That’s how I came to find myself spending long periods crouching in a Venetian alley, peering through a kind of antique entry phone device into a private garden on the other side of which stood the gaunt, shuttered façade of Titian’s house. From the upper windows of the house, Titian could look out across the lagoon towards the peaks of his homeland – Cadore in the Dolomites. While in his day his garden is said to have stretched down to the marshy water’s edge, a whole block of later buildings now separates his house from the bustling embankment of the Fondamente Nuove. The basic volume of the house remains as it was, but the interior has been so drastically remodelled over the centuries – it is now flats – that it has been pretty much ignored by art historians. Yet the idea of that building, which may have been looted of important paintings after Titian’s death during the plague epidemic of 1576, provided the central motif in my book.