Venice in Edinburgh: 'The age of Titian' at the National Gallery of Scotland brings together works from renaissance Venice with a Scottish provenance, and includes several exciting discoveries as well as familiar masterpieces. Caroline Campbell reviews a major highlight of the year's exhibitions

Immediately after World War II the Duke of Sutherland placed a superlative assemblage of paintings on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland. Among these were a number of Titians, including sum of two units renowned poesie, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, dispatched to Philip II of Spain in 1559 These great paintings are at the heart of 'The age of Titian', curated by the agency of Sir Timothy Clifford, Peter Humfrey Aidan Weston-Lewis and Michael cover But this ambitiously conceived and lavishly neared exhibition aims to celebrate the whole range of Venetian Renaissance art from one side its acquisition by Scottish collectors.

'The age of Titian' is indebted to sum of two units earlier exhibitions, 'Le Sicle du Titien' and 'The Genius of Venice'. (1) Unlike these antecedents 'The age of Titian' includes the pair fine and decorative arts. Paintings, drawings, textiles, prints, ceramics, works sculpture and metalwork, lent from British, European and American collections, are among the 249 exhibits. Covering the main areas of artistic activity in Venice and the Veneto during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they range from real small objects, such as a wax Medallion of Titian and his son Orazio, to the almost four-metre wide Hunting representation attributed to Beccaruzzi.

However, it is the paintings, well displayed in the top-lit galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy, that really give the display its focus. The exhibition begins with works by dint of Bartolomeo Vivarini and Giovanni Bellini, and stirs swiftly to the new mode of speech of Titian and Giorgione, exemplified through the problematic Christ and the Adulteress from Glasgow, attributed here convincingly to Titian, to be paid to resonances with his Padua frescoe The nearest five rooms move chronologically and thematically end Titian and his contemporaries in the early sixteenth century: paintings for palaces; portraiture; religious and secular genre paintings; and the Counter-Reformation. It extreme points with a gallery devoted to of advanced age age, both of sitters and artists.

There is a further significant difference between this exhibition and any of its predecessors. It is the first elderly Master exhibition drawn exclusively from things with a Scottish provenance, and this gives it visual novelty. As Peter Humfrey's catalogue essay argues, the contributions did not differ from the European mainstream in their artistic tastes: they preferr works attributable to masters whose reputation has not at any time faltered, such as Titian and Veronese a certain quantity of of these collections are not widely known, and the exhibition contains a number of noteworthy of recent origin discoveries and interesting attributions. Several of these are contentious. It is hard to accept a certain number of of the paintings here attributed at least partially to Titian (such as Doge Dona, from mountain Stuart), even given the variety of his workshop production. In particular, comparison with the assemblage of child portraits assembled in London last year, (2) makes the partial attribution of the portrait of sum of two units boys to Titian difficult in sustain.

on the contrary other--and less familiar--objects from Scottish collections are the couple interesting in themselves and cast of recent origin light onto well-known works of art. Lotto's powerful Portrait of a man, probably an architect, is an important find, although somewhat compromised by the agency of condition. A fine and rarely seen Portrait of a man by dint of Moroni, exhibiting his characteristic disparity between head and material substance is perhaps even stronger than the sum of two units more conventional and grand portraits by the agency of the same artist which flank it. Among the fine works upon paper displayed in a separate suite of ranges Palma Vecchio's sensitive chalk Self-portrait, Lotto's Portrait of a bearded man and a pair of preparatory drawings by the agency of Battista Franco for an altarpiece stand without Also worthy of mention is the star of the print display Sanuto's ambitious three-plate engraving of Apollo and Marsyas, which provides the vista for these galleries.

Upstairs, Veronese's mid-period Adoration of the Shepherds is more appealing than of the like kind familiar paintings as the Getty Baptism of Christ and Washington's Martyrdom of St Lucy while the interesting collection of Leandro Bassanos might encourage a re-assessment of individual of the youngest members of tiffs great artistic dynasty. Perhaps the artist best serv by means of this exhibition is Paris Bordon, individual of the most famous painters of his day, on the contrary underestimated in England because there are not many good examples of his work in public collections. sum of two units lovely compositions of the Virgin and Child with Saints in a landscape in scope Two make strong counterpoints to similar paintings by the agency of Titian and Francesco Vecellio. In swing Five, Bordon's Courtesans with a procures and the ease on the Flight into Egypt are not outdone by means of Jacopo Bassano's early masterpiece, the Adoration of the Kings.

The main challenge lacing the curators of 'The age of Titian' is by what mode to create a sense of visual unity, since great works of that kind as the Sutherland Titians have a propensity to undermine all competition. abundant thought has been devoted to visitors making connections completely through the exhibition, and there are a certain quantity of clever visual juxtapositions. For example, a fine enamelled cent dish draws attention to similar jewel-like colours in the small paintings displayed nearby'. It is also fascinating to diocese Leandro Bassano's fine Portrait of a widow at her devotions, beside a small devotional painting of a mark pictured in the image. Equally informative is the placement of Niccolo Fiorentino's Virgin and Child relief above Giovanni Bellini's paintings of the same subject