Titian - Sheila Hale

The first biography since 1877 of Venice's greatest artist - a towering work which captures the genius of Titian, beautifully illustrated throughout with full colour plates.

Devoted father and loyal friend, Titian was notorious for disregarding authority and was an international celebrity by his late fifties. He was famously difficult but his stubbornness and horrendous timekeeping did nothing to deter his patrons who included the Hapsburgs, the Pope and his family and Charles V.

During his career, which spanned more than seventy years, Titian painted around five or six hundred pictures of which less than half survive. His work has been studied by generations of great artists from Rubens to Manet and he is often seen as having artistically transcended his own time.

Sheila Hale not only examines his life, both personal and professional, but how his art affected his contemporaries and how it influences artists today. She also examines Venice in its context of a city at the time of the Renaissance, overshadowed artistically by Rome and Florence and growing into the famous historical city it has become.

Fully illustrated with four colour plate sections (including his famous works 'Reclining Venus', 'Death of Actaeon' and 'Three Ages of Man'), this is an astonishing portrait of one of the most important figures in the history of Western art and a vivid evocation of Venice in its 'Golden Age'.

Sheila Hale has known and often lived in Venice since 1965 when she began work as a research assistant to John Hale. She is the author of a number of books including The Man Who Lost His Language. She is a trustee of Venice in Peril and lives in Twickenham.

'Crammed with new or expanded or re-thought information about this stubbornly mysterious giant. Impressive . She shines a light on the mysterious conflict of energies that makes his genius so difficult to encapsulate. Hale is also an enthusiastic collector of characters and her descriptions of the band of Renaissance crackpots who constituted Titian's employers result in some of the book's most entertaining stretches' Sunday Times

'Evokes the sensuality of Titian's working methods and provides subtle insights into his enigmatic last paintings . a scrupulous and exhaustive account that is informed by the latest scholarship, but admirably free of academic cant . her book provides by far the richest account yet of Titian's interactions with the city's labyrinthine social fabric' Daily Telegraph

'Magnificent . the elegance and energy of her narrative . a born biographer's eye for detail. This is the first serious attempt for 100 years at encompassing Titian's life. Its combination of the eminently readable and the profoundly authentic is remarkable' Literary Review

'A huge and exceptional new study of the painter . a superb portrait of the artist - an example of measured scholarship, judicious opinion, and telling framing detail' Guardian

'The depth of her research is both impressive and astonishing . enriched by vivid anecdotes and gossipy snippets . it all makes for compelling reading' Independent

'Scholarly, erudite, endlessly inquisitive and as clear as can be . many of the bit-part players in the book are brilliantly vivid' Mail on Sunday

'Magisterial . a poised and sincere account of Titian's life and art. A truly triumphal undertaking and a prodigious monument to one of the giants of Western art' The Art Newspaper