Madonna and Child in an Evening Landscape

Around 1560 Titian was past 70, and the Alte Pinakothek reads this canvas as his late answer to Michelangelo, whose work he had studied during a stay in Rome some 15 years earlier. The museum's clue is the Child, unusually large and powerfully built, and the monumental weight and energy that run through both figures. Behind them the daylight is going. The open evening landscape and the heavy fall of Mary's drapery bring calm to a composition that is otherwise full of tension. In these last decades Titian let colour carry the picture, laid on in broad, sure strokes, and the museum sees in them a painter openly enjoying his own independence. The canvas is nearly 1.75 metres tall. It was bought in Paris in 1814, the year Napoleon abdicated, for Maximilian I Joseph, the first king of Bavaria.