Willem de Kooning on Titian's paintings

"Even when crippled by arthritis, Titian kept on painting Virgins in that luminous light, as if he'd just heard about them.

Those old guys had everything in place, the Virgin and God and technique, but they kept it up like they were still looking for something. It's very mysterious.

You have to keep on the edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies."

- Willem de Kooning, quoted in Barbara Guest's Forces of Imagination

The Rape of Europa, 1538

Assumption of the Virgin, 1518

More on Titian here

painters and poets