Choice
[A] gem of a catalog. . . . A unique and important addition to the exhibition literature. . . . Highly recommended. All levels.


Book Description
Few individuals have had a greater influence on the development of Western painting than the celebrated sixteenth-century Venetian artist Titian (c. 1480–1576). His vibrant colors and masterful brushwork have made his work a constant inspiration to artists, from Rubens to the Impressionists and beyond. Every generation has found something new to admire in his astonishing technique, which enabled him to produce fresh interpretations of the most familiar religious and mythological stories as well as portraits and landscapes. Written by some of the world’s most renowned Titian scholars, this beautifully illustrated book accompanies a major exhibition devoted to the work of this extraordinary artist. Authoritative essays on Titian’s life and times, portraits, replicas, and technique provide the background for a detailed examination of over 40 of his greatest masterpieces—works that provide evidence of Titian’s genius as a stylistic innovator and supreme manipulator of paint.


From the Inside Flap
This gorgeous book is published to accompany an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, from February 19 to May 18, 2003.; Published by the National Gallery Company and distributed by Yale University Press


About the Author
Charles Hope is Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London. Jennifer Fletcher was Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute until September 2002. Jill Dunkerton is Restorer in the Conservation Department at the National Gallery. Miguel Falomir is Head Curator of Italian Renaissance Painting at the Prado, Madrid. David Jaffé is Senior Curator at the National Gallery. Nicholas Penny is Senior Curator of Sculpture at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Caroline Campbell is Assistant Curator of Renaissance Paintings at the National Gallery.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The greatest of all Venetian painters, Titian achieved a worldly success and an artistic influence unsurpassed in his own lifetime and later equalled only by Rubens. His matchless technique and brilliant use of colour won him the patronage of the most powerful men in Christendom, and led to the acceptance of a revolutionary change in the role of the painter the consequences of which are still felt today. In freeing the art of painting from its traditional subservience to drawing, he emphasised the importance of colour and brushwork as means of self-expression, establishing a tradition that can be traced through the work of countless artists from Velazquez to the Impressionists and beyond. In this major and scholarly study, Charles Hope presents an authoritative account of Titian's remarkable rise to fame and sustained pre-eminence, basing his arguments extensively on unpublished information and convincingly challenging many accepted ideas about the painter's career and development.

The author sheds light on the meaning of Titian's paintings, on the role of his studio, his influence on contemporaries and on the changes in his own ideals and technique. With many images in colour, this book covers every aspect of Titain's art and demostrates his status as the last great painter of the High Renaissance. It includes portraits, the epitome of the aristocratic ideals of the period, as well as erotic mythologies, which created an enduring and pervasive image of the world of the pagan gods, and large-scale religious compositions, whose innovations laid the foundations of the baroque art of Catholic Europe. This book, drawing on a massive compilation of manuscript sources, is considered by many, a standard one-volume work on the subject.

FROM THE CRITICS

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