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| Titian The Annunciation (for Chiesa di Santa Maria degli Angeli, Murano) engraving by Gian Jacopo Caraglio before 1565 after now-lost painting created in 1537 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Titian Battle of Cadore engraving by Giulio Fontana ca. 1569 after now-lost painting created in 1537 British Museum |
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| Titian Battle of Cadore anonymous etching made ca. 1570-80 after now-lost painting created in 1537 British Museum |
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| Titian Battle of Cadore drawing by Peter Paul Rubens ca. 1630-40 after now-lost painting created in 1537 Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp |
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| Titian Battle of Cadore anonymous copy painted before 1700 after now-lost painting created in 1537 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Titian Roman Emperor M. Silvius Otho engraving by Robert van Voerst ca. 1632 after now-lost painting created ca. 1536-39 British Museum |
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| Titian Roman Emperor C. Julius Caesar engraving by Aegidius Sadeler ca. 1629 after now-lost painting created ca. 1536-39 British Museum |
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| Titian Roman Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus engraving by Aegidius Sadeler ca. 1629 after now-lost painting created ca. 1536-39 private collection |
"The Venus of Urbino is the end product, chronologically a kind of postscript, of the strain that had been dominant in Titian's picture of the fourth decade. Before it was painted his course had again begun to change, re-attaching itself to the mode exemplified at the end of the twenties by the Peter Martyr altar and to the problems contained in it. As Pordenone's stimulus seems then to have been a factor, so, with his continuing activity in Venice, is it even more explicit that, a decade later, this is again the case. Also, the Romanist propaganda of Giulio [Romano] in Mantua had come to have an increasingly important effect, signifying to the painters of northern Italy what was authoritative as well as new. In the later 1530s Titian was repeatedly in touch with Mantua, and there are records of his certain visits there in 1536 and 1540 and of a probable visit made in 1538. These were the immediate stimuli for Titian to revitalize his style, but in addition he could not but be cognizant of the general course of events in Rome and Florence and of the affirmation there by the middle thirties of an art unlike his own of that moment."
"In 1537 these combined factors worked on Titian to effect a major change, and in that year and the next he did a group of works that demonstrate a convinced re-immersion in the problems that at this time signified 'modernity' – as marked in this as the previous paintings were oppositely conservative. The whole group has been lost, so its import for this moment in Titian's history tends often to be underestimated; but all are recorded in prints or painted copies, and their character can be assessed. The first was an Annunciation for S. Maria degli Angeli at Murano: it was this picture that was replaced by Pordenone's painting of the subject when the monks refused to pay Titian's price. Interpreting the theme as a pretext for an ennobled drama, Titian set its protagonists on a monumental and near-illusionistic architectural stage, moving them powerfully, and populated the upper scene with swirling angels. In the engraving that records the painting it is the effects of energy of structure and of plastic form that seem to dominate, but the original contained a further agency of drama that was natively Titian's, raised in this present context to a new force – what a description from the pen of Aretino tells us was a 'lume folgorante'."
"In the life-size Battle of Cadore once in the Palazzo Ducale Titian's response to the potentiality for drama is at a still higher pitch, and he has exploited every available resource, in his own repertory or in others', that would help him realize it. Pordenone, the arch-antagonist, is at once an irritant for Titian and a main source for borrowings. Roman prints derived from the battle scenes of the later Raphael and Giulio served Titian also, but the direct example of Giulio's works in Mantua is the most decisive stimulus – less from any analogues in the subject matter than from the whole tenor of style, complex and violent, in the main rooms of the Palazzo del Ti, most importantly the Sala dei Giganti. Titian tempers Giulio's precedent to his own purposes and gives fluency to what he takes from Pordenone, creating on challenge the most swiftly impelled image of an ordered turmoil art so far had conceived. The energy of forms that act in space seems even to exceed what was in Titian's sources, not only in the single figures but in the whole development in depth of the design. Yet this activity in space depends less than in Pordenone or Giulio (and less also than in Titian's own earlier Peter Martyr altar) on assertions of plasticity of form. On the contrary, plastic emphases are lessened by the action on them of a very varied chiaroscuro, and they seem to have been expressed less by means of modelling than by translation into equivalent energies of colour. The devices of illusion that Titian has taken with seeming literalness from Giulio and Pordenone assert themselves much less than in the works of those painters as simulations of sheer plastic facts. This is even less than in Titian's career before a simply imitated response to the Central Italian doctrine of plastic style, and more truly a dialectic made between his Venetian principles of light and colour. The visual and the illustrative energies of the Battle of Cadore match, but all the passionate commotion in it still is resolved into a unified pictorial texture, in principle what Titian had conceived in the Andrians; here, however, the vibrance the unity contains is at a vastly heightened pitch."
"The third element in this group of lost works is in the most literal sense Romanist: a set of half-length portraits of the Caesars painted to be inset into Giulio's decoration of the Gabinetto dei Cesari in the Mantuan Palazzo Ducale. Antique models – busts and coins – were obviously consulted by Titian for the portraits, but this necessary archaeology made only part of their effect of a Romanità . Apparently from sympathy with their Giulian setting and its author's style, Titian paraphrased Giulio's taste for an exaggerated physical presence, in both amplitude and plastic strength. This suits the power implied in the subjects, but even the tone of Titian's treatment suggests the impact on him of Giulio, for he has described the Emperors with an accent like Giulio's of caricatural realism and with a suspect touch of Giulio's mock-heroics. More than the companion pictures of 1537-38, the Emperor portraits constitute a concession to the mounting pressures on Venetian classicism of intruding Central Italian style. The group of works of which they form part contains, more than at any time in Titian's career, the evaluation of his ideas of art. What began in the last years of the fourth decade continued for a while into the next, and then generated what for the moment had the look of a profound crisis. It was for the rest of Venetian painting, but not, as we shall see, for Titian; as usual he came to dominate and exploit what influenced him."
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| Titian Portrait of Tommaso Mosti ca. 1520 oil on panel, transferred to canvas Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
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| Titian Man with a Glove ca. 1523 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Titian Federigo II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua ca. 1525-30 oil on panel Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Titian Man with a Falcon ca. 1528 oil on canvas Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska |
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| Titian Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici 1533 oil on canvas Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
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| Titian Isabella d'Este, Duchess of Mantua ca. 1534-36 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Titian Woman with Fur-Trimmed Dress ca. 1534 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Titian La Bella ca. 1536 oil on canvas Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
– S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (1970)