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 August 27, 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. His last canvas, a Pietà, was meant to hang over his own grave, and he was buried without it.
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Those birth dates are only an estimate. No document records his birth, and writers of his own century imply years scattered across a decade or more. Late in life Titian even told Philip II that he was older than he probably was, perhaps to hurry along late payments.
Where he came from is clearer. The Vecellio family had lived in Cadore since the fourteenth century. The district is a valley of the Dolomites, the mountains north of Venice, and in his day it was ruled by the Venetian Republic.
Around the age of nine or ten, the boy was sent down to Venice with his brother Francesco, to live with an uncle and learn a trade. Venice was then one of the richest cities in the world.
His first master was a mosaic maker, Sebastiano Zuccato, who set colored stone and glass into walls. Then the boy moved into the orbit of the Bellini, two painter brothers who ran the leading workshop in the city.
Around the Bellini, Titian met a young painter from Castelfranco, a small town inland from Venice. That young man would become his closest rival.
What You'll Discover
The rival whose unfinished picture he completed.
What an emperor gave a painter.
Why Mark Twain hated one nude.
What the friars did with his last painting.
How his brush changed in old age.