The Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio - better known by the brush-name Titian - has been consistently celebrated for the more than 400 years since his death.

He has come to stand as the painter's equivalent of Shakespeare: the master against whom all who follow in the art must judge themselves.

A major new exhibition at the National Gallery in London shows dozens of the religious tableaux and portraits in which - four centuries after the models died and the paint dried - the eyes and faces still blaze with life.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine Greer, a genius with a brush, does the show make the case?

GERMAINE GREER:
That's the case that the show would like to make.

I'm wondering if it's a service to Titian. He doesn't come from nowhere, he comes from the Venetian milieu.

There are other great painters like Giorgione who we can't really put together, we haven't got enough paintings for Giorgione, we've got too many paintings for Titian.

Now the irony is that because Titian is a superstar, his work has been interfered with.

It's always been worth a huge amount of money so it's been wantonly restored so some of the pictures make no pictorial sense because the colours form into strange islands.

The glazes are gone, they were either cleaned off or fell off.

There is a huge amount of restoration works of Titian, especially the best-known works and it begins within 100 years of Titian's death. Probably, long before that, for all we know.

One of the odd things is that the pigments age in different ways and at different rates. So the pictures have changed over time.

Part of the understanding that we have of them has come from copies made by people like Van Dyke when they visited the paintings in the 17th century.

Which is not to say that this is not an important exhibition, Titian is a wonderful painter but he comes from a group of wonderful painters.

To me it was odd, after we saw Formaire and the Delph school that was an eye-opener to people who wanted to see where Formaire came from.

Now we see superstar Titian as if he came from nowhere.

MARK LAWSON:
You wanted to see more context. Sam, people talk about the painter's painter, the Shakespeare of painting and so on, as an artist when you go round, do you think he was the governor, as it were?

SAM TAYLOR-WOOD:
Not necessarily but I'm not a painter so I don't look at them the same way as painters do when they get excited about the expression in the gesture of the paint etc.

What excites me is the way in which he uses the subject matter, the passion, the violence, the frankness with which he represents different situations, such as the painting of Danae.

When you first look at it it's all there to be taken. It's a woman, it's erotic and sexual and it was painted for a cardinal! So that's interesting to me.

But I love Tarquin and Lucretia because you see the body in a different way.

She is protecting her modesty and herself. You feel the tension of the situation.

So that's the sort of side of Titian that excites me as the humanitarian side and the passionate side.

MARK LAWSON:
Michael Gove, a lot of people are drawn to the physicality of it.

There is a portrait of Pope Paul the third, in which you really think you could put a comb through that beard because his depiction is so physical?

MICHAEL GOVE:
One of the great skills that Titian has is he was a painter who was intimate with power at every level.

He was a superstar by the time he was painting pictures like this. He knew that his stardom relied on the relationship he had with patrons.

So when it came to painting one of the most powerful men in the world at the time, Titian was paying homage to him and the aura of power that surrounded him.

But at the same time, creating a work of art that he hoped would transcend the circumstances in which it was created.

He does it magnificently by creating an icon of malevolent power which still speaks to us.

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine raised this point, and it's the only criticism this exhibition has had so far, and it's the question of are we seeing what Titian wanted and what would have been seen at the time.

How much does it worry you, the extent to which they have been restored and played with?

SAM TAYLOR-WOOD:
It doesn't bother me that much because I don't really notice.

I think that is something that interests painters when they look at the surface and the texture.

I don't know how much they have been tampered with. A lot of work is collaborative or not finished.

You don't really know what you are looking at, whether someone else painted the background and the skies and who painted them, whether it was whoever, all of those things come into question.

Also the later paintings, the ones that people really get excited about, like The Flaying of Marsyas, you don't know how much of that was intentional and how much was unfinished as it was painted so late in his life.

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine, the level of detail, it's like a film-maker, his interest in point of view.

There is one of a family venerating a relic of the true cross and there are several sets of eyes.

The amount of attention he gives to where each of them is looking and the expression in their eyes, whether that is restoration or not, I think it was extraordinary?

GERMAINE GREER:
Well, let's not worry too much about the restoration question. It is not of the first importance.

If you take a work like the portrait of Ranuccio Farnese.

One of the interesting thing is you've got the patron telling you what he wants which is the what of the painting. Then you've got the painter confronting the subject which is the how of the painting.

So here I've got to do a portrait of this boy who is about to be sent away to become a prior of an order of Knights of St John of Malta, in Venice and he's a small boy, a tremulous boy, and he's distracted from being painted, his eyes are off nowhere.

His upper lip is tremulous and is almost covering his bottom lip. He is wearing this enormous mantle which is falling of his little shoulders.

All this accoutrement of manhood, his codpiece and his rapier, and his hand which is a boy's hand, a little hand, the picture is as good as anything Rembrandt every did. It's so full of contradictory feeling.

It is done with such lack of artistic bravura. You haven't got Titian saying, "This is how I paint a portrait ."

He is an extraordinary versatile genius. He paints in different styles at the same time.

This is not to do with detail, detail you can raise or lower.

MARK LAWSON:
It's a sense of drama. The psychology of the physicality behind it.

GERMAINE GREER:
Except you can undercut the drama. You can be told that the drama is meant to mean this and paint it in a way that it means that.

You've got the what but the how can be different.

In all of Titian as most wonderful paintings, you have this problem of knowing exactly what is going on.

You sit for hours thinking what is the relationship between these two figures?

Why is one looking one way and one looking the other way.

Why is everybody in the great altar piece of St Mark enthroned in glory, why is everybody pointing at Sebastian's loin cloth and why is Sebastian looking out of the picture?

Titian plays those games all the time.

MARK LAWSON:
Sam, you have a picture that you pick up on. Do Not Touch Me, Noli me Tangere ?

SAM TAYLOR-WOOD:
Yes, that is in the permanent collection at the National Gallery so it's something over years that I have seen, wandered past and stopped at.

Something that struck me a while ago was the way that he painted it and the way that Jesus curves his body away from the touch of Mary Magdalene, that sort of frailty of that moment, really.

The way that she looks at him imploringly, the way that he looks at her.

That really had an influence on me. I made a work with the same title which was fragility of life.

MARK LAWSON:
Michael there is a huge fuss around this exhibition, does it worry you that he is treated as a superstar in terms of this exhibition.

When I went to the press view and also later, there was a sense of hysteria about seeing this exhibition. Has it been over hyped?

MICHAEL GOVE:
I think it's impossible to over hype Titian.

It's difficult for people to appreciate him because there are so many people there, it is only a limited period of time and the Sainsbury Wing isn't really the ideal place to hang many of these works.

But it is definitely still worth anyone who has any real interest in visual art, going along to see it.

You see in Titian the development of everything that we have come to know by modern painting in the course of his career.

He starts of in the middle ages and he brings us bang up to date with impressionism, arguably with post-modernism in his last works.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.