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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12626 ***
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 12626-h.htm or 12626-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/2/12626/12626-h/12626-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/2/12626/12626-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN
+
+By
+
+CLAUDE PHILLIPS
+
+Keeper of the Wallace Collection
+
+1897
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _Flora_]
+
+
+[Illustration: The Portfolio Artistic Monographs With many
+Illustrations]
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+PLATES
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+Flora. Uffizi Gallery, Florence .......................    Frontispiece
+
+Sacred and Profane Love. Borghese Gallery, Rome..................... 36
+
+Virgin and Child, with Saints. Louvre............................... 54
+
+Le Jeune Homme au Gant. Louvre...................................... 62
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS PRINTED IN COLOUR
+
+Design for a Holy Family. Chatsworth................................ 86
+
+Sketch for the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Albertina.................... 96
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
+
+The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice............... 23
+
+Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." Imperial Gallery, Vienna 25
+
+The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome................. 29
+
+The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery ................................ 35
+
+Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria Gallery, Rome..... 39
+
+Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.................................... 41
+
+St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak. Fresco in the
+Scuola del Santo, Padua............................................. 43
+
+"Noli me tangere." National Gallery................................. 45
+
+St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della Salute, Venice. 49
+
+The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna............. 51
+
+PAGE
+Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot. Uffizi Gallery,
+  Florence.........................................................  53
+
+St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the Stag. British
+Museum ............................................................  55
+
+The "Cristo della Moneta." Dresden Gallery.........................  57
+
+Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery...............  59
+
+A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence..............  63
+
+Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.........................  65
+
+Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court...................  67
+
+The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid........................  71
+
+The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice....................  75
+
+The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso.............................  79
+
+Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery..............................  81
+
+St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso,
+Brescia............................................................. 85
+
+La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre.........................................  87
+
+St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge's Palace,
+Venice ............................................................  89
+
+The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria dei Frari, Venice...  93
+
+Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican...............................  97
+
+Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice........................  99
+
+
+
+
+THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+There is no greater name in Italian art--therefore no greater in
+art--than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high
+as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so
+mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil
+them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect
+balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael
+an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is
+wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the
+poet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than any
+one of these. Titian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, nor
+the most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, even
+of his time and country. Yet is it possible, remembering the
+_Entombment_ of the Louvre, the _Assunta_, the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_,
+the _St. Peter Martyr_, to say that he has, take him all in all, been
+surpassed in this the highest branch of his art? Certainly nowhere else
+have the pomp and splendour of the painter's achievement at its apogee
+been so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly ever
+overstepping the bounds of nature. The sacred art of no other painter of
+the full sixteenth century--not even that of Raphael himself--has to an
+equal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of the
+world, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred passion
+must perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is not
+necessarily a distortion of truth.
+
+And then as a portraitist--we are dealing, be it remembered, with
+Italian art only--there must be conceded to him the first place, as a
+limner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner in
+his secret heart for some other master. One will remember the
+disquieting power, the fascination in the true sense of the word, of
+Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on
+occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the
+Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del
+Piombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic
+truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of
+Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective
+and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate the
+other. Yet another will cite the lofty melancholy, the aristocratic
+charm of the Brescian Moretto, or the marvellous power of the
+Bergamasque Moroni to present in their natural union, with no
+indiscretion of over-emphasis, the spiritual and physical elements which
+go to make up that mystery of mysteries, the human individuality. There
+is, however, no advocate of any of these great masters who, having
+vaunted the peculiar perfections in portraiture of his own favourite,
+will not end--with a sigh perhaps--by according the palm to Titian.
+
+In landscape his pre-eminence is even more absolute and unquestioned. He
+had great precursors here, but no equal; and until Claude Lorrain long
+afterwards arose, there appeared no successor capable, like himself, of
+expressing the quintessence of Nature's most significant beauties
+without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.
+Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had,
+unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, and
+the Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesque
+influence, the true gift of the landscape-painter. Atmospheric
+conditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions;
+and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity of
+the landscape in the great _Pietà_ of the Brera, the ominous sunset in
+our own _Agony in the Garden_ of the National Gallery, the cheerful
+all-pervading glow of the beautiful little _Sacred Conversation_ at the
+Uffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late _Baptism of Christ_ in
+the Church of S. Corona at Vicenza. To attempt a discussion of the
+landscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as well
+as the most fascinating of subjects--so various is it even in the few
+well-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument of
+expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of
+his personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione--judging it from
+such unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of
+Castelfranco, the so-called _Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the
+Soldier_[1] in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called _Three
+Philosophers_ in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--has in it still a
+slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection. It
+was reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullest
+development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the _Three Ages_ and
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_. Then all himself, and with hardly a rival
+in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of
+earth and sky which enframe the figures in the _Worship of Venus_, the
+_Bacchanal_, and, above all, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_; to give back his
+impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty
+which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred
+Conversations. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the _St.
