Is life less beautiful today than it was when Titian was alive? It's a question worth asking. In today's Guardian, there are photographs of his city, Venice, sinking under rising lagoon waters and a tourism industry out of control (city officials are apparently considering border controls). These appear a few pages away from a shot of imperilled polar bears (although these ones are doing all right, fighting over the carcass of a whale.)
Yet in a lot of ways, the Earth is more beautiful today than it was a century ago. If you compare our time not with that of Titian, but with that of LS Lowry, it looks like we live in paradise. The forests of smoke stacks that dominated many British cities in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries have gone. The carbon they emitted, unfortunately, is still adding to global warming but most places in Britain look - and smell - better than they did when the Industrial Revolution was belching its noxious fumes.
I know the environmental catastrophe we're living through does not permit complacency, but it's also important to value what we (still) have. Titian - or any Renaissance artist - would find today's skies just as vivid and immense and its human faces and bodies just as amazing as ever in the 21st-century world.
They'd see a Renaissance beauty on every street corner. Perhaps if we recognise that, we will fight all the harder to save a world of delight.
