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Titian
1485 - 1576
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio, better known as Titian was born in the Alpine town of Pieve di Cadore. He was the leader of the 16th-century Venetian school of the Italian Renaissance. He was recognized early in his own lifetime as a supremely great painter.
Recognized by his contemporaries as "the sun amidst small stars" (recalling the famous final line of Dante's Paradiso), Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits and landscapes, mythological and religious subjects. What unites the two parts of his career is his deep interest in color. His later works may not contain vivid, luminous tints as his early pieces do, yet their loose brushwork and subtlety of polychromatic modulations have no precedents in the history of Western art.
The date of his birth is uncertain. He was the eldest of a family of four and son of Gregorio Vecelli, a distinguished councilor and soldier, and of his wife Lucia. Titian succeeded Giovanni Bellini, under whom he had studied, as painter to the Republic of Venice. The first documented reference to Titian dates from 1508, when he was commissioned to paint frescoes, with the Venetian painter Giorgione, on the exterior of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi.
Titian's most important innovations were made in portraiture with his search and penetration in human character, recorded in canvases of pictorial brilliance. In 1516 he had been named official painter to the Venetian state; thereafter he worked at the courts of Ferrara and Mantua. In the 1530s and '40s he traveled to Bologna to paint the Emperor Charles V and Pope Paul III, and at the pope's behest he visited Rome and met Michelangelo. He joined the court of Charles V at Augsburg, Germany, in 1548 and 1550. As a result of this connection, he obtained a multitude of portrait commissions. After 1550, Titian had returned to Venice where he worked until his death in 1576.
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