+Peter Martyr_, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic
+amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.
+The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be
+said to exist in the late _Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo)_ of
+the Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose and
+Giorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late _Rape of Europa_, the
+bold sweep and the rainbow hues of the landscape in which recall the
+much earlier _Bacchus and Ariadne_. In the exquisite _Shepherd and
+Nymph_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--a masterpiece in monotone of
+quite the last period--the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque time
+reappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, as
+in the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by that
+solemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the final
+years of Titian's old age.
+
+Thus, though there cannot be claimed for Titian that universality in art
+and science which the lovers of Leonardo's painting must ever deplore,
+since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of scope
+of Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht Dürer;
+it must be seen that as a _painter_ he covered more ground than any
+first-rate master of the sixteenth century. While in more than one
+branch of the painter's art he stood forth supreme and without a rival,
+in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorial
+decorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his younger
+rivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves more
+practised and more successfully daring in this particular branch.
+
+To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, such
+parallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must go
+to Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or had
+been, the great merchant city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly be
+styled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian
+predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was during
+the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle of
+supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer period
+during the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation of
+those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned
+them; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as an
+accessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who,
+in his greatest efforts--those sumptuous and almost truculent _portraits
+d'apparat_ of princes, nobles, and splendid dames--knew no superior,
+though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and
+Velazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more
+demonstrative, a seemingly closer embrace, drawing from the contact a
+more exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness some
+of the stain of earth. Titian, though he was at least as genuine a
+realist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mere
+outsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which was
+everywhere--in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home of
+his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art had
+ever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine
+harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion, that
+distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art that
+is not Italian.
+
+The relation of the two masters--both of them in the first line of the
+world's painters--was much that of Venice to Antwerp. The apogee of each
+city in its different way represented the highest point that modern
+Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as
+distinguished from mental culture. But then Venice was wrapped in the
+transfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering above
+the rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains,
+the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region. Reality, with
+all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality. But
+it was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the method
+of presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could
+add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the
+splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the
+genuine naturalness of such a mode of life. Art itself could only add to
+it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the
+colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression to
+the beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charm
+of the people. This is what Titian, supreme among his contemporaries of
+the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which,
+in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek
+for a parallel.
+
+Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly enlist
+our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in some
+special branch of their art; yet, after all, we find ourselves
+invariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them--taking _him_ as
+the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries and
+successors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may be,
+combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his
+creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has
+never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then
+Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the
+poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a
+higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been
+able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so
+incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of
+a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme
+limits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great
+_Madonna del Carmelo_ at the Venice Academy and the magnificent
+_Trinity_ in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near Udine may
+be taken to prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms
+to the painter of the _Assunta_, the _Entombment_ and the _Christ at
+Emmaus_? Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of illumination,
+a Titanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit and
+placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not
+altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in art.
+All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between the
+two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, even
+though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive the
+supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred
+drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A not
+dissimilar comparison might be instituted between the portraits of
+Lorenzo Lotto and those of our master. No Venetian painter of the golden
+prime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him,
+while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individuality
+submitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his own
+tremulous sensitiveness and charm. In this way no portraits of the
+sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in
+deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar
+temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical and mental
+characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.[2]
+
+Yet where is the critic bold enough to place even the finest of these
+exquisite productions on the same level as _Le Jeune Homme au Gant_ and
+_L'Homme en Noir_ of the Louvre, the _Ippolito de' Medici_, the _Bella
+di Tiziano_, the _Aretino_ of the Pitti, the _Charles V. at the Battle
+of Mühlberg_ and the full-length _Philip II._ of the Prado Museum at
+Madrid?
