For nearly four decades in the 16th century, the careers of Venice's three greatest painters - Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese - overlapped, producing mutual influences and bitter rivalries that changed the course of art history.
Venice was then among Europe's richest cities, and its plentiful commissions fostered an exceptionally fertile and innovative climate. In this climate, the three artists - brilliant, ambitious and fiercely competitive - vied with each other for primacy, deploying such new media as oil on canvas, with its unique expressive possibilities, and such new approaches as a personal and identifiable 'signature style'. They also pioneered the use of easel painting, a newly portable format that led to unprecedented fame in their lifetimes.
With over 150 stunning examples by the three masters and their contemporaries, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese elucidates the technical and aesthetic innovations that helped define the uniquely rich 'Venetian style', as well as the social, political and economic context in which it flourished. Essays range from examinations of seminal new techniques to such crucial institutions as state commissions and the patronage system. Most of all, by concentrating on the lives and careers of Venice's three greatest painters, the volume paints an equally vibrant human portrait - one brimming with savage rivalry, one-upmanship, humour and passion.
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