Titian

Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian (c. 1488/1490–1576), was the leading painter of the Venetian Renaissance, born at Pieve di Cadore near Belluno. Trained in Venice under Giovanni Bellini alongside Giorgione, he won fame with the Assumption of the Virgin for the Frari, completed in 1518.

Its agitated apostles broke with the meditative stillness of earlier Venetian painting. His patrons came to include Emperor Charles V and Philip II of Spain.

Equally master of portraits, mythologies and altarpieces, he defined Venetian colour and loose brushwork across nearly seventy years. He died in Venice in the plague of 1576.