Le tre età dell'uomo

Titian painted this around 1512, when he was a young man in his twenties and Venice's older master Giorgione had just died in a plague, leaving the city's painting to a new generation. You can feel that soft Giorgione mood here, in the warm light and the landscape that carries the meaning as much as the figures do. The subject is the whole of a life in one field. On the right two naked infants sleep in a tangle under a winged cupid. In the centre a young couple sit close, the woman holding two flutes, love at its beginning. Behind them an old man sits alone with two skulls in his hands, studying what is left at the end. The painting has hung in Edinburgh since 1945, part of a private collection sent north for safekeeping after its London house was bombed in the war.