Le Christ flagellé

Titian painted this in his last years, when he was around 80 and no longer needed to please anyone. Up close the surface looks barely finished. He laid down a reddish ground and left much of it showing through, then dragged thick paint over it with fast, broken strokes, at times reportedly working the paint with his fingers. A single shaft of imagined light falls across Christ's body and gathers on the face emerging from the gloom. This was Venice in the late 1560s, and while younger painters chased high polish and bright display, the old master went the other way, toward darkness and rough handling. Cardinal Scipione Borghese later acquired the picture for the Roman collection where it still hangs.