Titian was born in the Dolomites, north of Venice, in the small village of Pieve di Cadore. Estimates of the year of his birth range from 1473 to 1490. At nine or ten Titian was sent to Venice along with his brother Francesco to be trained as a painter, at first to the mosaicist Sebastiano Zuccato, then to Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, the city’s leading painters. While working with Giorgione on the painting of the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice in 1508, he became familiar with the newest trends in painting. His first independent works were frescoes in the Scuola del Santo in Padua, executed in 1511. After Giovanni Bellini’s death in 1516 Titian was named official painter of the Republic of Venice and commissioned to paint a battle scene in the council chamber of the Doge’s Palace. At the same time he began to work for Alfonso d’Este. With his innovative altarpiece The Assumption of the Virgin Mary (1516–18) for the Frari church, which is filled with revolutionary drama and color, Titian was acknowledged to be Venice’s foremost painter. Beginning in 1523 he also worked for Federico Gonzaga, and in 1532 for Francesco Maria della Rovere, duke of Urbino—all while holding a military post as well. In Bologna in 1529 to 1530 he had his first encounter with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who three years later appointed him court painter and named him count palatine and knight of the Order of the Golden Spur, thereby adding enormously to his international standing.

In 1545 he sojourned in Rome at the invitation of Cardinal Allessandro Farnese, and from 1547 to 1548 he traveled to the imperial diet in Augsburg at the behest of the emperor. He was again in Augsburg from 1550 to 1551, at which time he painted monumental official portraits of Philip II, king of Spain and numerous other princes and dignitaries. In the following years he executed fewer official commissions from the Republic of Venice, as these were being given to the younger painters Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese. Instead he turned to mythological pictures, among them the erotic poesie for Philip II, the subject of regular correspondence between the two. In 1576 Titian died in Venice of the plague, and was buried in the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

In his late works Titian’s signature style became increasingly loose, until, as described by one of his students, he painted "more with his fingers than with the brush." He had few direct imitators in Venice, but his influence on the great European painters of the 17th century, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, was immense.