Titian Prints

About Titian

Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, was born around 1490 at Pieve di Cadore in the mountains north of Venice and was sent to the city as a boy, training in the Bellini workshop and working beside Giorgione. After Giorgione's death in 1510 and Giovanni Bellini's in 1516 he was the leading painter in Venice, and remained so for sixty years. The Assumption of the Virgin, painted for the high altar of the Frari between 1516 and 1518, announced his scale and colour; Bacchus and Ariadne, painted between about 1520 and 1523 for Alfonso d'Este's study in Ferrara and now in London, is the most famous of his mythologies. He became court painter to the Emperor Charles V in 1533 and later produced the series of poesie for Philip II of Spain, including the Danaë and Venus and Adonis of the early 1550s. In old age his brushwork loosened into broken, almost abstract touches of colour. He died in Venice during the plague of August 1576. Titian's reputation rests on colour and on the freedom of his paint, and both come through in a print: the ultramarine sky and the orange-red drapery of Bacchus and Ariadne are as saturated as anything painted since.