Saint Jerome in Penitence

Titian was somewhere near 90 when he painted this, and he had almost stopped drawing edges. Look at how the saint's white beard, the red robe and the rocks around him seem to be made of the same loose, smeared paint, worked in places with his fingers as much as a brush. Jerome kneels in the wilderness with a skull, an hourglass and his lion, beating his breast before a small crucifix. It was made for Philip II of Spain, who hung it at the Escorial, the vast granite monastery-palace he was still building outside Madrid. Within a year or so of finishing it, Titian was gone, one of the many who died in the plague that swept Venice in 1576.