2010 begins with a worldbeating blockbuster capable of breaking all attendance records – and it ends with another. It’s more than 40 years since Britain saw a major exhibition of the work of Vincent van Gogh; 40 years in which the tormented Dutch genius has gone from being merely an extremely famous and influential painter to, by common consent, the world’s favourite artist, the man who sacrificed himself for his art, whose light-filled canvases tell us most about what we think art should be – never mind that many of them are of dark, rain-drenched Dutch fields.

The National Gallery is on a roll. Having enjoyed the surprise hit of the autumn with The Sacred Made Real, an exhibition of 17th-century Spanish religious art, the gallery now makes its first foray into installation art with by far the grungiest work ever to cross its portals: The Hoerengracht, a walk-through portrayal of Amsterdam’s red light district by the American sculptors Ed and Nancy Kienholz.

With thanks to the National Gallery, the Musée du Louvre, Madrid's Prado Gallery, Naples' Capodimonte Museum and Washington's National Gallery, and to mark the publication of Mark Hudson's major new biography, Titian: The Last Days, we reproduce a marvellous gallery of masterpieces. This is the first part of a four-part special, including three extracts from Hudson's book, about the master Venetian painter, Tiziano Vecellio (1489?-1576), universally known as Titian.