On December the 18th at 15:00 the festive opening of the expo called The Museum’s Masterpieces and Collections will be held, where the spectators will be able to see the Portrait of Girolamo Priuli by Titian.

“This exhibition will have special conditions. First of all it will last no more then 10 days, it will be exhibited at the same hall where Caravaggio used to be displayed. Continuous security will be provided, a militia post will be placed beside the painting. In addition the canvas will be barriered with a rail, so no one will be able to come to it closer then three metres, every evening the canvas will be placed in the storage, returning to the expo in the morning. Thus we take all possible measure to protect our painting”, Vladimir Ostrovsky, director of the museum informed.

“We are now also contacting the museums in Italy in order to organize the exposition of the picture there. It is most likely to be the museum of Milan or the one in Florence”, he added.

Chair person of the board of guardians of the museum Yuriy Maslov stated the Portrait of Girolamo Priuli, being in the museum’s collection is very likely to belong to the Italian painter Titian.

The National Research and Restoration Centre, Kyiv, held a number of analyses of the Odesa painting proving that it truly belonged to the art of the XVI century, and there were common details of Titian’s.

INFORMATION: Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio, born 1473/1490 (probably c.1488/1490), died 27 August 1576, better known as Titian, was the leading painter of the 16th-century Venetian school of the Italian Renaissance. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno (in Veneto), in the 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 polychromatic modulations are without precedent in the history of Western art.