On this day in 1576, Titian died in Venice, in a plague year. He had been born at Pieve di Cadore, up in the mountains, and painted for something like seventy years.

Stand close to the last canvases and the first thing you notice is that the brush is not always the tool. Paint is dragged, scrubbed, pushed about with the side of a finger, lifted with what looks like the end of a rag. A face comes up out of the ground in three smeared passes and a highlight put on almost carelessly, and only when you step back six paces does it assemble into a man. The under-layers are left showing on purpose. Nothing is tidied. Whoever ground those pigments for him in the last years was grinding for a hand that had stopped asking paint to behave.

The Pietà was still in the studio when he died, unfinished; another painter, Palma il Giovane, brought it to a close. The portrait below shows an old man in a black skullcap and fur collar, holding a slender brush at the lower edge of the picture. Whatever else the century decided about him, that is the fact of the thing: a working hand, still holding the tool, painted with the same.