Titian meets Isabella Stewart Gardner
In 1576 Venice was gripped by plague. The island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio, on which the afflicted were crammed three to a bed, was compared to hell itself. In the midst of this horror Tiziano Vecellio, the greatest painter in Europe, died — apparently of something else. He was in his eighties and working, it seems, almost to the end. Titian: Women, Myth & Power, now on view at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, contains several of the greatest masterpieces of his old age — and also of European art. It comprised just six canvases (a seventh was unable to travel to Boston), all done for Philip II of Spain — a villain of English history, the man who launched the Armada but, as far as Titian was concerned, his most discerning patron.
