Titian paintings in Madrid

Philip II of Spain was Titian's greatest patron in the second half of his career. Over several decades, the king commissioned the series of large mythological paintings known as the Poesie — scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, painted with an increasingly loose and sensual technique — as well as formal portraits of the Habsburg court. The Prado holds the core of this relationship: the Diana paintings, the Bacchanal series (some here, some now in Edinburgh), Venus with an Organist, and the equestrian portrait of Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg, which defined the visual language of European royal portraiture for a century.

The late Titians in the Prado show the technique that shocked his contemporaries: the forms dissolving into texture, the paint applied with fingers as much as brushes, the colours bleeding into each other. It was this technique, seen in Madrid by the young Velázquez, that shaped the way the greatest Spanish painter handled paint.