Nobody Found his Secret For 400 Years...

The painting you are looking at right now was completed sometime between 1550 and 1565, and at first glance it looks like a strange and slightly unsettling philosophical diagram rather than a portrait. Three male heads are arranged across the canvas, each one facing a different direction. On the left, an old man in profile, his beard grey, his gaze turned backward towards something behind him. In the centre, a bearded man in middle age, facing forward, looking directly out at whoever is standing in front of the painting. On the right, a young man in profile, his face turned toward the future, toward whatever lies ahead and outside the frame. Below each of these three faces is the head of an animal. Beneath the old man, a wolf. Beneath the middle aged man, a lion. Beneath the young man, a dog. And running across the top of the painting, almost invisible unless you know to look for it, is a line of Latin text, divided into three sections, one positioned above each face. The painting has been read for centuries as an allegory, a philosophical statement about time itself, about memory and the present moment and the future, dressed up in the form of three men and three animals. But there is another reading of this painting, one that turns it from a piece of philosophy into something far more personal, because the three faces looking in three directions may not be symbols at all, they may be a family. Look at the inscription running across the top of the painting, three fragments of Latin text, each one positioned directly above one of the three faces, written in letters so faint and so worn that most reproductions of this painting do not even show them clearly. Read together, the inscription says this, from the experience of the past, the present acts prudently, lest it spoil future action. Each fragment of that sentence sits above the face that represents it, above the old man, the word for the past, above the middle-aged man, the present, acting with prudence, above the young man, the future that must not be spoiled. This is where the painting gets its title and its most common interpretation and allegory of prudence, one of the four cardinal virtues in classical philosophy, represented here as a meditation on time. The three ages of man, the three tenses, the wisdom of learning from what came before in order to act correctly now and protect what comes next. But look at the central face again, the middle-aged man, looking directly out of the painting at you. Multiple art historians who have studied this work closely believe that face is a portrait of Titian himself, painted late in his own life, looking out at the viewer the way a man might look at his own reflection. And if the central figure is Titian, the question becomes unavoidable, who are the other two? Tiziano Vecelio, known to history simply as Titian, was born in the small town of Pieve di Cadore in the foothills of the Alps sometime in the 1480s, and by the time he died in 1576 he had become the most important painter in Venice and one of the most celebrated artists in all of Europe. He painted popes, emperors, and kings. His clientele stretched across the continent in a way that no painter before him had achieved. He lived an extraordinarily long life for the period, working productively into his 80s, and the paintings of his final decades are among the most experimental and most personal of his entire career. By the time he painted this work, Titian was an old man, looking back on a life that had included not just an extraordinary career, but a family, a son named Orazio, who worked alongside him as an assistant in his workshop for decades, and a younger relative named Marco Vecelio, born in 1545, who Titian raised as his heir and who would go on to inherit much of his workshop and legacy after his death. Art historians who have compared the three faces in this painting to what is known about the appearances of Titian, Orazio, and Marco have found that the ages line up convincingly, an old man old enough to be Titian in his final years, a middle-aged man the right age to be Orazio, and a young man, the right age to be Marco, around the time the painting was made. The family resemblance in terms of actual features is less certain, but the ages, the relationships, and the timing all point in the same direction. Each of the three heads is actually painted not what they show, but how the paint itself behaves differently across the canvas. The old man on the left, looking back toward the past, is barely there. He is rendered with dry, thin brushwork against a dark background, his features emerging faintly from the shadow as if he is already half-dissolved into it, already becoming a memory rather than a presence. The middle-aged man in the centre, looking out at the viewer in the present moment, is painted with firmer, more direct strokes present, solid, occupying space with a confidence the old man's figure does not have. And the young man on the right, facing toward the future, is the most vividly painted of the three, the brightest light, the thickest application of paint, a face built up with a physical density that makes it the most alive image in the entire composition. This is not decorative variation, this is Titian using the physical material of paint itself to represent the three different relationships each generation has to time. The past is thin and fading, the present is solid and direct. The future is bright, dense, and not yet worn down by experience, full of paint that has not yet had time to crack or fade or be touched by anything. If the central figure is Titian and the figure on the right is Marco, the young heir, the future of the workshop, the person who would carry everything forward after Titian was gone, then the brightness and thickness of that young face is not just a technical choice. It is Titian, in the final years of his life, looking at the person who represented everything that would continue after he stopped painting, and giving that face more paint, more light, and more physical presence than he gave to his own. The animal heads beneath the three human faces are not random additions, and the combination of a wolf, a lion, and a dog representing past, present, and future has a long history that predates this painting by more than a thousand years. In the Saturnalia, a work by the late Roman writer Macrobius, a three-headed beast combining a wolf, a lion, and a dog is described as an attribute of the god Serapis, a deity associated with time itself, the wolf representing what has been devoured by the past, the lion representing the strength and danger of the present, and the dog representing loyalty and hope looking toward what is to come. This same combination of animals appears again in a famous illustrated book published in Venice in 1499, and again in a book of symbolic imagery published in 1556, meaning that by the time Titian was painting this work, the three-headed wolf-lion-dog combination was an established and recognisable symbol that an educated viewer in Venice would have understood immediately. Records of the painting's creation suggest the animal heads were added at a later stage than the human faces, and that the quality of their execution is less refined than the central human head, leading some scholars to believe that Titian, by then in extreme old age, may have completed the most important and most personal part of the composition himself, and left the more conventional symbolic elements, the animals, the inscription to be finished by assistants in his workshop. The philosophy was added afterward, on top of something that had started as a portrait of three specific people looking in three specific directions. The allegory of prudence hangs today in the National Gallery in London, in a collection that includes some of Titian's most famous and most studied works. It is not one of the paintings that draws crowds. Most visitors who pass through the rooms containing it do not stop, and the paintings small, size, and dark, somewhat worn appearance do not immediately announce its significance the way a more colourful or dramatic Titian might. But among scholars of Titian's late work, this painting occupies a particular place, one of the most personal objects he ever produced, made by a man in his final years, looking simultaneously backward at everything he had been, directly at what he currently was, and forward at the person who would carry his name and his work into a future he would not see. Whether the three faces are, literally, Titian, Orazio, and Marco remains debated, and probably always will, because the only people who could confirm it have been gone for over 400 years. Thanks for sticking around to the end. If you want more videos like this one, please subscribe to my channel, and if you think I missed something in the painting, don't forget to comment down below. I read every single one. See you in the next video.