The greatest of all Venetian painters, Titian achieved a worldly success and artistic influence unsurpassed in his own lifetime and later equalled only by Rubens. His matchless technique brought him imperial patronage and led to a revolutionary change in the role of the painter. In liberating painting from its traditional subservience to drawing he emphasised the importance of colour and brushwork, establishing a tradition that can be traced through the work of countless artists, from Velásquez to the Impressionists and beyond. In this major study, Charles Hope draws on previously unpublished sources to present an authoritative new account of Titian's remarkable rise to fame and sustained pre-eminence and succeeds in convincingly challenging many long held ideas about the painter's career and development. Thirty-two colour plates and over eighty black and white illustrations show every aspect of Titian's work as the last great painter of the High Renaissance, including portraits epitomising the aristocratic ideals of the period, erotic depictions of pagan gods, and religious compositions that laid the foundations of Catholic baroque art.