The Concert

Around 1510 Venice had two rising painters whose hands were hard to tell apart. Giorgione was the celebrated one, and Titian, younger, was working in his orbit and soon absorbing it. This picture sat under Giorgione's name for centuries. Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici bought it as a Giorgione in 1654, and only in 1976 did X-rays settle it as an early Titian. At its centre a man at a spinet has turned from the keys, his hand still resting on them, to look back at a Dominican monk who touches his shoulder. Whatever passes between them stops the music mid-phrase. The face lit at the left edge, a young man in a plumed cap, is the kind of alert, breathing presence Titian would build a long career on.