Fuga in Egitto

This is Titian near the very start, about 1508, when he was young and still working alongside Giorgione, the Venetian painter whose soft, dreaming landscapes he was absorbing. It is a big canvas, and Titian gives most of it not to the Holy Family hurrying out of frame on their donkey but to the countryside they pass through, a long green stretch of trees and grazing animals and cool light. The religious story almost becomes an excuse for a landscape, which was a new and very Venetian idea at the time. Centuries later Catherine the Great bought it in Venice in 1768, and it went north to Russia, which is how one of Titian's earliest masterpieces ended up in the Hermitage. Along the foreground animals wander through the grass, painted for their own sake.