The Assumption of the Virgin

The Virgin rises to heaven in a storm of red and blue, swept up on a ring of clouds and putti, her arms flung open toward the waiting God above, while the apostles below reach after her in astonishment and longing. Titian builds the huge altarpiece in three surging tiers and floods it with his incomparable reds, turning a doctrine into overwhelming upward motion. Unveiled in 1518 on the high altar of the Frari church in Venice, where it still hangs, it stunned the city and announced Titian, barely thirty, as its supreme painter. The Venetian grandeur it launched would carry on toward the Baroque.