In 1508, in a Venice dominated by the famous Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, the figure of Titian began to emerge and would soon surpass the fame of both. That, in fact, was a turning point, not only for Titian's career, but for the entire Venetian and, in some way, European art. It is at this time that the young Cadore native, almost twenty years old, demonstrated his talent thanks to important public works such as Judith with the head of Holofernes, a fresco painted on the side façade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi which, due to the liveliness of the colors and the setting grandiose, it left contemporaries and, later, posterity incredulous.

The exhibition Titian 1508. At the beginning of a luminous career, curated by Roberta Battaglia, Sarah Ferrari and Antonio Mazzotta, recounts the birth of the talented artist through 17 autographed works by Titian and around ten comparisons with paintings, engravings and drawings by authors he contemporaries such as Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo, Albrecht Dürer and Francesco Vecellio. Among the works on display there are important loans, for example the large print of the Triumph of Christ from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Risen Christ from the Uffizi, the Madonna and Child between Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Roch from the Prado Museum and the Baptism of Christ of the Capitoline Museums.

The itinerary accompanies the visitor in understanding the artist's extraordinary ability to quickly assimilate different cultural components - in particular Giorgionesque, Dürerian and Michelangelo - and direct the Venetian pictorial language towards a mixture of naturalism and classicism.

«A research exhibition that has the important objective of bringing new light and new arguments to the critical debate on the auroral activity of Vecellio» comments the director of the Gallerie dell'Accademia Giulio Manieri Elia «An exhibition that we can define as a dossier dedicated to a phase, perhaps less known, of his production, but which is already rich in premises, achievements and masterpieces, typical of an unparalleled artistic personality".

Many works are rediscovered thanks to new research, scientific investigations and restorations. The combination of these pieces has often led to interesting revelations, as in the case of the panel Angel with tambourine, coming from the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome and exhibited for the first time in an exhibition. This painting is a fragment of an altarpiece that was originally located in the Church of the Servi in Ferrara, but which was then dismembered: research for the exhibition identified the other possible fragments in a Madonna and Child on a throne, preserved in Russia, and in a Saint Francis, located in a French museum.