+
+Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that Titian has
+serious rivals in those Veronese developed into Venetians, the two elder
+Bonifazi and Paolo Veronese; that is, there will be found lovers of
+painting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours in
+frank juxtaposition to a palette relatively restricted, used with an art
+more subtle, if less dazzling than theirs, and resulting in a deeper,
+graver richness, a more significant beauty, if in a less stimulating
+gaiety and variety of aspect. No less a critic than Morelli himself
+pronounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliant
+colourist of the Venetian school; and the _Dives and Lazarus_ of the
+Venice Academy, the _Finding of Moses_ at the Brera are at hand to give
+solid support to such an assertion.
+
+In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be the
+greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be
+found in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinal
+principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors--painters such
+as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri,
+Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci--Caliari
+dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as
+well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors,
+however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing the
+abruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing and
+tempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural masses of a vibrant
+grey and large depths of cool dark shadow--brown shot through with
+silver. No other Venetian master could have painted the _Mystic Marriage
+of St. Catherine_ in the church of that name at Venice, the _Allegory
+on the Victory of Lepanto_ in the Palazzo Ducale, or the vast _Nozze di
+Cana_ of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it is in one
+sense a step in advance even of Giorgione, Titian, Palma, and Paris
+Bordone--constituting as it does more particularly a further development
+of painting from the purely decorative standpoint--must appear just a
+little superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the nobler,
+graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods of
+Titian. With him, as with Giorgione, and, indeed, with Tintoretto,
+colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was to
+give a realisation, at once splendid and penetrating in its truth, of
+the subject presented; and colour in accordance with the true Venetian
+principle was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the very
+body and soul of painting--as what it is, indeed, in Nature.
+
+To put forward Paolo Veronese as merely the dazzling virtuoso would all
+the same be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art.
+He can rise as high in dramatic passion and pathos as the greatest of
+them all, when he is in the vein; but these are precisely the occasions
+on which he most resolutely subordinates his colour to his subject and
+makes the most poetic use of chiaroscuro; as in the great altar-piece
+_The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ in the church of that name, the too
+little known _St. Francis receiving the Stigmata_ on a ceiling
+compartment of the Academy of Arts at Vienna, and the wonderful
+_Crucifixion_ which not many years ago was brought down from the
+sky-line of the Long Gallery in the Louvre, and placed, where it
+deserves to be, among the masterpieces. And yet in this last piece the
+colour is not only in a singular degree interpretative of the subject,
+but at the same time technically astonishing--with certain subtleties of
+unusual juxtaposition and modulation, delightful to the craftsman, which
+are hardly seen again until we come to the latter half of the present
+century. So that here we have the great Veneto-Veronese master escaping
+altogether from our theory, and showing himself at one and the same time
+profoundly moving, intensely significant, and admirably decorative in
+colour. Still what was with him the splendid exception was with Titian,
+and those who have been grouped with Titian, the guiding rule of art.
+Though our master remains, take him all in all, the greatest of Venetian
+colourists, he never condescends to vaunt all that he knows, or to
+select his subjects as a groundwork for bravura, even the most
+legitimate. He is the greatest painter of the sixteenth century, just
+because, being the greatest colourist of the higher order, and in
+legitimate mastery of the brush second to none, he makes the worthiest
+use of his unrivalled accomplishment, not merely to call down the
+applause due to supreme pictorial skill and the victory over self-set
+difficulties, but, above all, to give the fullest and most legitimate
+expression to the subjects which he presents, and through them to
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Cadore and Venice--Early Giorgionesque works up to the date of the
+residence in Padua--New interpretations of Giorgione's and Titian's
+pictures.
+
+
+Tiziano Vecelli was born in or about the year 1477 at Pieve di Cadore, a
+district of the southern Tyrol then belonging to the Republic of Venice,
+and still within the Italian frontier. He was the son of Gregorio di
+Conte Vecelli by his wife Lucia, his father being descended from an
+ancient family of the name of Guecello (or Vecellio), established in the
+valley of Cadore. An ancestor, Ser Guecello di Tommasro da Pozzale, had
+been elected Podesta of Cadore as far back as 1321.[3] The name Tiziano
+would appear to have been a traditional one in the family. Among others
+we find a contemporary Tiziano Vecelli, who is a lawyer of note
+concerned in the administration of Cadore, keeping up a kind of
+obsequious friendship with his famous cousin at Venice. The Tizianello
+who, in 1622, dedicated to the Countess of Arundel an anonymous Life of
+Titian known as Tizianello's _Anonimo_, and died at Venice in 1650, was
+Titian's cousin thrice removed.
