qv), one of the most influential figures in the history of European painting. Early sources provide conflicting evidence regarding his birth date, but there is now general agreement that he was born around 1488–90, and that he was trained in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini (qv). Towards the end of the first decade of the century he evidently came under the spell of Giorgione (about 1477–1510), and the task of disentangling his early works from the late works of the older master has been a constant preoccupation of art-historical scholarship since the later 1800s. By about 1513, however, Titian had left his Giorgionesque phase behind him, and after Bellini’s death in 1516 he became the dominant artistic figure in Venice, undertaking a wide range of important commissions for public buildings in the city. Around this time, too, he embarked on an international career, beginning with his employment by the dukes of Ferrara and Mantua, and reaching a climax with his work for the Emperor Charles V, who knighted him, in the 1530s, and King Philip II of Spain from the 1550s. To meet the high demand for his work from his Venetian and foreign patrons, Titian maintained a busy workshop to assist in the production of his autograph pictures, and especially of variants and replicas after the master’s designs.