Titian's first masterpiece: The Flight into Egypt

The National Gallery (London, UK) presents to the public Titian’s first major commission, the Flight into Egypt, on loan from the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. The exhibition will examine the talented young artist’s creation of this extraordinarily ambitious work, painted when he was just a teenager.

The exhibition will explore Titian’s originality in creating one of the first large scale landscape narratives, and will demonstrate how he adapted ideas from the work of other artists in order to create his sophisticated composition. The painting will be exhibited alongside more than 20 works by Titian’s Venetian contemporaries including, Bellini, Giorgione, and Sebastiano del Piombo, from the National Gallery’s permanent collection, from the Hermitage and from other British institutions. Artists such as Albrecht Dürer, who was in Venice at the time Titian began this work, will also be included in the exhibition.

The Flight into Egypt is believed to be one of Titian’s earliest paintings. Produced on an impressive sized canvas (206 x 336 cm), the landscape occupies most of the composition, drawing the viewer’s eye to the green of the foliage, and the blues of the sky, mountains and stream. This unprecedented sensitivity to colour is a characteristic of Titian. He spontaneously displayed a naïve approach to nature, especially in the depiction of animals. The choice of this particular subject allowed the young painter to display his precocious skill in landscape painting and reveals the bold brushwork and exhilarating use of colour that would become signatures of his artistic style.

Date: until September 2.
Location: National Gallery. Trafalgar Square. London WC2N 5DN. United Kingdom.
Opening hours: from Saturday to Thursday from 10am to 6pm. Fridays from 10am to 9pm.