Madonna col Bambino tra i santi Antonio abate, Girolamo e Francesco

Around 1519 Titian was a young man stepping into an opening. Giovanni Bellini, the grand old master of Venetian painting, had died in 1516, and Titian was fast becoming the leading artist in the city. Here he sets the Virgin and Child not inside a church but out in open countryside, a low, wide landscape running across the panel, with Saints Francis, Jerome and Anthony Abbot gathered round in quiet adoration. For centuries the picture was not even given to him, filed instead under his brother Francesco or the workshop. Only in 1951 did scholars, comparing it with his altarpieces of the same years, restore it firmly to Titian's own hand.