In his 80s or 90s, the most revered painter in Europe stood before huge canvases smearing paint with his bare fingers and scraping down works he had begun decades earlier. This episode traces Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, from a rugged timber-trade town in the mountains near Belluno to the undisputed king of Venetian art. We follow his arrival in Venice at age nine, his early training as a mosaicist and in the Bellini workshops, and his public rivalry with Giorgione on the facades of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi around 1508.

We then examine how fate cleared the board between 1510 and 1516, the sensation of the 22-foot Assumption of the Virgin, and the government broker's patent that made him the Republic's official painter while he built a fortune in real estate, lending, timber, and grain. From there the story moves to the Triumvirate wit ...