What inspires an artist—beauty, passion, innocence, terror?

For Venetian Renaissance master Titian and his contemporaries you might add martyred saints, primping courtesans, and luckless mortals tormented by fickle gods.

While Titian shared these tastes for subjects sacred, profane, and mythological with his compatriots, you can see for yourself just how singular his canvases are in the exceptionally rare show Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. The exhibition runs Sunday through Aug. 14.

Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian painting offers a concentrated sample of 25 paintings and drawings from the National Galleries of Scotland. Those galleries, in addition to housing in Edinburgh an extraordinary collection of Scottish art, boast a substantial collection of European Renaissance art thanks to the Bridgewater Collection.

The story of the collection is one of many fascinating aspects of the show. Francis Egerton, 3^rd Duke of Bridgewater and industrial entrepreneur extraordinaire, assembled this collection from the liquidated holdings of the Duke of Orleans who was soon to lose his head in the French Revolution. Having survived, then, a revolution and two world wars, these masterpieces have embarked upon their first American tour, with stops in Atlanta and Minneapolis before Houston.

The show includes works by Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano, Lotto, but the stars are two large mythological canvases featuring the Roman divinity Diana, the virgin huntress, punishing the infractions of the hunter Actaeon and the nymph Callisto. These two works were part of a six-painting cycle commissioned by Phillip II of Spain in the mid-16^th century. Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto have been housed since 1945 at the National Galleries of Scotland and are now being acquired from the Bridgewater family.

What, you might wonder, is the asking price for a masterpiece by Titian? If you guessed $50 million, you’d be right. The National Galleries of Scotland teamed up with the National Gallery of London to jointly acquire Diana and Actaeon in 2008. Fundraising to purchase Diana and Callisto for another cool $50 million is ongoing.

Edgar Peters Bowron, Audrey Jones Beck Curator of European Art at the MFAH, describes the Diana canvases as perhaps “the two most important Old Master paintings that this institution has ever shown.” Given what Bowron calls the “paucity of Titian in America,” the presence of these works in Houston is another coup for the city's arts scene.

Titian’s Diana paintings, inspired by the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, are indeed a marvel. If you step back and look at them together, you’ll notice how intricately paired they are, with a mountain range in the background and a stream in the foreground that seem to run from one canvas to the other. Both of course share the fury and surprise of Diana at particularly delicate moments in which an all-female space has been invaded by the presence of men.

Diana and Actaeon shows the moment in which the hapless hunter Actaeon accidentally bursts in upon Diana as she bathes. Around the enraged goddess scatter nymphs in various states of undress, some shy, some flirtatious. The painting may not show the moment when Actaeon is transformed into a stag and ripped to pieces by his own hounds, but signatures of doom are everywhere, from Actaeon’s forlorn dog to the trees above Diana in which ominously hang the skins of deer. On one post is mounted a deer skull, as if Actaeon was already slain and flayed.

Diana and Callisto gorgeously depicts an equally awkward and doom-portending moment. The virgin nymph Callisto has been seduced and impregnated by Jove, the rather randy king of the gods, who had a penchant for transformation and disguised himself as Diana. Diana’s virgin company is thus doubly invaded. Titian depicts a moment when the other nymphs grab hold of Callisto and reveal her swollen belly.

Ovid’s theme was transformation, but in these works the colorful Titian is interested in moments of unexpected psychological vulnerability. If you proceed from the paintings into the small gallery stocked with drawings, you can find Callisto’s fate depicted by Domenico Campagnola. Banished from the company and protection of Diana, Callisto is transformed into a bear by Jove’s jealous wife, Juno, and later is nearly killed by her own son. Jove saves his suffering paramour by setting her in the sky as the constellation Ursa Major, otherwise known as the Big Dipper. Not all love stories end in tragedy, it seems.

If the exploits of the gods tickle your fancy, don’t miss Titian’s vision of Venus against a gorgeous ocean of blue. Venus Anadyomene (Venus Rising from the Sea) captures the goddess of love as she wrings seawater from her hair. The further exploits of Venus captured Paolo Veronese’s imagination in Venus, Mars, and Cupid.This sultry and witty depiction of frustrated love features the adulterous Venus and Mars in a dark wood. But as Mars reaches for Venus, the antics of her son, Cupid, and a little dog draw her attention making the god of war a low priority.

Amorous adventures (and misadventures) weren’t the only interests of Titian and his Venetian contemporaries, who were as comfortable with the profane as with the sacred.

Most religious painters of this era had a necessarily high tolerance for grotesquerie, especially given the frequency of portraits of martyred saints. Don’t miss Giovanni Cariani’s surreally placid Saint Agatha, whose calm gaze and colorful frock belie the brutality of her martyrdom. Because she refused the advances of a Roman soldier, her breasts were cut off in the process of her torture and execution. Those breasts appear on a plate with a martyr’s palm between them.

Tintoretto, a sometime student of Titian, crafted an extraordinary altarpiece painting of Christ Carried to the Tomb, a portion of which is on view in this exhibition. The muted palate of the work stands in contrast to the captured moment of frenetic activity around the limp body of the dead Christ. In the foreground two women attend a fainted figure, perhaps Mary, as a series of other figures appear to discuss the logistics of transport and support the body and others investigate the tomb with candles. The Venetian masters were known for their uses of color, but Tintoretto makes beauty out of the ordinary plainness of an act of care.

Classical mythology and Christianity were at times at war in Renaissance Europe, but it is interesting to see that this Titian exhibit exposes a fundamental similarity. Both found inspiration in love.