Ecce Homo

Titian painted this Ecce Homo late in his long life, around 1567, when he was in his late seventies and working in the loose, smudged manner of his final years. The subject is the moment Pilate shows the scourged Christ, crowned with thorns, to the crowd. What makes this particular canvas remarkable is what happened to it centuries later. Not long after it reached the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, thieves cut the central figure clean out of the painting, and that fragment spent more than three years rolled up in a damp hiding place before it was recovered. In 1934 the restorer Vasily Yakovlev matched the ruined centre back to the surviving edges, relined the whole canvas, and filled the lost patches with fresh primer. The seams of that rescue are part of the surface you see in Moscow today.