Ecce Homo

The surface of this picture is worn, and the Prado thinks it knows why. Philip the Second kept it in his own rooms in the Alcázar palace in Madrid, hung as a pair with a Titian of the grieving Virgin, and there it stayed for well over a century, until the night the Alcázar burned in 1734. The abrasion across the paint is probably from that fire, and the same wear shows, more faintly, on its companion. The support is unusual too, a thin sheet of slate, and it is the only painting on slate known in Titian's work. He made it in 1546 or 1547 and put it into the hands of Charles the Fifth at Augsburg in January 1548.