Die von Spanien gerettete Religion

In October 1571 a Christian fleet crushed the Ottoman navy at Lepanto, off the coast of Greece, and Catholic Europe took it as a deliverance. Titian was in his eighties in Venice by then. He reached for an allegory he had first worked out years earlier for the Holy Roman Emperor and reshaped it for Philip the Second of Spain. The armoured woman with the spear is Spain herself, striding to the rescue of Religion, the shaken figure beside her. Out on the water a man in a turban drives a chariot, standing in for the Turkish sea power just beaten back. Titian shipped the canvas to Madrid in 1576, the year he died. Up close the paint is loose and smoky, laid on with his fingers as much as a brush, the way he worked at the very end.