In the late 15th century, painting in Venice traveled much the same paths toward the High Renaissance as in Florence, while still maintaining a purely Venetian flavour. Giovanni Bellini’s Madonnas of 1505–10 (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan; and the National Gallery, London) are stylistically similar to the Madonnas that Raphael was painting in Florence at about the same time. The San Zaccaria altarpiece (“Enthroned Madonna with Four Saints”) of 1505 carries the sacra conversazione fully into the High Renaissance. Inasmuch as Giovanni Bellini dominated Venetian painting, his style influenced the younger painters Giorgione and Titian, yet he was receptive enough to learn in turn from them and inventive enough to maintain his position of dominance.

Giorgione, having learned from Bellini, went beyond his master to bring to Venetian painting a treatment of landscape that can only be compared to pastoral poetry. In his brief career (all his extant paintings date from the last five years of his life) this highly inventive young artist taught his contemporaries and successors how to exploit the medium of oil paint to create the illusion of textures, light, and air in their paintings. His earliest known painting, the “Madonna and Child with SS. Francis and Liberale” (c. 1504; Castelfranco cathedral, Italy), derives from the style of the mature work of Bellini. In only a few years Giorgione passed from this style of painting, through the turbulence of the dramatic landscape with storm clouds of “The Tempest” (c. 1505; Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia), to the dreamy landscape of the “Pastoral Concert” (c. 1510; Louvre). In the latter, Giorgione reveals the Venetians’ love of textures, for he carefully renders almost palpable the appearance of flesh, fabric, wood, stone, and foliage. The soft, typically Venetian diffused light, together with the landscape, its hills stretching into the distance and all harsh or sharp contours removed (whether of landscape or figures), creates a gently pastoral mood. The use of landscape to create a mood and the use of figures in the landscape to reflect or intensify that mood is an innovation characteristic of Venetian painting of the 16th century and one of great importance to the development of Baroque art.

Whatever the significance of the figures in Giorgione’s painting “The Tempest,” it is certain that the picture soon came to be regarded merely as a landscape, and it is one of the first European paintings, certainly the first by a great artist, to make this sort of “background” material its subject matter. Landscape painting was to become a specialization of artists only toward the close of the 16th century, and even then chiefly in northern Europe.

The impact of Giorgione on Venetian art was immediate and direct. Bellini’s last works, such as “The Feast of the Gods” (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), owe much to Giorgione, but Giorgione’s greatest impact was on Titian (Tiziano Vecelli). Although Titian was never a student of Giorgione, he worked with him on one project and finished a number of his paintings. The so-called “Sacred and Profane Love” of 1512–15 (Borghese Gallery, Rome) is, in a sense, Titian’s trial piece in which he shows himself capable of rivaling and surpassing Giorgione in Giorgione’s own terms. The influence of Giorgione is especially marked in the profane paintings just as the religious paintings are marked by the influence of Bellini, Titian’s teacher and rival until his death, when Titian himself emerged as the leader of Venetian painting.

Titian’s great masterpiece, the “Assumption” (1516–18; Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice), established his reputation as Bellini’s successor. In the painting he exhibits the Venetians’ love of colour and texture, but he succeeds in achieving a balanced and moving composition that can only be compared to Raphael’s “School of Athens” in its grandeur. The environment is both earth and heaven, yet it is created and defined by light and atmosphere in a typically Venetian way, rather than by architecture, as would have been more common in Florence. This painting, together with the “Sacred and Profane Love,” “Entombment” (Louvre), and the “Pesaro Madonna” (1519–26; Santa Maria dei Frari), typifies Titian’s contribution to the High Renaissance.

Upon the completion of the “Assumption” Titian undertook to execute a series of paintings on mythological themes for the court of Ferrara. “The Bacchanal” (1518–19; Prado, Madrid) was soon joined by the “Worship of Venus” (1518–19; Prado) and “Bacchus and Ariadne” (1520–23; National Gallery, London). In “The Bacchanal” Titian reveals his mastery in treating mythological subjects. The bacchants are disposed about the miraculous stream of wine that flows through an island, dancing, singing, and drinking. The movement of the figures, the juxtaposition of nude and clothed, of male and female, creates a revel in which even the landscape seems to participate—only a Venetian could have created such a pagan, earthy, and hedonistic glorification of life.

