Within the past two decades or so scholarship has increasingly been willing to confront those Renaissance paintings that were created and have survived in the greatest numbers, but were neglected throughout the twentieth century, the religious works. Although Titian's altarpieces have been receiving a fair share of attention alongside his ever-popular portraits and of course mythologies, the devotional paintings he created across the long span of his career have not. In this book, Christopher Nygren turns the spotlight on this neglected genre within Titian's oeuvre. Denominating them icons, which name, the author admits, suggests an adherence to tradition at odds with our expectations of Titian as an innovator, Nygren's images resemble icons in their half-length format, biblical subjects, and devotional function.

Early in Titian's lifetime the miracle-working Christ Carrying the Cross in San Rocco was ascribed to his hand. Nygren asserts that it's irrelevant to his argument whether Titian actually painted it or not. Being the only living artist to have a miraculous image attributed to him goaded Titian to rethink the tradition of the icon and to find new ways to incite devotion in the beholder. He invented three strategies to move the icon in unexpected directions. First, he “temporalized” it—that is, sought to represent the pivotal moment of revelation or conversion in his scriptural narrative. Second, he “troped” the image by engaging the viewer as interpreter; when Christ asks a question viewers are provoked to think about how the question applies to their own lives. Third, by using new technologies such as stone supports—that is, “transposing,” in Nygren's language—the beholder is challenged to seek a relationship between the material and the message (21).

Selecting seven nodes of Titian's icons, Nygren finds that they fall into two groups. He discerns a shift at the time of Titian's only visit to Rome in 1545. The images before this date can be described as narrative—that is, Christ is shown speaking in a specific moment described in the Gospels, which Nygren associates with Erasmus. Figuring out the moment and the words is a part of what engages the worshipers’ attention. Psychologically, the viewer relates differently to these narratives from the iconic representation that Titian painted after his sojourn in Rome, where he would have experienced the famous icons housed in its churches—at Santa Maria Maggiore and the Aracoeli, and especially the mosaic in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Hereafter, in Nygren's analysis, Titian shifted from narrative icons that present Christ's teaching to images focused on his Passion, which call forth the viewers’ empathy and compassion rather than challenging them to interpret.

The critical volte-face is the Ecce Homo (Madrid, Prado) presented by Titian in person to the emperor Charles V when he visited the court at Augsburg in 1548. In Rome Titian had become reacquainted with Sebastiano del Piombo, his colleague in the workshop of Giorgione in the first decade of the century. Sebastiano had invented the means of painting not only in oil on the wall, but also in oil on stone, and his technique had been imitated by a number of his fellow artists in Rome. Titian chose to make his devotional Christ for the emperor on slate, and the later pendant Mater Dolorosa on marble. Nygren finds significance in the stone material as a reference to the scriptural associations of Christ to a rock. White marble was the appropriate material for the Virgin. Titian returned in his later years to revisit many of the subjects he had painted earlier, making comparisons convenient. The shift to “the rough scumbled style” of his late work is not of concern to Nygren; rather he homes in on “the pastoral and exegetical aspects of his experiments in self-censuring” [160].

Nygren's categories are not tidy. The Pitti Christ Redeemer (1533–34) anticipates the later post-1545 icons in abandoning the narrative speech act, for example, whereas late Ecce Homos in the Prado and Saint Louis return to multifigured narrative. In this reader's view, the shift to affective icons is most economically accounted for by the shift in the devotional climate inaugurated by the Council of Trent in 1545, which coincided with Titian's watershed visit to Rome.