The painter known as Titian was the most versatile and productive painter of his day. His name was Tiziano Vecellio. He lived in the village of Pieve di Cadore in the Italian Alps, and he remained always a child of the mountains in spite of his fame and success:
The ambition that drove him came as much from his ingrained attitudes as it did from the need to find outlets for his talent. Like a peasant whose one concern is to store up grain against the winter, Titan worked for security (Williams 7).
The name Titian is an anglicized version of Tiziano, and Titian and Raphael (for Raffaello) are the only Italians whose names have consistently been anglicized in this manner, a reflection of the lasting nature of their fame (Gould 7).
Throughout his life, Titian produced a lovely sort of landscape in which a decorative arrangement of forms meets a large truthfulness of atmosphere and spatial effect. Titian would have a major influence on the Carracci and Rubens as well as Watteau, Gainsborough, Constable, and Delacroix. While in his thirties, Titian devoted himself to the Giorgionesque idyll and to a highly poetized portraiture. In his forties he practiced a more positive and splendid color while working out new dynamic patterns for great religious pieces. In his seventies, Titian discovered synthetic painting and invented new procedures that were variously to reappear in Rembrandt and Velasquez:
All this bespeaks a well-ordered energy in the man, finest taste, uncommon wisdom. In caricatured and diminished form we see the wisdom in his self-seeking, mountaineer closeness (Mather 285).
In fact, Titian's age has always been a source of speculation. It has been given traditionally as 99 at his death, but in fact the year of his birth is unknown. It is certain that he was very old when he died, but we do not know how old. What is certain is that his life as a painter spanned no less than 70 years. Titian's pers...