La Gloria

Titian painted this vast heavenly vision for the most powerful man in Europe, the Emperor Charles V, whose lands stretched from Spain to the Netherlands to the New World. It shows the Trinity in glory, and among the crowd of the blessed kneels Charles himself, stripped of his crown and wrapped in a plain white shroud, beside his late wife and his children. The emperor, worn out and crippled by gout, was already planning to give up his thrones. When he abdicated and retired to the remote monastery of Yuste in western Spain, he took this painting with him. Contemporaries said he sat before it during his final illness in 1558, studying the place he hoped to hold among those shrouded figures.