On a trip to Rome in 1545 Titian succeeded in rivaling Raphael’s “Portrait of Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi” (Uffizi) and Michelangelo’s “Leda and the Swan” (copy; National Gallery, London), while demonstrating that Venetian painting in its own unique way was the equal of the Florentine-Roman tradition. The portrait of “Pope Paul III and His Grandsons Ottavio and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese” (1546; Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples) is a free variation on Raphael’s “Leo X,” but Titian altered the composition and introduced a narrative dimension more dramatic and compelling than that in any of his earlier portraits. The “Danae with Nursemaid” (1553–54; Prado), from the same period, poses the colourism and sensuousness of Venetian painting against the sculptural and restrained tradition of Michelangelo for succeeding centuries to judge.

In his late works Titian carried the oil medium to new heights. He used loosely juxtaposed patches of colour, sometimes allowing the prepared canvas to show through. He applied paint freely and loosely with the brush and sometimes reworked it with his fingers. Although his paintings have a fresh quality that makes them appear to have been painted quickly in the heat of inspiration, it is known from his biographers and friends that each work had been carefully studied, criticized, and reworked before the artist was satisfied.

Two works from this late period reveal the scope of Titian’s genius. The “Martyrdom of St. Lawrence” (Church of the Jesuits, Venice) was begun about 1548 after his return from Rome and before a trip to Augsburg and the court of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V. Although Titian was nearly 60, he painted with all the enthusiasm of youth. There is a certain amount of Mannerist foreshortening and exaggeration, but Titian used these aspects of Mannerist vocabulary, together with the Venetians’ skill in the use of light, to emphasize the dramatic and emotional content of the painting. Drama, light, and colour were used in the late “Rape of Europa” (c. 1559–62; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) in a way that prefigured the work of Rubens and the Baroque.

Titian’s genius, given full rein in his long and productive career, deeply influenced Venetian painting. The two most outstanding painters of the end of the 16th century, Veronese and Tintoretto, each took a different aspect of Titian’s style and developed it. Paolo Caliari, called Veronese (he was born in Verona), is best known for the rich colour and interweaving compositions he learned from Titian. His frescoes at the Villa Barbaro at Maser northwest of Venice are important for Venetian Mannerism and for landscape painting, but the richness of his palette is best seen in the mythologies, such as “Mars and Venus United by Love” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), or the “Marriage of St. Catherine” (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia). With Tintoretto he decorated the chambers of the Doges’ Palace in Venice, partially supplanting the aging and busy Titian as official painter of the city; his “Apotheosis of Venice” (c. 1585) in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doges’ Palace is a bold and successful use of dramatic foreshortening and rich colour to express the vigour and vibrancy of Venice. Splendid also are his extremely large paintings crowded with figures, such as the “Feast in the House of Levi” (1573; Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia).

Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto, was most interested in Titian’s use of dramatic light and heightened emotion. By 1548 he had established his reputation as a leading artist of the younger generation with his “San Marco Freeing the Slave” (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia). He decorated several chambers of the Doges’ Palace with a number of inventive mythological scenes. A great part of his career and energy was devoted to the decoration of the Great School of San Rocco, Venice (1564–c. 1588). Perhaps the crowning achievement of his career can be found in “The Last Supper” of 1594, painted for the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. In this painting Tintoretto made use of all the rapidly receding diagonals and dramatic foreshortenings of the Mannerist vocabulary, but he brought to the painting the Venetians’ love of light effects to define the forms and heighten the drama. The head of Christ is bathed in light that is repeated in the smoky lamps so that its true source cannot be known. Light is used, as in the work of Titian, to pick out certain forms, throw others into darkness, and create a sense of movement within the composition. The comparison of this painting with Leonardo’s “Last Supper” of 100 years earlier reveals the differences between the High Renaissance and the late 16th century.

With the death of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, Venice became a school for 17th-century painters, where great works of the past were studied but few great works were produced until the 18th century. The influence of 16th-century Venetian painting on such diverse Baroque artists as Annibale Carracci, Peter Paul Rubens, and Nicolas Poussin was not negligible, but they came to Venice only to learn; they made their major contributions in other centres.