At the start of “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice,” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is a seventeenth-century map of La Serenissima studded with colored dots, a different hue for each artist.[1] (The color coding repeats on the labels.) The dots mark the artists’ studios and the churches, Scuole, monasteries, and government buildings housing their most important commissions. There’s proximity and even overlap among the sites of the commissions, but the studios are widely spaced, as if each artist were a solitary territorial animal whose powerful aura repelled the others from his range. The map is a graphic metaphor for the entire exhibition, which tracks the complex relationships between three masters whose works, separately and collectively, more or less define what we mean by Venetian painting at its most glorious. It’s a history of influence, cross-fertilization, competition, pride, and envy.

The starting point is the surprising fact that the careers of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese overlapped during a period of nearly forty years—roughly 1538 to 1576—despite the considerable differences in their ages. Tiziano Vecellio (1488–1576) was thirty years older than Jacopo Robusti (1518–1594), called Tintoretto, and forty years older than Paolo Caliari (1528–1588), called Veronese, after his birthplace; Titian remained a force to be reckoned with not only throughout his impressive lifetime but also after his death, through the presence of his unignorable works and enduring fame. In twentieth-century terms, this chronology translates approximately into the overlapping lifetimes of Pablo Picasso, Robert