Madonna and Child in Evening TITIAN 1565

  The complete title of this work is Madonna and Child in Evening Landscape.

The greatest of Venetian painters, Titian was born at Pieve di Cadore [Friuli] about 1487; he died at Venice, Aug. 27, 1577.

The date of his birth is disputed by at least ten years.

At the age of ten Titian was brought to Venice and placed by his brother with the celebrated mosaicist, Sebastian Zuccato, but at the end of four or five years he entered the studio Giovanni Bellini, at that time the most noted artist in the city. There he found a group of young men about his own age, among them Lorenzo Lotto, who were all to become renowned. The foremost of these innovators and their master was Giorgio da Castelfranco, nicknamed Giorgione. With him Titian formed a friendship of which all his early works bore traces, so much so that at this period it is difficult to distinguish the young master of Cadore from him of Castelfranco. The earliest know work of Titian, the little "Ecce Homo" of the Scuola di San Rocco, was long regarded as the work of Giorgione. And the same confusion or uncertainty is connected with more than one of the "Sacred Conversations", in which several holy persons [generally three or four] appear at half length in sweet and familiar association with the Blessed Virgin.

Giorgione died in 1511 and the aged Bellini in 1515, leaving Titian after the production masterpieces without a rival in the Venetian School. For sixty years he was to be the absolute and undisputed head, the official master, and as it were the painter laureate of the Republic Serenissime. As early as 1516 he succeeded his old master Bellini as the pensioner of the Senate. Fifteen years later began the relations with Charles V, Francis I, Alfonso and Isabella d'Este, the Houses of Ferrara and Urbino, which made him the first of the princely painters or the Renaissance and the one whose position was most international and most glorious of all. However he rarely left Venice. Married to a tenderly loved wife, solidly established in his habits of work, and like all Venetians strongly attached to the life of Venice, he regarded nothing as being worth a separation from his home, his studio, or his country. 

During the years 1516-30 which may be called the period of his bloom and maturity, the artist attempted the monumental style. His most noteworthy work in this style, the "Assumption" of the Church of the Frari [1518].

The artist continued simultaneously his series of small Madonnas which he treated more and more amid beautiful landscapes in the manner described as poetic pastorals.






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