Bacchus and Ariadne

The Duke of Ferrara first handed this commission to Raphael, who managed only a drawing before he died in 1520. It passed to Titian, then in his early thirties, who finished it by 1523 for a small private room the duke was filling with scenes of wine and revelry. Titian caught the god Bacchus at the single instant he leaps from his chariot, twisting in mid-air the moment he first sees Ariadne, the woman abandoned on the shore. Above her head Titian painted a ring of eight stars, the crown she will become in the sky. The blue of the sea and sky is ground from lapis lazuli, a pigment then worth more than gold, and after five centuries it still reads as the loudest colour in the room.