Mater Dolorosa with her Hands apart

In 1554 Charles the Fifth, ruler of Spain and of the Holy Roman Empire, asked Titian for a second painting of the grieving Virgin, and he attached a condition. This one had to be painted on stone. Titian spent months hunting for the right slab and only found it in March 1555, and that May the emperor wrote from Brussels that he was sending a pattern to follow, most likely a Flemish devotional image. What came back is painted on marble, heavy and cold and expensive, and the expense was part of the point in a private image of this kind. Its companion, the version with the hands clasped, has the blue of the mantle made from ground lapis lazuli. Both went with Charles when he withdrew to the monastery of Yuste.