Titian died in Venice on 27 August 1576, probably in his late eighties, while plague was killing about a third of the city. The usual answer is that the plague took him.
He died in his house in the Biri Grande district, the most celebrated painter in Europe, and his son Orazio followed him four days later.
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The plague story has a hole in it. In the summer of 1576 a plague victim could end up in a pit with the other dead, and regulations forbade the grand funeral that tradition gives Titian. Yet the tradition says he was buried with honors inside the Frari, one of the great churches of Venice.
Both cannot be true. Either Venice broke its own rules for one painter, or the word plague never belonged next to his name. I lean toward the second. The evidence is one word in the records, and a grave Titian had fought over for years.
What do the documents call Titian's illness?
Fever. The journalist Roderick Conway Morris writes that the documents give the cause of death as fever, not plague, and that a plague diagnosis would most likely have sent Titian to a plague pit along with the other victims. He calls the story of the magnificent funeral one of the legends that grew up soon afterward.
Mark Hudson, who wrote a whole book on Titian's last days, asks whether the great plague or simply old age killed him, and leaves the question open. A man of that age needed no epidemic to die.
The legend is easy to understand. Orazio, his son and assistant, did die of the plague, a few days after his father. Two deaths in one family, in a city full of the disease, and the story wrote itself. Orazio was also his father's sole heir, and Titian had left no will.
What You'll Discover
What became of his house.
How old he really was.
Why he lies in the Frari.
What he left unfinished.