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| Italy 20000 Lire banknote 1975 Tiziano |
Italy 20000 Lire banknote 1975 Titian
Obverse: At the centre, a suggestive bust of Titian, taken from a self-portrait in the collection of the Uffizi, Florence; behind, a landscape of Titian's in one of the frescoes in the Scuola del Santo (the "miracle of the amputated foot") from the Church of St. Anthony in Padua. The fixed-point watermark consists of a head of "Flora" from Titian's painting of that name in the Uffizi.
Reverse: Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love" from Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Drawing: Lazzaro Lazzarini.
Etching: Trento Cionini.
Dimensions: 161 x 79 mm. (including white margins); coloured portion, 147 x 65 mm.
Paper: high-quality, slightly coloured, special pulp, watermark, luminous fibrils and a vertical security thread.
Characteristics: Copperplate and letterset.
Printer: Bank of Italy Printing Works.
No. notes authorized: 99,500,000.
Legislation: Ministerial Decree of 20 December 1974.
Italian banknotes and paper money from Italy
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Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576), known in English as Titian, was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno (in Veneto, Republic of Venice). During his lifetime he was often called da Cadore, taken from the place of his birth.
Recognized by his contemporaries as "The Sun Amidst Small Stars" (recalling the famous final line of Dante's Paradiso), Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western art.
During the course of his long life, Titian's artistic manner changed drastically but he retained a lifelong interest in color. Although his mature works may not contain the vivid, luminous tints of his early pieces, their loose brushwork and subtlety of tone are without precedent in the history of Western painting. He was noted for his mastery of colour.
Sacred and Profane Love
Sacred and Profane Love (Italian: Amor Sacro e Amor Profano, also called Venus and the Bride) is an oil painting by Titian, painted circa 1514. The painting is presumed to have been commissioned by Niccolò Aurelio, a secretary to the Venetian Council of Ten (so identified because his coat of arms appears on the sarcophagus or fountain in the centre of the image) to celebrate his marriage to a young widow, Laura Bagarotto. It perhaps depicts the bride dressed in white, sitting beside Cupid and being assisted by Venus in person.