TITIAN (c. 1477-1576), Tiziano Vecellio, or Vecelli, one of the greatest representatives of the Venetian school of painting. The house at Pieve di Cadore where he was born is now a small museum. Titian, one of a family of four, was the son of Gregorio Vecelli, a distinguished councillor and soldier, and of his wife Lucia. The date of his birth is generally given as 1477. Vasari in one passage (at variance with Ridolfi) says that Titian was born in 1480; while Titian himself, writing to Philip II. in 1571, pro fessed to be ninety-five years old.
He was still a child when sent by his parents to Venice, to an uncle's house. There, according to Lodovico Dolce, he was placed under Sebastiano Zuccato, a mosaicist and painter. He next be came a pupil of Gentile Bellini, and then of Giovanni Bellini. The youth was a contemporary of Giorgione and Palma Vecchio, who influenced him at first ; when his period of pupilage expired, he is surmised to have entered into a sort of partnership with Giorgione. A lost fresco of "Hercules" on the Morosini Palace is said to have been one of his earliest works. In 1507-1508 Giorgione was com missioned by the state to execute frescoes on the re-erected Fondaco de' Tedeschi (warehouse for the German merchants). Titian worked along with him, as is known to us only by engrav ings. Towards 1511, Titian went to Padua, and painted in the Scuola di S. Antonio a series of frescoes, representing the life of the saint. Another fresco, dated 1523, is "St. Christopher carry ing the Infant Christ," at the foot of the staircase in the ducal palace of Venice. From Padua Titian in 1512 returned to Venice; and in 1513 he obtained a broker's patent and became superin tendent of the government works, being charged to complete the paintings left unfinished by Giovanni Bellini in the hall of the great council in the ducal palace (destroyed by fire). He set up an atelier on the Grand Canal, at S. Samuele. It was not until 1516, upon the death of Bellini, that he came into actual enjoyment of his patent, which yielded him an annuity of 120 crowns—and exempted him from certain taxes—he being bound in return to paint likenesses of the successive doges of his time at the fixed price of eight crowns each. The actual number which he executed was five. The year 1516 witnessed Titian's first journey to Fer rara. Two years later was completed, for the high altar of the church of the Frani, one of his most world-renowned masterpieces, the "Assumption of the Madonna." It excited a vast sensation.
Bologna a portrait of the emperor Charles V., and was created in 1533 a count palatine and knight of the Golden Spur, his children also being made nobles of the empire—for a painter, honours of an unexampled kind.
The Venetian government, dissatisfied at Titian's neglect of the work for the ducal palace, ordered him in 1538 to refund the money which he had received for time unemployed; and Por denone, his formidable rival of recent years, was installed in his place. At the end of a year, however, Pordenone died; and Titian was reinstated after having applied himself diligently to painting in the hall Barbarossa's Victory at Spoleto, erroneously referred to as Battle of Cadore. This great picture, which was burned with several others in 1577, represented in life-size the moment at which the Venetian captain, D'Alviano, fronted the enemy, with horses and men crashing down into the stream. Fontana's engrav ing, and a small copy in the gallery of the Uffizi in Florence, record the energetic composition. A visit was paid to Rome in 1546, when he obtained the freedom of the city and painted the portrait groups of Pope Paul III. and his two grandsons, the Cardinal Alessandro and the duke Ottavio Farnese. The picture now at Naples was left unfinished and Titian returned to Venice in the same year. In Jan. 5548 and again in 1550-51 he went to Germany to paint Charles V. and others, in Augsburg. He exe cuted the portraits of the elector of Saxony (Vienna) and of Philip II. (now lost; copy in Madrid), which was sent to England and proved a potent auxiliary in the suit of the prince for the hand of Queen Mary. In '554 his beloved daughter Lavinia, whom he painted various times, married Cornelio Scarcinelli of Serra valle ; she had succeeded her aunt Orsa, now deceased, as the man ager of the household, which, with the lordly income that Titian made, was placed on a corresponding footing. She died in child birth in 1560. With his European fame, Titian is the last man one would suppose to have been under the necessity of writing letters for payment, especially when the defaulter addressed was lord of Spain and of the American Indies; yet he had constantly to com plain that his pictures remained unpaid for and his pensions in arrear, and in the very year of his death (February) he recites the many pictures which he had sent within the preceding twenty years without receiving their price. In fact, there is ground for thinking that all his pensions and privileges, large as they were nominally, brought in but precarious returns. It has been pointed out that in the summer of 1566 (when he was elected into the Florentine Academy) he made an official declaration of his in come, and put down the various items apparently below their value, not naming at all his salary or pensions. Possibly there was but too much reason for the omission.