The work that Titian produced during the first decade of his career is beautiful and varied, but it has raised many questions of attribution and chronology. This book - the first thorough and coherent account of this period in Titian's life - reconstructs what he painted, when he painted it and what these paintings mean. Paul Joannides begins by discussing the probable course of Titian's early career and his relationship to the Bellinis. There are individual excurses on Giorgione and on Sebastiano del Piombo whose work has often been confused with his. Joannides then offers new interpretations of some of Titian's paintings, emphasising their poetic and dramatic qualities. Among other topics, he associates for the first time the paintings in Saint Petersburg, Venice and Houston; lays out Titian's part of the Fondaco; connects the privately owned Resurrected Christ with the Fogg Circumcision; integrates the Dresden Venus and the Berlin Portrait into Titian's work; and establishes the dynamism and inventiveness of the great Assunta of 1516-18. Joannides provides detailed arguments in support of both new and familiar attributions, proposes a more closely reasoned and precise chronology

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–94) is an ambiguous figure in the history of art. His radically unorthodox paintings are not readily classifiable, and although he was a Venetian by birth, his standing as a member of the Venetian school is constantly contested. But he was also a formidable maverick, abandoning the humanist narratives and sensuous color palette typical of the great Venetian master, Titian, in favor of a renewed concentration on core Christian subjects painted in a rough and abbreviated chiaroscuro style. This generously illustrated book offers an extensive analysis of Tintoretto’s greatest paintings, charting his life and work in the context of Venetian art and the culture of the Cinquecento. Tom Nichols shows that Tintoretto was an extraordinarily innovative artist who created a new manner of painting, which, for all of its originality and sophistication, was still able to appeal to the shared emotions of the widest possible audience. This compact, pocket edition features sixteen additional illustrations and a new afterword by the author, and it will continue to be one of the definitive treatments of this once grossly overlooked master.

This insightful volumes the use of imitation and the modern cult of originality through a consideration of the disparate fates of two Venetian painters - the canonised master Titian and his artistic heir, the little-known Padovanino.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 15-Sept. 3, 2012.

At the end of his long, prolific life, Titian was rumored to paint directly on the canvas with his bare hands. He would slide his fingers across bright ridges of oil paint, loosening the colors, blending, blurring, and then bringing them together again. With nothing more than the stroke of a thumb or the flick of a nail, Titian’s touch brought the world to life. The clinking of glasses, the clanging of swords, and the cry of a woman’s grief. The sensation of hair brushing up against naked flesh, the sudden blush of unplanned desire, and the dry taste of fear in a lost, shadowy place. Titian’s art, Maria H. Loh argues in this exquisitely illustrated book, was and is a synesthetic experience. To see is at once to hear, to smell, to taste, and to touch. But while Titian was fully attached to the world around him, he also held the universe in his hands. Like a magician, he could conjure appearances out of thin air. Like a philosopher, his exploration into the very nature of things channelled and challenged the controversial ideas of his day. But as a painter, he created the world anew. Dogs, babies, rubies, and pearls. Falcons, flowers, gloves, and stone. Shepherds, mothers, gods, and men. Paint, canvas, blood, sweat, and tears. In a series of close visual investigations, Loh guides us through the lush, vibrant world of Titian’s touch.

Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation demonstrates that two major monuments of Italian Renaissance culture - Bellini's and Titian's famous series of mytho-poetical paintings for the camerino of Duke Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - were conceived as mnemonic or pedagogical devices aimed at educating the reader/beholder in the medical science of reproductive physiology and the maintenance of sexual health. It is further argued that the learned courtier Mario Equicola, who conceived the pictorial program of Duke Alfonso's camerino, had read Colonna's text and was extensively inspired by its prior literary argument. The study is organized in two parts, intimately interrelated. The first part is a study of Alfonso d'Este's camerino, with a general introduction, individual chapters on each of Bellini's and Titian's four pictorial "bacchanals," and a conclusion proposing a new and more accurate reconstruction of the layout of the room, also including a completely new way of interpreting the ensemble. The second part of the study concerns Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, again beginning with its own introductory essay and advancing a completely new interpretation of the text. The brief conclusion brings the insights of the two sections together, clarifying the historical relationship between the pictorial and literary works and explaining their larger cultural significance. Emphasizing Equicola's use of the Hypnerotomachia as a model for pictorial invention, the author reveals how Titian's remarkably sensuous paintings and Colonna's erotically-charged romance are related by their common reference to the neo-Aristotelian medical theory of the "libidinal seasons," and by corollary themes of marriage and sexual consummation. This peculiar intersection of cultural themes came to prominence in the context of a courtly world in which medical science was increasingly brought to bear on the problem of dy

Titian is best known for paintings that embodied the tradition of the Venetian Renaissance—but how Venetian was the artist himself? In this study, Tom Nichols probes the tensions between the individualism of Titian’s work and the conservative mores of the city, showing how his art undermined the traditional self-suppressing approach to painting in Venice and reflected his engagement with the individualistic cultures emerging in the courts of early modern Europe. Ranging widely across Titian’s long career and varied works, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance outlines his radical innovations to the traditional Venetian altarpiece; his transformation of portraits into artistic creations; and his meteoric breakout from the confines of artistic culture in Venice. Nichols explores how Titian challenged the city’s communal values with his competitive professional identity, contending that his intensely personalized way of painting resulted in a departure that effectively brought an end to the Renaissance tradition of painting. Packed with 170 illustrations, this groundbreaking book will change the way people look at Titian and Venetian art history.

A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

"For nearly four decades in the sixteenth century, the careers of Renaissance Venice's three greatest painters - Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese - overlapped, encouraging mutual influences and bitter rivalries that changed the course of art history. Venice was then among Europe's richest cities, and its plentiful commissions fostered an exceptionally fertile and innovative climate. In this environment, the three artists - brilliant, ambitious, and fiercely competitive - vied with each other for primacy, deploying the new combination of oil on canvas, with its unique expressive possibilities, and such new approaches as a personal and identifiable signature touch. They also pioneered the use of easel painting, a newly portable format that allowed for unprecedented fame in their lifetimes. With more than 160 stunning examples by the three masters and their contemporaries, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese elucidates the technical and aesthetic innovations that helped define the "Venetian style"--Characterized by loose technique. rich coloring, and often sensual subject matter - as well as the social, political, and economic context in which it flourished. Essays range from examinations of new approaches to studies of such crucial institutions as state commissions and the private patronage system. Most of all, by concentrating on the lives and careers of Venice's three greatest painters, the volume presents a vibrant human portrait - one brimming with intense competition, one-upmanship, humor, and passion."--Jacket.

This study examines the development of the altarpiece in sixteenth-century Venice. Focusing closely on Titian's St. Peter Martyr Altarpiece, which was the most famous work by this painter, destroyed in 1867, Patricia Meilman considers how this painting irrevocably changed the course of altar decoration. Demonstrating the legacy of the St. Peter Martyr Altarpiece with a younger generation of painters, she also examines the social, religious and historical events of the decades just before the Tridentine reforms and their impact on devotional imagery and practices.