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History - About Titian
Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian, was born in Cadore in the Dolomites in
Northern Italy c. 1485-90. He went to Venice where he was briefly apprenticed
to Giovanni Bellini and worked as an assistant to Giorgione.
His talent ensured a meteoric rise and, from the 1520s, he became the
most renowned portrait painter of the age. His sitters included men of
the highest rank, such as Emperor Charles V, Pope Paul III, Philip II
of Spain and numerous Doges of Venice. He had the ability to capture both
the physical features and also the inner nobility and vitality of the
sitter.
Titian was the greatest Venetian painter of all, whose name was synonymous,
even in his own lifetime, with the sensuous handling of paint and the
magical use of colour. He was in great demand in Venice and the north
of Italy as a painter of altarpieces and devotional works and of mythological
subjects for a courtly setting. From the 1540s he worked almost entirely
for the Hapsburg court, and his pictures could be admired in Vienna, Brussels
and, above all, in Madrid. Titian was a highly original artist whose dynamic
energy in painting was to have a major impact on European art. His works
directly inspired the great Baroque artists Velasquez, Rubens and Van
Dyck and the later spread of portraiture into Northern Europe and England.
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