Even allowing for the abnormal length of his professional career, Titian's prolific faculty is amazing. More than a thousand pictures in European and American galleries are attributed to Titian. Of these 250 are spurious or doubt ful. The largest collection (41 works) is in the Prado, Madrid. The Uffizi has 18; the Pitti, 16; Naples Museum, seven; the Venice Acad emy, eight; the Louvre, 18 and the National Gallery, London, six. Some critics accord the famous (Concert) in the Louvre, which has long been considered a Giorgione, to Titian.
((Titian was a man of correct features and handsome person,'" writes William M. Rossetti, ((with an uncommon air of penetrating observa tion and self-possessed composure—a Venetian presence worthy to pair with any of those most potent, grave and reserved signors, whom his brush has transmitted to posterity. He was highly distinguished, courteous and winning in society, personally unassuming and a fine speaker, enjoying (as is said by Vasari, who saw him in the spring of 1566) health and prosperity unequaled. He was not a man of universal genius or varied faculty and accom plished like Leonardo da Vinci and Michel angelo: his one. great and supreme endowment was that of painting. Titian may properly be regarded as the greatest manipulator of paint in relation to color, tone, luminosity, richness, torture, softness, surface and harmony and with a view to the production of a pictorial whole converging to the eye, a true, dignified and beautiful impression of its general subject matter and of the objects of sense which form its constituent parts. In this sense Titian has never been deposed from his sovereignty in painting. Titian's pictures abound with mem- , ories of his home country and of the region.,/ which led from the hill summits of Cadore to the Queen City of the Adriatic. He was al most the first great painter to exhibit an ap preciation of mountains, mainly those of a turretted type, as exemplified in the Dolomites. Indeed he gave to landscape a new and original vitality, expressing the quality of the objects of nature and their control over the sentiments and imagination with a force that had never been before approached. The earliest Italian picture expressly designated as 'landscape) was one which Titian sent in 1552 to Philip II. Naturally a good deal of attention has been given by artists, connoisseurs and experts to probing the secret of how Titian managed to obtain such extraordinary results in color and surface. His figures were put in with the brush dipped in a brown solution and then altered and worked up as his intention de veloped. In his earlier pictures the gamut of color rests mainly upon red and green; in the later ones upon deep yellow and blue. The pigments which he used were nothing unusual; indeed they were both few and common. Palma Giovine records that Vecelli would set pictures aside for months and afterward ex amining them as if they were his mortal ene mies would set to work upon them like a man possessed. Also that he left many pictures in progress at the same time, turning from one to the other, and that in his final operations he worked far more with the finger than with the brush?' Titian seems to have taken Palma Vecchio as his model for softness and Giorgi one as his model for richness. He distanced all his predecessors in the study of color as ap plied to draperies.
Titian excelled in every style. The 'Assump tion of the Virgin' is ranked as one of the world's greatest pictures and the 'Entombment of Christ,) the (Christ Crowned with Thorns) (Louvre), the
a portrait painter Titian is unequaled. Ac cording to Vasari ((There has scarcely been a noble of high rank, scarcely a prince or lady of great name, whose portrait has not been taken by Titian.° His list of famous men and women is long. Perhaps at the very top stands the unknown 'Man with the Glove (Louvre), young, handsome and charming. Many times was die Duchess of Urbino painted, the most famous being the 'Bella' in the Uffizi, Florence. Many times also his daughter, Lavinia, smiles down the centuries. Sometimes she is holding a dish of fruit (Berlin), sometimes a jeweled. casket (Lord Cowper) and sometimes a fan (Dresden). The Uffizi contains four superb studies: Catarina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, Sandovino, Francesco, Duke of Urbino and Eleanora, the Duchess of Urbino. Charles V on horseback at the battle of Muhlberg, now in the Prado, Madrid, shows for all ages what kind of man the emperor was. one painted three portraits of himself : one in early life (Vienna), one in middle age (Berlin) and one in old age (Prado, Madrid). Francis I (Louvre), though a great portrait, was not painted from life, for Titian never saw this sovereign. The famous work in the Louvre called (Titian and his
represents Alphonso, Duke of Ferrara and his wife Laura di Dianti. Pope Paul III was another fine sub ject. The great
or
Judgment,' in which Charles V appears, was so loved by the emperor that he had it in his room during his last illness and kept his eyes fastened on it till the last. Titian also painted one great historical work in 1539, The Battle of Cadore' representing the moment when the Venetian captain, facing the enemy, dashed into the rush ing stream with men and horses. All are rep resented life size. This picture perished by fire in 1577 . and is only known to-day by Fontana's engraving and a sketch by Titian in the Uffizi.
writes Kugler, ((was born in grand Alpine scenery amidst a sturdy and vigorous race; and it is in the combination of these ante cedents with the gorgeous color and stately forms of Venetian life that we trace that breadth of qualities so conducive to the develop ment of art in which he takes precedence of every other painter. Two forms of nature es pecially courted his pencil — landscape and portraiture; and in each he revealed to the world treasures of truth and poetry not worked out before. For Titian is not only the painter t of humanity in its largest distinctions—in the 1 beauty of woman, the dignity of man and the artlessness of childhood— but he is especially the delineator of all those under every aspect of the high born and the affluently placed classes of society. Sir Joshua Reynolds says of him whatever he touched by a kind of magic the invested with grandeur and importance. The intellectual, the noble, the splendid, the well formed, the well-fed, the well-dressed were the mutual subjects of his art. His type accord ingly of Christ, John the Baptist and the Magdalen —characters in whom the pride of life and the abnegation of self are incompatible qualities—cannot satisfy those who look for the realization of a sacred idea. Titian can, therefore, hardly rank as a painter of religious feeling except in his earliest works when he was still under the influence of Giorgione.") Bibliography.— Crowe and Cavaleaselle, (Titian: his Life and Times) (2 vols., London 1877) ; Gronau, G., (Titian' (Berlin 1900; Eng. trans., London 1904) ; Hamel, Maurice, (Titian' (Paris 1905); Huell, Estelle M., (Bos ton 1901) ; Heath, R. F. (London 1885) ; Phillips, Claude, (The Earlier Work of Titian) and The Later Work of Titian' (Portfolio, No. 34 and No. 37), and Gilbert, Josiah, or Titian's Country) (Lon don 1889).