Titian And His World

After Vasari's Lives of the Most Famous Artists,The Life of Titian by the seventeenth-century Venetian artist and writer Carlo Ridolfi is the most important contemporary documentary source for our understanding of the great Renaissance artist. This new critical edition, the first translation into English of Ridolfi's biography, illuminates his life, his artistic production, and his early critical reputation. The editors address art-historical questions of attribution, provenance, and documentation that Ridolfi's biography raises. Two introductory essays present the nature, scope, and importance of the biography for the study of Titian and Venetian Renaissance art and place Ridolfi in the tradition of Renaissance biography and artistic literature. The annotations provide a useful and current bibliography drawn from both art history and literature. The Life of Titian will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students of the history of Renaissance art, literature, language, and culture.

An account of the life, work and times of the most famous painter of 16th century Venice.

The first definitive biography of the master painter in more than a century, Titian: His Life is being hailed as a "landmark achievement" for critically acclaimed author Sheila Hale (Publishers Weekly). Brilliant in its interpretation of the 16th-century master's paintings, this monumental biography of Titian draws on contemporary accounts and recent art historical research and scholarship, some of it previously unpublished, providing an unparalleled portrait of the artist, as well as a fascinating rendering of Venice as a center of culture, commerce, and power. Sheila Hale's Titian is destined to be this century's authoritative text on the life of greatest painter of the Italian High Renaissance.

Towards the end of his life Titian didn't finish his paintings. The elderly artist kept them in his studio, never quite completing them, as though wanting to endlessly postpone the moment of letting go. Created with the fingers as much as the brush, Titian's last paintings are imbued with a sense of final, desperate effort - a rawness and immediacy that weren't to be seen again in art for centuries. But what did Titian, who experienced as much in the way of material success as any artist before or since, mean by these works? Are they a harrowing, final testament or simply a collection of unfinished paintings? In the outbreak of plague that finally killed him, Titian's studio was looted, and many paintings taken. What happened to them is not known. This book is a quest - a journey through Titian's life and work, towards the physical and spiritual landscape of his last paintings. Looking at Titian's relationships with his artistic rivals, his patrons - including popes, kings and emperors - and his troubled dealings with his own family, the narrative moves from the artist's hometown in the Dolomites to the greatest churches and palaces of the age. Parallel with these physical travels is a journey through the paintings, following the glittering trajectory of Titian's life and career, the remorseless formal development that led to the breakthroughs of his last days. Titian: The Last Days is an exploratory history of the artist and his world that vividly recreates the atmosphere of sixteenth-century Venice and Europe, a narrative in which the search for the subject becomes part of the subject itself. The result is a brilliant and compelling study of one of Europe's greatest artists that is at once passionate, engaging and deeply personal.

The first definitive biography of the master painter in more than a century, Titian: His Life is being hailed as a "landmark achievement" for critically acclaimed author Sheila Hale (Publishers Weekly). Brilliant in its interpretation of the 16th-century master's paintings, this monumental biography of Titian draws on contemporary accounts and recent art historical research and scholarship, some of it previously unpublished, providing an unparalleled portrait of the artist, as well as a fascinating rendering of Venice as a center of culture, commerce, and power. Sheila Hale's Titian is destined to be this century's authoritative text on the life of greatest painter of the Italian High Renaissance.

At the dawn of the sixteenth century, the republic of Venice reigned as one of the most powerful city-states of Europe. The pre-eminent artist during this period was Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian. Titian's older and younger contemporaries included painters of the stature of Bellini, Giorgione, Bassano, Tintoretto and Veronese. This book examines twenty of the most important paintings by these artists included. Titian and his World also traces the development of Venetian painting from 1460 to 1615 and provides the background to the opulence and sensuousness of Venetian painting. AUTHOR: Peter Humfrey is Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews and a widely recognised authority on Venetian Renaissance art. SELLING POINTS: An introduction to some of the greatest artists of the Venetian Renaissance Extravagant colour reproductions of the major late Renaissance paintings 30 colour illustrations