+
+Gregorio Vecelli was a valiant soldier, distinguished for his bravery in
+the field and his wisdom in the council of Cadore, but not, it may be
+assumed, possessed of wealth or, in a poor mountain district like
+Cadore, endowed with the means of obtaining it. The other offspring of
+the marriage with Lucia were Francesco,--supposed, though without
+substantial proof, to have been older than his brother,--Caterina, and
+Orsa. At the age of nine, according to Dolce in the _Dialogo della
+Pittura_, or of ten, according to Tizianello's _Anonimo_, Titian was
+taken from Cadore to Venice, there to enter upon the serious study of
+painting. Whether he had previously received some slight tuition in the
+rudiments of the art, or had only shown a natural inclination to become
+a painter, cannot be ascertained with any precision; nor is the point,
+indeed, one of any real importance. What is much more vital in our study
+of the master's life-work is to ascertain how far the scenery of his
+native Cadore left a permanent impress on his landscape art, and in what
+way his descent from a family of mountaineers and soldiers, hardy, yet
+of a certain birth and breeding, contributed to shape his individuality
+in its development to maturity. It has been almost universally assumed
+that Titian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery of
+Cadore in the backgrounds to his pictures; and yet, if we except the
+great _Battle of Cadore_ itself (now known only in Fontana's print, in a
+reduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Uffizi,
+and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in a
+modified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altar-pieces,
+Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawings
+of the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we find
+the jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. In the
+majority of instances, however, the middle distance and foreground to
+these is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts,
+its monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountain
+sides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring, but the richer
+vegetation of the Friulan mountains in their lower slopes, or of the
+beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian
+plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the
+play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of Venetian
+art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery
+of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for
+studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and
+back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland.
+How far Titian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needy
+mountaineers, may be taken to account for his excessive eagerness to
+reap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for his
+unresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to be
+got in, must be a matter for individual appreciation. Josiah
+Gilbert--quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle[4]--pertinently asks, "Might
+this mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewd
+Swiss?" In the getting, Titian was certainly all this, but in the
+spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and
+voluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of his
+career. Vasari relates that Titian was lodged at Venice with his uncle,
+an "honourable citizen," who, seeing his great inclination for painting,
+placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became a
+proficient. Dolce, apparently better instructed, gives, in his _Dialogo
+della Pittura_, Zuccato, best known as a mosaic worker, as his first
+master; next makes him pass into the studio of Gentile Bellini, and
+thence into that of the _caposcuola_ Giovanni Bellini; to take, however,
+the last and by far the most important step of his early career when he
+becomes the pupil and partner, or assistant, of Giorgione. Morelli[5]
+would prefer to leave Giovanni Bellini altogether out of Titian's
+artistic descent. However this may be, certain traces of Gentile's
+influence may be observed in the art of the Cadorine painter, especially
+in the earlier portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technical
+execution generally. On the other hand, no extant work of his beginnings
+suggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino's
+pupils--one of the _discipuli_, as some of these were fond of describing
+themselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the
+fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the
+influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his
+following or not. Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art of
+Venice and the _Veneto_ an influence not less strong of its kind than
+that which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regions
+during his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on the
+works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the
+painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and
+Borgognone--such men as Ambrogio de' Predis, Bernardino de' Conti, and,
+indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself. To the fashion for
+the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class, even Alvise Vivarini,
+the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocento
+development, bowed when he painted the Madonnas of the Redentore and S.
+Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the Vienna
+Gallery. Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr.
+Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under the
+paramount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the altar-piece
+of S. Cristina near Treviso, the _Madonna and Child with Saints_ in the
+Ellesmere collection, and the _Madonna and Child with St. Peter Martyr_
+in the Naples Gallery, while in the _Marriage of St. Catherine_ at
+Munich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regards
+exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour,
+essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise's
+death, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could,
+faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in his
+later years was transformed into something very like a satellite of
+Giovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather to
+the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent
+overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the point
+of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.
+
+What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both of
+Giorgione and Titian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is not
+so much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent lean
+on Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves. Neither of
+them is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutely
+dependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for a
+time held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliest
+manhood held towards Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent also
+of Lorenzo Lotto, who, in the earliest known examples--the so-called
+_Danaë_ of Sir Martin Conway's collection, and the _St. Jerome_ of the
+Louvre--is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art passes through
+successive developments, he will still show himself open to more or less
+enduring influences from the one side and the other. Sebastiano del
+Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly be
+accounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career out
+of leading-strings. First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling _Pietà_ in
+the Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authentic
+inscription, "Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus
+(sic)," is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece of
+documentary evidence, it would even now pass as such. Next, he becomes
+the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save perhaps
+Titian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in a
+quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque,
+that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, have
+acquired a world-wide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soul
+to Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of early
+training and association, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal itself,
+he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the
+very end of his career.
