The Flaying of Marsyas

Titian was in his eighties when he worked on this, probably in the early 1570s, still painting in a Venice repeatedly swept by plague. The subject comes from Ovid. A satyr named Marsyas dared to challenge the god Apollo to a music contest, lost, and is being skinned alive as the price. Titian paints it without flinching. Apollo kneels almost tenderly at the work, a dog laps at the blood, and an old king sits to one side, chin on hand, simply watching. In his last years Titian's brushwork loosened until paint was pushed on with fingers as much as brushes, and up close the whole surface dissolves into smears and scratches. There is a partial signature on the stone at the bottom. The painting was very likely still in his studio when he died in 1576.