The Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple

Titian painted this for the meeting room of a Venetian confraternity, a charitable brotherhood based in the building where it still hangs. That is the rare thing about it. Almost everything else in the Accademia was carried in from somewhere else, but this wall has held the same picture since the 1530s, at the scale and in the light Titian planned for it. He set the small figure of Mary, three years old, climbing a great flight of steps toward the temple, and lined the lower edge with portraits of the brotherhood's own members watching her go. There is even a real doorway cut through the bottom of the painting, which Titian composed around. An old woman selling eggs sits at the foot of the stairs, painted from life.