Nymph and Shepherd

Titian was in his eighties when he painted this around 1570, near the end of a career that had made him the most celebrated painter in Europe. By then he worked largely for himself, and it shows in the handling. A shepherd sits playing a pipe while a nude woman reclines with her back to us on a leopard skin, the whole scene built from rough, dragged, smeared paint that softens every edge. Scholars still argue over who the two figures are meant to be, trading names from Greek myth without settling it. Up close the nymph's pale body barely separates from the dark landscape behind her, the forms held together by touch rather than line.