Titian

The year 1510 constituted a fateful moment in the history of Venetian art. In that year, aged about thirty - four, the painter Giorgione died in Venice . His death, noted by some prescient contemporary observers, came at a time when Venetian art was undergoing a process of fundamental transformation, a process which he himself had helped to initiate. The year 1510 also saw the creation of seminal paintings by several of his talented contemporaries: Giovanni Bellini, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Titian. These paintings were to become the first in a long series of works which would, within less than a century, elevate the Venetians from a school of local importance to a major force in the history of Western art.

In 1510, an informed observer looking at Giorgione Tempest, Titian's Santo frescoes, or Sebastiano del Piombo's altarpiece in the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo might have realized that these remarkable paintings both embodied and transformed the ancient traditions of Venetian painting upon which they so heavily depended. Their artists visualized the world, its inhabitants, and their beliefs and dreams in a way never before seen in the West.

Giorgione and his equally gifted near-contemporaries, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo, had all studied with Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516). Bellini and his painter brother Gentile (c. 1435-1507) had, in turn, learned their art in the family workshop headed by their father, Jacopo (c. 1400-1470). As a young man, Giovanni Bellini had painted a series of imaginative pictures based partially on the ancient traditions of Venetian picture-making that began in the Middle Ages and partially on some of the new developments that had lately come into northern Italy from Florence .

By 1510, the year of Giorgione's death, the old Giovanni Bellini himself had developed a personal style of great lyrical beauty, which, while it still embodied many of the venerable characteristics of Venetian art, was to become one of the foundations of Renaissance painting in the city. Bellini's late works, such as the Madonna and Child painted in 1510, were to have a major impact not only on his pupils Giorgione and Titian, but on the subsequent development of Venetian Renaissance painting. Yet Bellini himself would be influenced by these two artists around 1510 when Venetian art was experiencing major new developments.

Bellini's influence was also felt by a number of more minor, but still highly talented artists whose conceptions of style and subject depended on his earlier works. For example, in paintings from 1510 by Vittore Carpaccio and Marco Basaiti, one sees these men each responding in their own specific way to the new, broader horizons of the increasingly monumental figural style and expressive landscape favored by Bellini in his late work. Their responses, albeit limited, to the ferment occurring around 1510 graphically demonstrate the artistic dynamism and diversity of the time.

The year 1510 also saw the commissioning of Titian's frescoes for the Confraternity (Scuola) of Saint Anthony of Padua . These revolutionary works, the first which can be dated with certainty to the artist's hand, were a result of what Titian had learned from both Bellini and Giorgione. But more importantly, they embodied many of the elements of an idiom which was to become a cornerstone in the history of European art.

The prospects for Titian's future career improved around 1510 due to two events. The first was Giorgione's removal from the Venetian scene by death in 1510; the second was the departure from Venice of a potential rival, Sebastiano del Piombo, another remarkable artist trained in the Bellini shop. In 1511 Sebastiano moved to Rome , where he transformed himself into a rather slavish follower of his idol Michelangelo. But before he left, he painted a major altarpiece for the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo , probably in 1510.