Annunciation

When this altarpiece was set up in the church of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples around 1557, Titian was an old man close to 70, painting in a way that unsettled people. Up close the surface looks half-finished, the colors smeared and broken, the angel's light breaking through cloud in rough strokes rather than a clean glow. Some Neapolitans thought it simply looked dirty and unfinished. It caused enough argument that a local scholar, the physician Bartolomeo Maranta, sat down and wrote a whole discourse in the painting's defense, explaining why Titian's loose late manner was worth admiring. That treatise is one of the earliest cases we have of someone arguing in writing over a single modern picture. In the scene itself Mary stands at the right in a blue robe over red, turning as a shaft of light comes down through the clouds toward her.