Unlike Cézanne, however, Titian was motivated as much by money as by art. He was neither unduly political nor religious,  but rather pragmatic. The majority of his letters are about business and the main concern of the last part of his life was his attempt to win church benefices for his son Pomponio. While he was a rich man-150 commissions for the Habsburg court alone saw to that-he always wanted more. Philip II's ambassador put it down to age, reporting that "Titian, being old, is somewhat covetous" but it was more likely to have been the tardiness of the payments for work completed that made the elderly artist so cautious.

In front of a canvas, though, the businessman disappeared. As the years passed the sweet, Giorgionesque style of his youth (The Three Ages of Man and Sacred and Profane Love) gave way to greater tonal depth and visible brushwork in the service of emotional resonance. As Vasari wrote, his paintings were "executed with broad and bold strokes and smudges, so that from nearby nothing can be seen whereas from a distance they appear perfect". A 17th-century writer characterised the late style differently, likening it to being "violently raped". What both recognised in their own ways was that, for the first time in art, the paint itself had become an expressive medium.

In this Cézanne was the Venetian's direct descendant. He may not have shared Titian's humanism but paint fascinated him. As he wrote: "Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian knew at once how to merge their whole personality in all that flesh that they had before their eyes, in a sublime compromise, to animate it with their passion and with the likeness, to glorify their dreams or their sadness. They did it exactly. I can't do that." He sought instead to transmit the physical presence of an object, whether it be an apple or a mountain. 

It was, suggests Alex Danchev in his subtle and broad-based biography, Cézanne's single-mindedness in this aim that so fascinated his contemporaries. Public acceptance came late-he was 56 before he held his first one-man show-but fascination (often mixed with incomprehension and ribaldry) came early. It was his artistic seriousness rather than his rough table manners and picaresque southern accent that endeared him to his fellow painters. His work was collected by Monet, Degas, Pissarro and Gauguin long before anyone else would touch it. 

As he aged and developed his method of constructing pictures using slanted, parallel taches (patches) rather than by modelling Cézanne's pursuit of form never became any easier. In frustration he was once witnessed throwing a rock through a particularly recalcitrant canvas and he raged at less committed artists: "All my compatriots are arseholes beside me."