La leggenda di Polidoro

This is Titian very early, working on a long narrow panel meant to run along the top of furniture or panelling rather than hang on its own. It dates to around 1506, when he was barely out of his teens and still finding his way in Venice, years before the frescoes that would make his name. The story is one of the darkest in the tale of Troy. Polydorus, the youngest son of King Priam, was sent out of the besieged city with a fortune in gold for safekeeping, and the host who took him in murdered the boy for it. Titian spreads the episode across the panel in the old frieze manner, small figures moving through a landscape. It sits now in the civic museums of Padua, the city where he would soon paint in fresco.