Verkündigung

By the time Titian finished this altarpiece for the church of San Salvador, he was an old man, decades past the crisp, jewel-like surfaces that had made him famous across Europe. The paint here is loose and smoky, the colours deliberately murky, the angel enormous beside a Virgin caught mid-turn. His patrons, the story goes, refused to believe the aged master had really painted something so strange and rough. So Titian signed it not once but twice, Titianus fecit, fecit, Titian made it, made it, as if daring anyone to argue. The heavy, physical handling was not failing eyesight. He was pushing toward the moment when the immaterial becomes flesh, and letting the paint itself do that work. It still hangs in San Salvador, above the tomb of the merchant who commissioned it.