The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr

Titian's Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr, destroyed by fire at the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in 1867, was for three centuries considered his supreme masterpiece and one of the most influential paintings in European history. Completed around 1530, it showed the Dominican inquisitor Peter of Verona being hacked down by assassins in a forest, his companion fleeing in terror while angels descended above. The compositional innovation — the violent diagonal of the falling figure, the drama of the tall trees against a stormy sky, the psychological immediacy of extreme violence in a natural setting — had no precedent in Italian painting and established models that Rubens, Poussin, and Delacroix would return to two centuries later. Vasari ranked it among the greatest paintings of the age; Rubens made a careful copy that testifies to its continuing influence in the seventeenth century. Its destruction is the single most significant loss in Venetian Renaissance painting.

Known only through copies and engravings, the painting demonstrated Titian's revolutionary approach to violent action in landscape, with dramatically foreshortened figures and towering trees creating a composition of unprecedented dynamism.

The original painting of 1528, considered one of Titian's supreme masterpieces, was destroyed in a fire at the Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, in 1867. What survives are copies and versions that preserve the composition. Any extant version is a copy after the lost original and has been conserved accordingly.