Titian is acknowledged as the greatest of the sixteenth-century Venetian painters, best known for his portraits, mythological pictures and religious subjects. Yet his first great achievement as a painter, schooled in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, was to refashion the portrayal of nature in his own distinctive style by studying the work of Albrecht Durer, whose naturalistic paintings of plants, animals and landscape — for which northern European artists were renowned — had caused a sensation in Venice in the first decade of the sixteenth century. In this short, beautifully illustrated book, Antonio Mazzotta presents this experience, together with Titian's native landscape of PievediCadore, as crucial influences in the artist's early representation of nature. The recently restored Flight into Egypt (now in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) — probably painted when Titian was still a teenager — is vivid proof of his interest in the depiction of animals, plants and figures in the landscape. The author's carefully chosen comparisons of paintings, prints, drawings and details of works by the young Titian, Durer and their contemporaries (including Sebastiano del Piombo and Giorgione) suggest that Titian was as innovative and as influential in his unique view of nature as he was in portraiture.
