ペーザロの聖母

Titian worked on this altarpiece through the early 1520s for the Pesaro family chapel in the Frari church in Venice, where it still hangs. The man who commissioned it, Jacopo Pesaro, had led a papal fleet against the Ottoman Turks, and Titian folds that victory into the sacred scene. Off to the side an armoured figure hauls forward two captives, one in a turban, a reminder of the battle at sea. What was genuinely new here is the arrangement. For centuries the Virgin sat dead centre, facing out. Titian pushes her up and to one side, sets the great columns at a slant, and makes the whole composition climb on the diagonal. Kneeling at the lower right, the Pesaro men look up toward her, and the painting pulls your eye up with them.