Virgen con el Niño y los santos Esteban, Jerónimo y Mauricio

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.