Titian; The Last Days

Over Spring Break, I finished an excessive number of books, but this was not one of them.

Titian, by Mark Hudson, is about everything and everyone (and everyone's cousin) in Italy within a century or two of Titian's life. I read detailed accounts of the possible interpretations of paintings (which Titian probably never even saw) by artists who Titian never knew. I read the word "beatific" four times in one page, and eventually looked it up. ( If you're curious, it means saintly, calm, enlightened, etc; it is not simply another way to say beautiful. It is also used to address the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. If you find this excessive and unwarranted explanantion tedious, I recommend you do NOT read this book). Reading this, I felt as though someone had written a three page dissertation on Titian, realized that it had to be a 100 page paper, panicked, and proceeded to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. And then, realizing he only had 99.5 pages, threw in the kitchen sink and made the page margins a bit smaller.

So if you'd like to educate yourself about Titian's home and how it looks now, rumors about the personal lives of those who inspired and trained him, and the nuances of tempera paint as opposed to oil paint, I would recommend this book. If you want to learn something about Titian, I'd recommend Wikipedia.