+
+Giorgione and Titian were as nearly as possible of the same age, being
+both of them born in or about 1477. Lorenzo Lotto's birth is to be
+placed about the year 1476--or, as others would have it, 1480. Palma saw
+the light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485. So
+that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier
+half of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eight
+years--between 1477 and 1485.
+
+In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Life and Times of Titian_ a revolutionary
+theory, foreshadowed in their _Painting in North Italy_, was for the
+first time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained. They
+sought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, that
+Palma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced and
+shaped the art of his contemporary Titian, instead of having been
+influenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artists
+would have induced the student to believe. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's
+theory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelli
+appears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to be
+found on a _Santa Conversazione_, once in the collection of M. Reiset,
+and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d'Aumale. This date now
+proves with the artist's signature to be a forgery, and the picture in
+question, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode of
+conception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more modern
+technique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma in
+the development of the full Renaissance types and the full Renaissance
+methods of execution. There can be small doubt that this particular
+theory of the indefatigable critics, to whom the history of Italian art
+owes so much, will little by little be allowed to die a natural death,
+if it be not, indeed, already defunct. More and more will the view so
+forcibly stated by Giovanni Morelli recommend itself, that Palma in many
+of those elements of his art most distinctively Palmesque leans upon the
+master of Cadore. The Bergamasque painter was not indeed a personality
+in art sufficiently strong and individual to dominate a Titian, or to
+leave upon his style and methods profound and enduring traces. As such,
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle themselves hesitate to put him forward, though
+they cling with great persistency to their pet theory of his influence.
+This exquisite artist, though by no means inventive genius, did, on the
+other hand, permanently shape the style of Cariani and the two elder
+Bonifazi; imparting, it may be, also some of his voluptuous charm in the
+rendering of female loveliness to Paris Bordone, though the latter must,
+in the main, be looked upon as the artistic offspring of Titian.
+
+It is by no means certain, all the same, that this question of influence
+imparted and submitted to can with advantage be argued with such
+absoluteness of statement as has been the rule up to the present time,
+both on the one side and the other. It should be remembered that we are
+dealing with three young painters of about the same age, working in the
+same art-centre, perhaps, even, for a time in the same studio--issuing,
+at any rate, all three from the flank of Giovanni Bellini. In a
+situation like this, it is not only the preponderance of age--two or
+three years at the most, one way or the other--that is to be taken into
+account, but the preponderance of genius and the magic gift of
+influence. It is easy to understand how the complete renewal, brought
+about by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini's teaching and example,
+operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open
+to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness of
+sensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible was
+the fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over his
+youthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influence
+widen, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellino
+himself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there could
+be no question of light received back from painters of his own
+generation in exchange for that diffused around him; but with Titian and
+Palma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell here
+in each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous
+plant of the same family, yet with all its Giorgionesque colour of a
+quite distinctive loveliness. Titian, we shall see, carried the style to
+its highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways a
+new thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in
+nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than
+Giorgione, Titian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to that
+element of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a way
+counteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interprets
+the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic
+attributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itself
+beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this
+frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this _terre à
+terre_ energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early work of
+Titian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was
+influenced?[6] There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the
+Giorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to the
+everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and
+this not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, in
+which, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular
+resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the
+important _Adam and Eve_ of his earlier time in the Brunswick
+Gallery--once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione--and
+the preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found in
+Titian's _Three Ages_ at Bridgewater House, in his so-called _Sacred and
+Profane Love (Medea and Venus)_ of the Borghese Gallery, in such sacred
+pieces as the _Madonna and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ at the Prado
+Gallery of Madrid, and the large _Madonna and Child with four Saints_ at
+Dresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception stripped
+of a little of its poetic glamour, but retaining unabashed its splendid
+sensuousness, which is thus made the more markedly to stand out. We
+notice, too, in Titian's works belonging to this particular group
+another characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only because
+Palma indulged in it in a great number of his Sacred Conversations and
+similar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin, the
+muscular form, of some male saint, or it may be some shepherd of the
+uplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddy
+gold, of a female saint, or a fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdess
+or a heroine of antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishing
+characteristics as these--and others that could easily be singled
+out--as wholly and solely Titianesque of the early time? If so, we ought
+to assume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palma
+came from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken to
+have transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the less
+subtle shape into which he had already transmuted it. But should not
+such an assumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main,
+be made with all the allowances which the situation demands?
