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Titian ran the busiest and most powerful painting workshop in 16th-century Venice, and he ran it for a very long time. Born around 1488 in the mountains north of the city, he took over as Venice's leading painter after Giovanni Bellini died, and confirmed it in 1518 with a towering altarpiece of the Virgin rising to heaven for the Frari church, its figures larger and more alive than anything the city had seen.

His reach went far beyond Venice. In 1530 he met the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the most powerful man in Europe, and became his favoured portraitist. The story goes that the emperor once bent to pick up a brush Titian had dropped, an unheard-of gesture toward a mere painter. Charles made him a count, and his son Philip II of Spain kept Titian on for decades, commissioning a series of large mythological canvases of Greek gods and mortals that the painter shipped off to Madrid.

Titian worked into extreme old age, and his late paintings loosen almost to a blur, the paint dragged and smeared with fingers as much as brushes, so that up close they dissolve. He was still at it when the plague swept through Venice in 1576. It killed him that August, along with his son Orazio, and he was buried in the same Frari church that held his first great triumph. He was somewhere near 88.