Attributed to Titian

Attributed to Titian is the label for a painting a museum believes to be by Titian himself while stopping short of certainty. Titian's own habits make that step a hard one. Palma il Giovane, a younger painter who worked with him in his last years, described how he would lay in a canvas, turn it to the wall for months, and come back to it again and again. The account survives through the writer Marco Boschini, who published it in 1674. Pictures stayed in Titian's house for years in different states of finish.

When he died in 1576, some of those canvases were still there, and other hands finished or sold them. Palma himself completed the large Pietà that Titian had meant for his own tomb, and added a Latin inscription recording that he had finished what Titian left begun. The picture now hangs in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice.