Book excerpt: "For nearly four decades in the sixteenth century, the careers of Renaissance Venice's three greatest painters - Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese - overlapped, encouraging mutual influences and bitter rivalries that changed the course of art history. Venice was then among Europe's richest cities, and its plentiful commissions fostered an exceptionally fertile and innovative climate. In this environment, the three artists - brilliant, ambitious, and fiercely competitive - vied with each other for primacy, deploying the new combination of oil on canvas, with its unique expressive possibilities, and such new approaches as a personal and identifiable signature touch. They also pioneered the use of easel painting, a newly portable format that allowed for unprecedented fame in their lifetimes. With more than 160 stunning examples by the three masters and their contemporaries, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese elucidates the technical and aesthetic innovations that helped define the "Venetian style"--Characterized by loose technique. rich coloring, and often sensual subject matter - as well as the social, political, and economic context in which it flourished. Essays range from examinations of new approaches to studies of such crucial institutions as state commissions and the private patronage system. Most of all, by concentrating on the lives and careers of Venice's three greatest painters, the volume presents a vibrant human portrait - one brimming with intense competition, one-upmanship, humor, and passion."--Jacket.