+
+That, when a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to overturn
+barriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy to
+unravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lines
+everywhere, one or two modern examples much nearer to our own time may
+roughly serve to illustrate. Take, for instance, the friendship that
+developed itself between the youthful Bonington and the youthful
+Delacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre: the
+one communicating to the other something of the stimulating quality, the
+frankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished the
+English from the French school; the other contributing to shape, with
+the fire of his romantic temperament, the art of the young Englishman
+who was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of the
+P.R.B.--Millais, Rossetti, and Mr. Holman Hunt--who is to state _ex
+cathedra_ where influence was received, where transmitted; or whether
+the first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time of
+their complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, the
+third the conscience of the group? A similar puzzle would await him who
+should strive to unravel the delicate thread which winds itself round
+the artistic relation between Frederick Walker and the noted landscapist
+Mr. J.W. North. Though we at once recognise Walker as the dominant
+spirit, and see his influence even to-day, more than twenty years after
+his death, affirmed rather than weakened, there are certain
+characteristics of the style recognised and imitated as his, of which
+it would be unsafe to declare that he and not his companion originated
+them.
+
+In days of artistic upheaval and growth like the last years of the
+fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the _milieu_
+must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who most
+influence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeply
+rooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not be
+doubted that when in Giorgione's breast had been lighted the first
+sparks of the Promethean fire, which, with the soft intensity of its
+glow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire ran
+like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth, his
+contemporaries and juniors, just because their blood was of the stuff to
+ignite and flame like his own.
+
+The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question
+merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a
+brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that "they who were
+excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of
+life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of
+flesh, etc."[7] It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and
+style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the
+Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life
+aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just as
+the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of
+lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which, in
+Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first
+years of the Cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when--to take one
+instance only among many--the Ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble Venetian
+Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance
+with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was ever of love. In
+that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina's
+courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty,
+Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa
+illustrissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius,
+the leaflets which, under the title _Gli Asolani, ne' quali si ragiona
+d' amore_,[8] soon became a famous book in Italy.
+
+[Illustration: _The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice.
+From a Photograph by Naya_.]
+
+The most Bellinesque work of Titian's youth with which we are acquainted
+is the curious _Man of Sorrows_ of the Scuola di S. Rocco at Venice, a
+work so faded, so injured by restoration that to dogmatise as to its
+technique would be in the highest degree unsafe. The type approaches,
+among the numerous versions of the _Pietà_ by and ascribed to Giovanni
+Bellini, most nearly to that in the Palazzo del Commune at Rimini.
+Seeing that Titian was in 1500 twenty-three years old, and a student of
+painting of some thirteen years' standing, there may well exist, or at
+any rate there may well have existed, from his hand things in a yet
+earlier and more distinctively Quattrocento-style than anything with
+which we are at present acquainted. This _Man of Sorrows_ itself may
+well be a little earlier than 1500, but on this point it is not easy to
+form a definite conclusion. Perhaps it is reserved in the future to
+some student uniting the qualities of patience and keen insight to do
+for the youthful Titian what Morelli and his school have done for
+Correggio--that is, to restore to him a series of paintings earlier in
+date than those which criticism has, up to the present time, been
+content to accept as showing his first independent steps in art.
+Everything else that we can at present safely attribute to the youthful
+Vecelli is deeply coloured with the style and feeling of Giorgione,
+though never, as is the case with the inferior Giorgionesques, so
+entirely as to obliterate the strongly marked individuality of the
+painter himself. The _Virgin and Child_ in the Imperial Gallery of
+Vienna, popularly known as _La Zingarella_, which, by general consent,
+is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this class,
+is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception and
+arrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength, and richness of the
+colour-chord, in the atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the landscape
+background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already
+Giorgionesque. Nay, even here Titian, above all, asserts _himself_, and
+lays the foundation of his own manner. The type of the divine Bambino
+differs widely from that adopted by Giorgione in the altar-pieces of
+Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The virgin is a woman
+beautified only by youth and intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgione
+and Titian in their loveliest types of womanhood are sensuous as
+compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as
+Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. But
+Giorgione's sensuousness is that which may fitly characterise the
+goddess, while Titian's is that of the woman, much nearer to the
+everyday world in which both artists lived.
