Retable de saint Nicolas della Lattuga

When Giovanni Bellini died in 1516, Titian became the painter Venice turned to, and commissions like this one followed. The friars of a small church near the Frari wanted an altarpiece and, after first considering another painter, settled on him. He gave them the Virgin and Child floating in cloud above a row of six saints. The panel was once arched at the top, with the dove of the Holy Spirit set in the curve, before it was trimmed down and moved from wood onto canvas. Later a pope took it to Rome for his own palace, where in 1786 the poet Goethe stopped to admire it. It hangs now in the Vatican's picture gallery.