Madonna with saints and members of the Pesaro family
			1519-26 Altar-painting: oil on canvas 478 x 266 cm (188 1/8 x 104 3/4 in.) Church of Sta Maria dei Frari, Venice
			Madonna with saints and members of the Pesaro family was begun only some fifteen years after Giovanni Bellini's Madonna with saints. Titian had a lot of effect on contemporaries. It was almost unheard of to move the Holy Virgin out of the center of the picture, and to place the two administering saints - St Francis, recognized by the wounds of the Cross, the Stigmata, and St Peter, who has deposited the key (the emblem of his dignity) on the steps of the Virgin's throne not symmetrically on each side, as Giovanni Bellini had done, but as active participants of a scene. In this altar painting, Titian revived the tradition of donors' portraits, but did it in an entirely novel way. The Venetian nobleman Jacopo Pesaro intended the picture as a token of thanksgiving for a victory over the Turks, and Titian portrayed him kneeling before the Virgin while an armored standard-bearer drags a Turkish prisoner behind him. St Peter and the Virgin look down on him benignly while St Francis, on the other side, draws the attention of the Christ Child to the other members of the Pesaro family, who are kneeling in the corner of the picture. The whole scene seems to take place in an open courtyard, with two giant columns rising into the clouds where two little angels are playfully engaged in raising the Cross. While Titian's contemporaries had expected the painting to look lopsided and unbalanced, the opposite effect was achieved. The different way of placing the characters only makes the painting gay and lively without upsetting the harmony. Titian used light, air and colors to unify the scene.
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