Titian continued to paint to the last year of his long life, and many
writers, fond of the marvellous, assert that his faculties and his
powers continued to the last. Vasari, who saw him in 1566 for the last
time, said he "could no longer recognize Titian in Titian." Lanzi says,
"There remains in the church of S. Salvatore, one of these pictures
(executed towards the close of his life), of the Annunciation, which
attracts the attention only from the name of the master. Yet when he was
told by some one that it was not, or at least did not appear to have
been executed by his hand, he was so much irritated that, in a fit of
senile indignation, he seized his pencil and inscribed upon it,
'Tizianus fecit, fecit.' Still the most experienced judges are agreed
that much may be learned, even from his latest works, in the same manner
as the poets pronounce judgment upon the Odyssey, the product of old
age, but still by Homer."