Titian

Titian's paintings use color and the movement of paint to organize figures, light, and narrative across a long Venetian career. His early landscapes and portraits give close attention to the relationship between people and their surroundings. The Assumption of the Virgin, made for the high altar of the Frari church in Venice, turns a religious subject into a rising movement of figures between earth and heaven. Bacchus and Ariadne presents a classical narrative through a carefully balanced encounter of bodies, gestures, and color, within a group of mythological pictures for Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara. Later, Titian painted a series of mythological subjects for Philip II of Spain, calling them poesie, or painted poems. These courtly commissions accompanied portraits and church paintings, while his later handling of paint gave figures and surfaces a freer, more open appearance.