In your review of the exhibition of late Titian at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice (“Worth Waiting For,” March 8, 2008), you mention that he is believed to have been eighty when he died in 1576. And then you add that this was considered a miracle in an age when most people died before they were forty. Bunkum. To begin with, most sources place Titian’s age at death at ninety and above. Moreover, you fail to mention that he died from the plague, which took more than fifty-thousand Venetians in 1576 and 1577. Most important, it is a well-known fact that many Venetians lived past eighty at the time. For instance, Sebastiano Venier became doge in 1577 at the age of eighty-one. After his death in 1578, Nicolò da Ponte was elected doge at the age of eighty-seven. Amazingly, he died in 1585. Remember, low life expectancy back then has little to do with the age people reached at death; rather, it has to do with high infant mortality. The miracle of Titian’s age only shows your own misunderstanding of elementary demographics.