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| Titian The Crowning with Thorns 1542-44 oil on panel Musée du Louvre |
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| Titian Cain and Abel ca. 1543 oil on canvas (ceiling painting) Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, Venice |
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| Titian David and Goliath ca. 1543 oil on canvas (ceiling painting) Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, Venice |
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| Titian Sacrifice of Isaac ca. 1543 oil on canvas (ceiling painting) Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, Venice |
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| Titian Ecce Homo 1543 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
"By 1540 Titian had reigned over Venetian painting for thirty years since Giorgione's death, yet this was no more than the rough mid-point of his career. He continued to paint for three decades more, and at an age that was most probably a little over ninety finally let go of life, in 1576. The last half of his career – a span that would have sufficed a normal sixteenth-century creative life – was even more astonishingly vital than the first."
"In the early forties the preoccupation that had been increasingly visible in Titian's art of the previous decade, with Central Italian ideas of style, became a factor that significantly affected – where it did not control – his most important paintings for some years. We have seen his competitive involvement in the later thirties with the art of Pordenone, and his exposure to the more authentic Romanist example in Mantua of Giulio Romano; he was in Mantua again late in 1540. The Crowning with Thorns (Paris, Louvre, 1542-4; painted for S. Maria delle Grazie in Milan) is the revelation of the extent to which his accumulated experience of Giulio affected Titian. Against an ashlar architecture that, like Giulio's real buildings, is both expressive and archaeological, Titian sets Romanized anatomies in poses of forced action. The self-consciously rhetorical exaggeration in these postures and the extreme stress of their plasticity is Giulio's, compounded with an element of Michelangelism and by a recall of the Laocoön. Twenty years before, two of these same factors had been instrumental in Titian's earlier confrontation of Venetian with Roman values, as in the Resurrection of SS. Nazaro e Celso. But now the confrontation is with Giulio's exaggeration of the properties of Roman painting style into post-classicism, and the will to convert its possibilities to his own use brings Titian nearer to the formal accent and expressive atmosphere of post-classical Roman style than he had ever ventured before – with the diminished but still saving factor of an optical technique that gives the foreign artifice of form at least the light and texture of existence in reality. This is the irreducible native constant not only in the Crowning but also in the other works of this short phase, within the early forties, of Titian's deepest probing towards Romanità. It is still more evident in the three great ceiling paintings, twice life-size – Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, and the Sacrifice of Isaac – which he executed for the church of S. Spirito (c. 1543; now, Venice, S. Maria della Salute). In these, anatomical gigantismo and dramatic action have a less artificial pathos than in the Crowning, and chiaroscuro and colour are as much the agencies of drama as the actors' forms. Not just Giulian example but Pordenone's and Correggio's, more nearly of the Venetian tradition, served Titian in the ceiling paintings, affecting both the motifs and the devices of illusionism he employs in them, and his way of dealing with his sources is, more evidently than ever before, an expropriation even more than it is an assimilation. By it, in this episode of Romanism, he finds a new and more rhetorical impressiveness for his actors and their settings and a higher energy not just for their forms but for the colours he clothes them in. The large Ecce Homo (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, dated 1543) has these effects of Titian's Romanism but less of forced Romanità, tempering artifice in its dramatic style with a pathos more closely dependent on observed truth. The extreme of Titian's Romanism passed before his actual experience of Rome itself."
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| Titian Danaë 1545-46 oil on canvas Museo di Capodimonte, Naples |
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| Titian Portrait of Pope Paul III with grandsons Alessandro and Ottaviano Farnese 1546 oil on canvas (unfinished) Museo di Capodimonte, Naples |
"In the autumn of 1545, responding to solicitations from the Farnese, Titian finally made an extended visit to Rome: he stayed from October 1545 to June of the succeeding year. He was lodged in the Belvedere and guided (by Vasari among others) through the city's monuments and works of art. He was commissioned to do paintings which were, mostly, portraits; of those that were not, the most important that survives is the Danaë (Naples, Pinacoteca), painted for Ottaviano Farnese. It seems a programme piece, meant to show what, of aesthetic principle more than motifs or particular style, Titian found worthy of consideration in his Roman environment, and equally to show where, on the contrary, he insisted on his Venetian differences from Rome. The nude form of Danaë takes on a high classic character – partly from close study of antique examples, but more from a synthesis that Titian had not made to this degree before between grandeur of dimensions and regularizing harmony of shapes. Seeing Roman antiquity in abundance, Raphael rather than Giulio Romano, and Michelangelo rather than Pordenone, Titian has grasped the classical sense of the Roman plastic style in place of the outward and post-classical earmarks he tended to observe in Venice or in Mantua: the shape and posture of the Danaë have the plastic certainty of grand classic statuary. But as if to demonstrate to Rome – perhaps polemically – a power of Venetian classicism that Roman art did not possess, Titian has clothed the Danaë's nude form with a tactile lustre, which emanates a sensuousness as grand as the form itself is ideal. This is more than the dialectic Titian had achieved at times before between plastic and optical style. In a Rome in which true classicism was no longer a living principle Titian found the idea that permitted him to move on to a stage of classicism higher than he had achieved before, and of which he would never quite abandon the essential sense."
