Titian's First Masterpiece, National Gallery, review From the outset of his career, he displayed a ruthless competitiveness. Arriving in Venice from his home in the Dolomites around 1500, when he was about 10, he burst on to the city's art scene with a Picasso-like precocity. His early career was marked by a determination to outdo both his venerable teacher, Giovanni Bellini - the senior Venetian painter of the time - and his slightly older friend and mentor, the romantic visionary Giorgione. Yet, again like Picasso, he engaged in creative if generally one-sided dialogues with other artists throughout his career, and was still referring to Bellini in his work at the time of his death, 70 years after The Flight into Egypt was supposedly painted. In this painting, he seems to be trying to fuse the ideas of his two formative influences, but on a scale larger than just about anything either Bellini or Giorgione ever attempted. Yet the two approaches fail to really cohere. The background is extremely accomplished, with its line of autumnal trees, receding towards craggy mountains reminiscent of Titian's native Dolomites, surrounded by sunlit clouds. The group of shepherds, conversing in the shadows in the middle distance, are pure Giorgione in their tenebrous moodiness. The figures in the foreground, however - Mary on her donkey led by a tousle-headed youth, with a rather stiff-looking Joseph bringing up the rear - progress in a flat frieze-like fashion, the figures rendered in laboured imitation of Bellini. While they have a certain naive charm, the faces are generic, the drapery cumbersome. The magisterial assurance of that extraordinary early portrait The Man with a Blue Sleeve (here called Portrait of Girolamo Barbarigo) is utterly absent. Indeed, it is impossible to believe the two works are separated by only two years, as the exhibition claims. Background and foreground fail to marry to the degree you wonder if more than one artist was involved, or if the two parts were painted in different periods. Vasari suggests that Titian may have been assisted by a group of German artists - experts in landscape - to whom he gave "hospitality." But if Titian was still a teenage assistant to Bellini, as the exhibition implies, it's difficult to imagine him putting anyone up, and the treatment isn't in any case particularly Germanic. While the information panels argue that the relatively realistic rendering of the plants and animals in the foreground is directly attributable to the influence of the great German painter Albrecht Dürer, who visited Venice twice during this period, the way these elements are distributed over the park-like sward feels closer in spirit to the magic-realism of late-gothic painting than to Durer's quasi-scientific meticulousness. Around this intriguing but problematic work, the curators have constructed a small yet vivid overview of Venetian art at the dawn of the 16th century, with A-grade works by Bellini, Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian himself. If the best are drawn from the gallery's own collection, they are arranged to reveal the integration of landscape and religious subjects, and the quest for ever-greater emotional realism, to highly potent effect. The exhibition makes a revealing prelude to viewing Diana and Callisto, the second of the Duke of Sutherland's Titians, recently bought for the nation at a cost of £45 million, and on show in London for the first time just a couple of rooms away. Painted about 50 years after The Flight into Egypt, it represents Titian at the height of his powers, an inspirational essay in light on flesh set against a sub-alpine landscape surprisingly similar to the one in the earlier painting. For all its charm, The Flight into Egypt tells us little about the young Titian's path towards greatness, other than that he could be gauche, imitative and prone to biting off more than he could chew - much, in fact, like any other teenager. Until Aug 19. Mark Hudson is the author of 'Titian, the Last Days" (Bloomsbury)