ABSTRACT
The "excellence of art," criticized by Gilio as being put in competition with devotional content, seems in Barocci to serve the devotional purpose. No one has ever doubted the artistic greatness of Titian and Tintoretto and Veronese, those giants of the late sixteenth century in Venice, but their innovative use of their materials, their facture, has not been discussed in relation to the Counter-Reformation. For Titian and Tintoretto—and, we should add, El Greco and Veronese—the experience was more than sheer pleasure. The painterly brushwork served to invite participation and even empathy. Titian initiated his use of this new technique in his mythological paintings in the early 1550s, but he soon recognized that it served well to engage the worshipers' emotions in a sacred image. Paolo Veronese moved from Verona in 1553 to a Venice dominated by the internationally famous Titian.
