Madonna and Child with Four Saints

This is an early Titian, from around 1518, when he was still in his late twenties and just stepping out from under the shadow of his teacher Giorgione and the older Giovanni Bellini. It is a sacra conversazione, the kind of picture where saints from different centuries are gathered informally around the Virgin and Child as if in one quiet room. Here the four are John the Baptist, Paul, Mary Magdalene and Jerome. No documents record when it was painted, so the date rests entirely on its style, on the loosened composition and warm Venetian colour that would become Titian's signature. For a long stretch the panel was not even credited to him. The 19th-century connoisseur Giovanni Morelli was the first to name Titian, and most scholars have agreed ever since.