Titian

Titian dominated Venetian painting for sixty years and changed what oil paint could do. Born Tiziano Vecellio around 1490 in the Dolomites, he trained in Venice under Giovanni Bellini and had outlived every rival by the time he died of plague in 1576.

His early work is sharp-edged and brilliantly coloured; his late work is not. Over decades he moved toward broken, loaded brushwork that only resolves at a distance, applying paint with brush, finger and rag. Contemporaries complained the late pictures looked unfinished. They were the beginning of a tradition that runs through Rubens and Velázquez to Manet.

Two of his altarpieces remain in the church they were painted for, the Frari: the Assunta over the high altar, which pushed the Virgin into violent upward motion at a scale nothing in Venice had attempted, and the Pesaro Madonna, which moved the Virgin off-centre and rebuilt the composition on a diagonal. Seeing them in place rather than in a gallery is the point — both were designed for their exact position and light.

He painted for Charles V and Philip II of Spain, and was among the first painters to be treated as a figure of rank rather than a craftsman.