Titian: His Life. By Sheila Hale. Harper Press; 829 pages; £30. To be published in America in November; $39.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

TITIAN stands out among his peers as Shakespeare does among writers, and Sheila Hale’s authoritative and readable book is more than worthy of her subject.

Titian opened up a natural world of landscape, portraiture and sexual arousal. He did not deny the power of religion, and he painted memorable and moving altarpieces. But his finest work is drawn from life, and designed to satisfy the vanity and lust of magnificent dukes, corrupt popes and powerful emperors. It sharpens the senses and gives pleasure.

He was born just before the start of the 16th century, a turbulent age which embraced the origins of Protestantism, the decline of Venice and the rise of the Spanish empire. Lady Hale shows herself to be a diligent researcher. Her sensitivity for place and her intimate knowledge of the period is partly the legacy of her marriage to the late Sir John Hale, a distinguished historian of the Renaissance, for whom she began working in 1965. Though there is sometimes rather more background than is entirely necessary to illuminate Titian in the foreground, a sense of history differentiates this biography from academic studies, and is one of its strengths.

Lady Hale is particularly good on Venice, which she has been visiting or living in for more than four decades. She delights in identifying similarities between Venice at the start of the 1500s and London 500 years later. It was a polyglot city of merchants, fortune-seekers and refugees, uncommonly tolerant of freedom of expression. The seriously rich indulged themselves—just as hedge-fund managers do today—shopping and seeking out promising young painters, such as Titian.

Sexual libertinism was taken for granted so that when “Venice” was painted above a door in other European cities, it usually led to a brothel. There was fierce competition among young painters. Titian responded by becoming the first to use live models and to paint naked women lying down, as with the “Venus of Urbino” (pictured). His art was influenced and enhanced by the city’s palpable atmosphere of excitement.

In time, Venetians would come to be priced out of Titian’s market by the powerful figures of the age. The painter was, Lady Hale writes, a mercenary who would serve the highest bidder without, it seems, sacrificing his artistic integrity. Eventually he became court painter to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Philip II, King of Spain. But he continued to live in Venice with his family and his friends, the best of whom was Pietro Aretino, a magnificent and magnificently bearded scoundrel. A bisexual blackmailer and art critic, Aretino was a fierce adversary of the papacy and simultaneously an aspirant to a cardinal’s hat. Lady Hale warms to him. Titian trusted his judgment and enjoyed his vivid conversation. Both loved the company of women. One dining companion was Angela del Moro, the model for Urbino’s Venus and the second-highest paid courtesan in Venice, who was noted for refusing to feign orgasms. Titian liked to seat his models on his lap and may even have married a couple; he had four children by different wives and partners, though these women remain in the shadows.

But there is no mystery about his relations with his two sons. Titian wanted his eldest, Pomponio, to become a priest, and he spent years trying to persuade his patrons to give the boy benefices that would enable him to live in comfort. Pomponio preferred a riotous life with his friends. Father and son argued bitterly. Aretino declared that the fame of his father had proved too heavy a burden for the eldest son. Orazio, the second boy, never left his father’s side, however, and took over the management of his affairs as Titian started to grow old.

Orazio’s principal task was to collect the money the painter was owed by Charles V and Philip II, for whom he had done much of his best work. Titian, who came from a peasant community high in the Dolomites close to the Austrian border where the living was always tight, was acutely conscious of his finances. He was a worrier. Charles and Philip owed him substantial sums and never placed him high on their long list of creditors. That did not stop the Spanish ambassador to Venice writing acerbically to the emperor: “Being old, [he] is somewhat covetous.”

Dedicated art historians tend to focus on the trees. Lady Hale’s intention is to reveal the whole of the wood. A remarkable amount is known about Titian’s art and his life, but new research on the artist tends to be disseminated in academic papers and at conferences. Charles Hope, the foremost British expert on the greatest painter of the Venetian Renaissance, for example, has written no fewer than 24 learned papers on his life. Lady Hale says she owes him her “first debt of gratitude”. Unlike Mr Hope, Lady Hale is not an art historian. But that may well be one reason why her biography, eight years in the writing, is the first comprehensive portrait of the artist since 1877. Known to his contemporaries as “the sun amidst small stars” (after the final line of Dante’s “Paradiso”), Titian inspired Rubens, Van Dyck, Velázquez, Rembrandt and Turner. Lady Hale says he is the father of modern painting, and there is surely none who consistently gives such pleasure.