Il sacrificio di Isacco

Titian made this to be looked at from below, not hung on a wall. Around 1542 he painted three violent Old Testament scenes for the ceiling of a Venetian church, Santo Spirito in Isola, and this is one of them, Abraham with the knife raised over his son Isaac, stopped at the last second by an angel. Because it was meant for a ceiling, Titian tilted everything upward, so we see the boy's body from beneath and the figures lunge and foreshorten against an open sky. It was a newly muscular, almost sculptural manner for him, spurred by the grand Roman style of Michelangelo and the antique. When Santo Spirito was later suppressed, the ceiling paintings were carried across to the church of the Salute, where they remain.