A rich, luminous city, her beauty reflected at every turn, Venice was the perfect muse for an ambitious Renaissance artist. Only if he'd lived to be 100—and he did—could Titian have hoped to enhance her glory. Manuela Hoelterhoff traces his genius

I moved on to Giorgione's The Tempest (circa 1505-06), a mysterious picture of a nude woman with a child sitting in a beautiful landscape threatened by a storm. A handsome young man leaning on a pole has turned to look toward her. Who are they? What's the story? Art historians still puzzle over this picture. As an illustration of the time-dissolving power of art, you have only to stand right here in front of this smallish canvas and ponder how a young artist can engage us centuries later. He was barely thirty years of age when he died, probably of the plague, which periodically savaged Venice (the word quarantine is Venetian in origin). In August 1576, another plague killed a friend of his, the most famous painter in Europe at the time, Titian—born Tiziano Vecellio in Pieve di Cadore, a little town in the Dolomites.

Like Giorgione, Titian studied in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini; upon the older master's death, he was appointed to his position of painter to the Venetian Republic, a job that came with a huge salary. His earliest works in Venice included a decorating job that he split with Giorgione, embellishing the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the warehouse of the German merchants on the Rialto. The weathered frescoes are now barely visible in their new home in the Ca' d'Oro palazzo. But their history is interesting, and we will visit them and the other works Titian painted during his long life in Venice.

Nobody seems to know just how old Titian was—maybe 103!—when he died in his house, a handsome mansion that had a garden down to the lagoon where he liked to entertain. He had several children and many friends, but little else is known about his domestic life. He often teamed up with Jacopo Sansovino, the sculptor and architect, and made sure the projects were publicized by their mutual friend Pietro Aretino, a fat gourmand and pornographer who served as his press agent and secretary. (We loved your gift of pickled fennel and spice cakes, he wrote on Titian's behalf.) Titian seems to have lied to exaggerate his age and, notably avaricious, liked to downplay his wealth, thereby hoping to pull at the heartstrings of patrons, who included kings and duchesses, bishops and popes. His seductive brush and opulent palette could turn even a tortured runt like Philip II into a brooding prince of stature. A beloved anecdote has Philip's father, Charles V, bending down to retrieve a brush that had fallen from the hand of his revered painter.