Workshop of Titian

In the Sala di Marte at Palazzo Pitti hangs a portrait of a bearded man in black, and its label prints two doubts at once. The sitter is given as the anatomist Andreas Vesalius with a question mark after the name, and the painter is given as the workshop of Titian.

Titian ran that workshop for decades from a house in the Biri Grande quarter of Venice, and most of the people in it were relatives. His son Orazio worked beside him on the late commissions for the Spanish crown. His cousin Cesare Vecellio and the younger Marco Vecellio painted there, and Girolamo Dente, who signed himself Girolamo di Tiziano, stayed roughly 40 years. They carried on canvases the master had laid in, finished passages he left, and above all supplied repetitions. When a court wanted the portrait of a pope or a sovereign in several copies, the shop produced them, with Titian's own hand on some of them and nowhere near others.

None of this was deception. Anyone ordering from Venice knew he was dealing with a shop, and how much of the master a picture would contain was part of what was agreed. The trouble came much later, when collectors and cataloguers began to want one identified hand and had to decide, canvas by canvas, how much of Titian was in there.

The Vesalius portrait went under Titian's own name for centuries. Scholars have since pushed it around northern Italy, proposing one painter after another, the 2003 catalogue of the gallery placed it in his immediate circle, and the label settled on bottega. Titian died in the plague year of 1576, Orazio died days after him, and the house at Biri Grande was ransacked.