Titian, born Tiziano Vecellio in the Alpine village of Pieve di Cadore, was the leading painter of Renaissance Venice for some sixty years. Most scholars place his birth between 1488 and 1490, and he died in Venice on 27 August 1576, while the plague raged.
He painted the emperor Charles V, the Venus of Urbino and a run of mythologies for Philip II of Spain. He is also the painter who prepared his own tomb and was buried without it.
He worked for popes, emperors and kings, and the canvases he signed hang in the great museums of Europe. At the very end he was painting for a chapel where he hoped to lie.
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In his last years Titian painted a Pietà, a dead Christ held in the arms of his mother, and he painted himself into it as Saint Jerome. In a corner, a small votive tablet shows him and his son Orazio at prayer. He made the picture for a particular place, the Christ chapel of the Frari church in Venice, in exchange for the right to be buried there.
The bargain fell through. The Franciscan friars of the Frari gave the painting back, and it was still unfinished when Titian died. His son Orazio, his assistant and sole heir, caught the same plague and died soon after, leaving no will. Titian was buried in the Frari after all, beneath the altar of the Crucifix. The Pietà was not there.
A fellow painter, Palma il Giovane, finished it. He added a torch-bearing angel and a Latin inscription saying he had completed what Titian left unfinished. Recent scholarship suspects his share was small.
What You'll Discover
How old Titian claimed to be.
Who he worked beside in Venice.
What an emperor gave a painter.
Why Mark Twain hated one nude.
How his brush changed in old age.