The Virgin and Child between Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Roch

For centuries this quiet holy group was thought to be a Giorgione, and it took until 1904 for scholars to give it to the young Titian instead. The two painters were close in these years, and Titian had clearly learned from the older man the soft light and the calm, pyramid arrangement of figures before a landscape. Look at the saint on the right, Roch, resting one leg on a stone to show the plague sore on his thigh. He was the protector people prayed to against epidemics, and Titian painted this around 1510, when plague was moving through the Veneto. It carried off Giorgione himself that year. The picture likely served a confraternity that tended the sick, its gentle mood set against the fear all around it.