Virgin and Child with Saints Stephen, Jerome and Maurice

Titian painted this in Venice around 1520, just as the city's older masters had died and he was becoming its leading painter. It is a quiet gathering rather than a scene, the Virgin and Child seated among three saints who lived centuries apart, brought together outside time. Stephen kneels as the first Christian martyr, Jerome appears as the scholar-hermit, and Maurice stands in armour as a soldier-saint. There is a second, nearly identical version in the Louvre in Paris, and scholars have argued for well over a century about which of the two Titian painted first and which is the finer. Here the saints are set against a broad evening landscape, the kind of open sky he liked to give even a still, sacred subject.