The fungal source of Titian’s rich reds

There’s nothing Titian loved more than a red satin robe. The works of the Renaissance Venetian artist are full of them, perhaps most famously that flying off the shoulder of the god Bacchus as he leaps from his chariot to claim Ariadne, waving off her lover Theseus from the island of Naxos in Bacchus and Ariadne. Titian’s rendering of these materials were masterclasses in the art of glazing, laying translucent colours over one another to create a deep lustrous tone. ‘Glazes, thirty or forty!’, he is said to have exclaimed.