Marte, Venus y Amor

This is late Titian, and up close it barely holds together, the paint dragged and dabbed in loose strokes that only settle into flesh and cloth when you step back. In his last decades Titian worked more and more like this, building figures out of open, broken color long before anyone had a word for it. The subject is the love of Venus, goddess of desire, and Mars, the god of war, an affair the old poets said produced a daughter named Harmonia, harmony born of the two fiercest opposites. Whether Titian finished this canvas himself or left it for his workshop to complete is still argued by scholars. It has hung in the imperial collection in Vienna since at least the 1780s, among the Habsburgs' deep holdings of the painter they prized above all others.