Le Christ apparaissant à sa Mère après la Résurrection

The meeting in this painting is not in the Bible. No Gospel records the risen Christ appearing first to his mother, but by the Middle Ages many believed he must have, and it became a favourite subject for altarpieces. Titian took it up around 1554, an old man in his sixties, for a church in the small town of Medole near Mantua, where the picture still hangs today. On the left he added a crowd just freed from limbo, Adam shouldering the cross, Eve behind him, and the patriarchs Noah and Abraham, the souls Christ was believed to have released before this reunion. It is the only altarpiece by Titian still standing in the place he made it for in that region. In 1968 it was stolen, recovered a month later, and repaired.