Christus und der gute Schächer

This is a piece of a larger picture. Somewhere below Christ and the thief there were once soldiers, and all that survives of them is a couple of spear tips at the edge, the canvas having been cut down at some point. It is very late Titian, from around 1566, when the painter was an old man working in a way that startled people. Up close the surface looks almost unfinished, dragged and dabbed, the body of Christ built out of raw strokes of light against a bruised sky. Those who watched him said the old master by then painted as much with his fingers as with the brush. The picture seems to have stayed in his studio, undelivered, until after he died.