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“... The small exhibition at the National Gallery entitled Titian’s First Masterpiece: ‘The Flight into Egypt’, open until 19 August, is centred on a large canvas from the Hermitage. The picture has not been much discussed by scholars. This is partly because it has just emerged from a lengthy restoration, partly because it is known to most specialists mainly or only through photographs, and not least because it does not look much like any other painting generally accepted as by Titian ...”

“... If you are willing to define what you mean by it, the idea of progress in the arts is useful. Take Titian’s portraits. Whether or not those who first saw them understood that a new way of recording likeness was evolving, that way would define the technical ambitions of European portrait painting until photography put an end to them ...”

“... Titian: His Life is – not surprisingly, considering its great length – really about Titian’s ‘life and times’, and often seems to be more about the latter than the former. Even when we meet with a fact about the artist (and there are a good many new ones here) – it may be about the family timber business, about the artist’s investments in land, about his endless pursuit of benefices for his unworthy son Pomponio or of emoluments for himself – we seem to be considering commonplace behaviour rather than anything exceptional, anything that might explain his greatness as an artist, his powers of sympathy and imagination ...”

“... If Titian’s reputation were to be assessed by the number and quality of the monographs devoted to him during this century, it would be hard to believe that he was one of the greatest painters of European art history. There are, perhaps, two closely related reasons for this. On the one hand, the crucial element of his art, his treatment of colour, cannot be reproduced in black-and-white illustrations; and, perhaps worse, even the best and technically most advanced colour plates necessarily distort and impoverish the rich harmonics of his colour schemes ...”

“... The painting A Man with a Quilted Sleeve in the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery (until 18 May) makes sense as a self-portrait. The bearded young man looks over his shoulder towards you as an artist would who had turned from canvas to mirror. There are also two undoubted self-portraits here. The Berlin picture (from the mid to late 1540s) shows Titian in vigorous old age – although exactly how old he was is a mystery since his date of birth is uncertain ...”

“... to Michiel the landscape and a figure of Cupid (eliminated by a restorer in 1843) were by Titian. The same picture had been described in 1648 by the Venetian writer Carlo Ridolfi, who added that Cupid was shown holding a bird. Morelli’s identification, his apparent ability to recognise a masterpiece by Giorgione in a picture then considered to be a ...”

“... towards the mountains. The Pastoral Concert must have been inspired by Giorgione, even though Titian painted the picture (in the Louvre). In mid-century (and often in this exhibition) the concert reassembles to celebrate erotic delight and fate. In one print the band is conducted by an écorché figure and a skeleton, bodies flayed for art; the subject is ...”

“... stands in front of the more reticent and elegant home of the parent institution. But The Age of Titian, an exhibition devoted to Venetian Renaissance art mainly from Scottish collections, is so well conceived and displayed that it disarms those of us who trembled at the prospect of change to the arrangements here. There are paintings transported from ...”

“... than flattering, but they are considered beautiful none the less; and the same is true of those by Titian, who managed to make the rulers he painted uniformly handsome, confident, authoritative and benign, but in ways that seem entirely convincing and unstrained. ‘Portrait of Bernardo Spini’ and ‘Portrait of Pace Rivola ...”

“... he doesn’t mention this) originally included such columns. He also connects this convention with Titian’s use of asymmetrical columns and pilasters of huge proportions. But this is surely completely different and was suggested to Titian by the massive columns he had deployed as part of the palatial theatrical setting for ...”

“... stubborn refusal to bow to the archetype. One is an intruder on privacy as one never is with a Titian or a Rubens nude. It is possible that Bathsheba’s pose is based on a piece of classical statuary that Rembrandt could have known from an engraving; this may explain why, although it is a greater picture than the Woman Bathing, one does not read the pose ...”

“... is as agonising as that in the National Gallery’s better-known canvas on the same theme by Titian. Titian​ is effectively the backbone of Caroline art history, to the extent, that is, that any theme can be said to have informed the big grab that came away with some ingratiating Correggios, some bombastic Palma ...”

“... local tradition whose best representatives were among the outstanding artists of their day. Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, for example, were all active when Sansovino was writing: at that time nowhere else in Italy could boast of a group of painters of comparable stature. But not only have historians of this period devoted much more attention to the ...”

“... under a hundred pictures, and more than a hundred faces, in Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, at the National Gallery until 18 January. Some of the pictures stick firmly to the facts: the line of a nose, the jut of a chin, the texture of stuffs and fur, the shine of gold. Others adjust things to emphasise status or enhance beauty. Sometimes ...”

“... Lorenzo Lotto was born in Venice around 1483. He belonged to the same world, therefore, as Titian and Giorgione. Despite the fact that he was a native of the city, however, which they were not, he never became a fully fledged Venetian as they did. By 1503 his name is recorded in legal documents in Treviso as a painter; he also worked in the towns of Recanati and Jesi ...”