At the end of his long, prolific life, Titian was rumored to paint directly on the canvas with his bare hands. He would slide his fingers across bright ridges of oil paint, loosening the colors, blending, blurring, and then bringing them together again. With nothing more than the stroke of a thumb or the flick of a nail, Titian’s touch brought the world to life. The clinking of glasses, the clanging of swords, and the cry of a woman’s grief. The sensation of hair brushing up against naked flesh, the sudden blush of unplanned desire, and the dry taste of fear in a lost, shadowy place. Titian’s art, Maria H. Loh argues in this exquisitely illustrated book, was and is a synesthetic experience. To see is at once to hear, to smell, to taste, and to touch. But while Titian was fully attached to the world around him, he also held the universe in his hands. Like a magician, he could conjure appearances out of thin air. Like a philosopher, his exploration into the very nature of things channelled and challenged the controversial ideas of his day. But as a painter, he created the world anew. Dogs, babies, rubies, and pearls. Falcons, flowers, gloves, and stone. Shepherds, mothers, gods, and men. Paint, canvas, blood, sweat, and tears. In a series of close visual investigations, Loh guides us through the lush, vibrant world of Titian’s touch.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.

This up-to-date, well-illustrated, and thoughtful introduction to the life and works of one of the giants of Western Painting also surveys the golden age of Venetian Painting from Giovanni Bellini to Veronese and its place in the history of Western art. Bruce Cole, Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University and author of numerous books on Italian Renaissance art, begins with the life and work of Giovanni Bellini, the principal founder of Venetian Renaissance painting. He continues with the paintings of Giorgione and the young Titian whose work embodied the new Venetian style. Cole discusses and explains all of Titian's major works--portraits, religious paintings, and nudes--from various points of view and shows how Venetian painting of this period differed from painting in Florence and elsewhere in Italy and became a distinct and fully-developed style of its own.

The work that Titian produced during the first decade of his career is beautiful and varied, but it has raised many questions of attribution and chronology. This book - the first thorough and coherent account of this period in Titian's life - reconstructs what he painted, when he painted it and what these paintings mean. Paul Joannides begins by discussing the probable course of Titian's early career and his relationship to the Bellinis. There are individual excurses on Giorgione and on Sebastiano del Piombo whose work has often been confused with his. Joannides then offers new interpretations of some of Titian's paintings, emphasising their poetic and dramatic qualities. Among other topics, he associates for the first time the paintings in Saint Petersburg, Venice and Houston; lays out Titian's part of the Fondaco; connects the privately owned Resurrected Christ with the Fogg Circumcision; integrates the Dresden Venus and the Berlin Portrait into Titian's work; and establishes the dynamism and inventiveness of the great Assunta of 1516-18. Joannides provides detailed arguments in support of both new and familiar attributions, proposes a more closely reasoned and precise chronology