Works by Titian
184 works · 249 ms
Titian painted with loose, open strokes you can follow across the canvas, and from the 1550s, while still living in Venice, he worked mostly for Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain.
In Bacchus and Ariadne, painted in 1520–23 for the Duke of Ferrara's alabaster room, the wine god leaps from a chariot drawn by two cheetahs, pink cloak flaring, while Ariadne startles on the shore. The ring of stars at top left is her wedding crown, which Bacchus turned into a constellation.
Charles V ennobled him in 1533, and at Augsburg in 1548 Titian finished the Equestrian Portrait of Charles V: the emperor rides out in armour with a lance under a darkening sky. For Charles's son Philip he painted the poesie, large myths taken mostly from Ovid. In the Venus and Adonis of about 1555–60, one of several versions, the goddess clings to her lover as he strides off to hunt, and Adonis's arm was worked partly with a finger. The Rape of Europa, delivered in 1562, throws the girl on her back across the white bull as it swims out, a red scarf whipping from her hand.
Titian never engraved, but around 1515 he designed a woodcut of The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea on twelve sheets, to hang like a painting; in this 1549 printing the sea is rows of curling cut lines, and horsemen go under at the left. Below are mostly paintings, sacred and mythological scenes with many portraits.
Sources: Wikipedia, Museo del Prado, J. Paul Getty Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, National Gallery, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