"The major portrait Titian did in Rome, of the aged Paul III with his Nephews, Alessandro and Ottaviano [in fact grandsons, but Freedberg uses the older, more deferential title for the painting from an age less willing to acknowledge that nominally celibate Popes possessed grandsons] (Naples, Capodimonte) is a very different but no less important matter. It is unfinished, and this intensifies the effect it makes, almost startling, of the momentary and immediate, and of psychological experience so subtly nuanced as to seem evanescent. The painting is in these ways a virtuoso demonstration of Titian's most instinctive, rather than classical and cogitative, gifts. The picture's livingness is the antithesis of the congelations of contemporary Maniera portraiture, more rigid in Rome than elsewhere. Was its virtuosity a contradiction offered to Maniera portraiture on its home ground, as the sensuous lustre of the Danaë was to the Maniera's sophistications and fragilities in painting of the nude?"
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| Titian Portrait of Charles V Seated 1548 oil on canvas Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Titian Portrait of Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg 1548 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Titian Tityus 1548-49 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Titian Sisyphus 1548-49 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Titian Tantalus etching ca. 1565 by Giulio Sanuto after now-lost painting created in 1548-49 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Titian Danaë ca. 1565 oil on canvas (purchased in Rome by Velasquez for Philip IV of Spain) Museo del Prado, Madrid |
"Titian's return to Venice was followed fairly shortly by an invitation from Charles V to come to Augsburg. In January 1648 Titian was en route to Germany, and he remained in Augsburg until October of that year. He was engaged entirely in painting portraits, among them some (such as the Charles V Seated, now in Munich) that make measured concessions to a German taste. One of the Augsburg portraits, depicting Charles as a mounted general at the recent victory at Mühlberg, was an image so immediate in both reference and presence and, at the same time, so stately that it founded an iconography within the portrait genre: its formula was destined to endure until generals and horses ceased to coexist. While Titian was in Augsburg, Mary of Hungary, Charles's sister, commissioned a set of what might best be called antique morality-paintings, which Titian executed after his return to Venice (three in 1549, one before 1553), sending them then to Mary's residence in Flanders. They illustrated four great ancient 'condannati': Tityus, Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Ixion. The last two have been lost, and the two remaining ones, now in the Prado, were very early damaged by fire (1554), and may not document much more than the idea that Titian had when he conceived them. Yet, in the Tityus especially (sometimes improperly identified as a Prometheus), there is evidence of the maturing of a process that had been at work since the middle of the fifth decade, of which the Roman Danaë may mark the inception; a second versions of the Danaë theme (Madrid, Prado, 1554 [curators at the Prado now date the Danaë there to 1565 – a total of six versions having been produced by Titan, with greater or lesser assistance from others in the workshop, between 1545 and 1565 – the "second" of these versions to which Freedberg refers was commissioned by Philip II of Spain and painted 1549-50, but did not remain in Spain, instead looted by the British during the Peninsula War and taken to England, where it was subsequently cut down due to damage and is now held by the Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London]) may testify to its fulfillment. In the early forties Titian's response to Romanist ideas had consisted mainly in an aggrandizement of form in size and in effect of plastic substance. In the Roman Danaë, however, more in the Tityus, and quite evidently in the second Danaë, aggrandizement is not so much through physical effects as by the sense of scale Titian gives to the idea inhabiting the form. Substance is dense, but it is no longer plastically defined, and it is bound more closely to the surrounding light and air. Not only form but all sensuous and, specifically, optical values that the image holds are conceived on a larger scale, felt – and now set down by a rougher brush – with a power so grand that it endows them too with a character of idea."
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| Titian Venus and Adonis 1554 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Titian Venus with a Mirror ca. 1555 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Titian Perseus and Andromeda oil on canvas (anonymous 16th-century copy) Museo del Prado, Madrid |
"The later Danaë and the pictures that are coeval with it – the Venus and Adonis (Prado), Venus with a Mirror (Washington, National Gallery, c. 1555), or the Perseus and Andromeda (London, Wallace Collection, after 1553/6) – convey the sense that an extraordinary reach of classical expression has been achieved in them, as sensuous experience, as much as that of the spirit and the mind, assumes the stature of idea. This compares in many ways with what had happened in Michelangelo at an earlier time, but it contrasts with what the contemporary art of the Florentine had since increasingly become: an abjuring of the senses. As overt decorative virtue yields to depth of meaning in these works colour becomes quieter, but in compensation is infused by the rougher vibrance taken on by light. More than ever, what the paintings of the fifties and the years that follow tend to possess is less a colorism than a tonality: a tissue of restrained hues woven with a wonderfully diverse luminescence. In this tissue chiaroscuro is the agency of drama, not just of narrative but of visual experience. Within the chiaroscuro the lights are radiance and coruscation, exalting what they touch."
– S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (1970)