+
+In the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is a
+beautiful _Madonna and Child_ in a niche of coloured marble mosaic,
+which is catalogued as an early Titian under the influence of Giovanni
+Bellini. Judging only from the reproduction on a large scale done by
+Messrs. Braun and Co., the writer has ventured to suggest
+elsewhere[9]--prefacing his suggestions with the avowal that he is not
+acquainted with the picture itself--that we may have here, not an early
+Titian, but that rarer thing an early Giorgione. From the list of the
+former master's works it must at any rate be struck out, as even the
+most superficial comparison with, for instance, _La Zingarella_
+suffices to prove. In the notable display of Venetian art made at the
+New Gallery in the winter of 1895 were included two pictures (Nos. 1 and
+7 in the catalogue) ascribed to the early time of Titian and evidently
+from the same hand. These were a _Virgin and Child_ from the collection,
+so rich in Venetian works, of Mr. R.H. Benson (formerly among the
+Burghley House pictures), and a less well-preserved _Virgin and Child
+with Saints_ from the collection of Captain Holford at Dorchester House.
+The former is ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the early time of
+the master himself.[10] Both are, in their rich harmony of colour and
+their general conception, entirely Giorgionesque. They reveal the hand
+of some at present anonymous Venetian of the second order, standing
+midway between the young Giorgione and the young Titian--one who, while
+imitating the types and the landscape of these greater contemporaries
+of his, replaced their depth and glow by a weaker, a more superficial
+prettiness, which yet has its own suave charm.
+
+[Illustration: _Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." Imperial
+Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by Löwy_.]
+
+The famous _Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Chiesa di S. Rocco at
+Venice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed by
+Vasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to
+that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The
+biographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to be
+from the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in Venice,
+and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and
+Giorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life." This
+too great popularity of the work as a wonder-working picture is perhaps
+the cause that it is to-day in a state as unsatisfactory as is the _Man
+of Sorrows_ in the adjacent Scuola. The picture which presents "Christ
+dragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in the
+background," resembles most among Giorgione's authentic creations the
+_Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Casa Loschi at Vicenza. The
+resemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since this
+last--one of the earliest of Giorgiones--still recalls Giovanni Bellini,
+and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception.
+In both renderings of the divine countenance there is--or it may be the
+writer fancies that there is--underlying that expression of serenity and
+humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject, a sinister,
+disquieting look, almost a threat. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called
+attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as
+compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar
+disproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the _Christ
+between St. Andrew and St. Catherine_ in the Church of SS. Ermagora and
+Fortunato (commonly called S. Marcuola) at Venice. Here the head of the
+infant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the two
+saints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest.
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle had refused to accept this picture as a genuine
+Titian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful place
+among the early works.
+
+Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the _Three
+Ages_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_, the writer is inclined to place
+the _Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI. to St.
+Peter_, once in the collection of Charles I.[11] and now in the Antwerp
+Gallery. The main elements of Titian's art may be seen here, in
+imperfect fusion, as in very few even of his early productions. The not
+very dignified St. Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with a
+high relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again in
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or rather his
+immediate followers; the magnificently robed Alexander VI. (Rodrigo
+Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, gives back the style in portraiture
+of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio; while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro--an
+ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of
+fleets, as the background suggests--is one of the most characteristic
+portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos, its intensity,
+contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same
+_Baffo_ in the renowned _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, painted twenty-three
+years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It
+is the first in order of a great series, including the _Ariosto_ of
+Cobham, the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, the _Portrait of a Man_ in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous _Concert_ of the Pitti,
+ascribed to Giorgione. Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. Georges
+Lafenestre[12] have called attention to the fact that the detested
+Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot
+well have been executed after that time. He would have been a bold man
+who should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI.
+into a votive picture painted immediately after his death! How is it
+possible to assume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless assume, that
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art,
+was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at the
+latest, in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione
+himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted
+his Castelfranco altar-piece, his _Venus_, or his _Three Philosophers
+(Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas)_. Old Gian Bellino himself had not entered
+upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S.
+Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.[13]
+
+It is impossible on the present occasion to give any detailed account
+of the fresco decorations painted by Giorgione and Titian on the facades
+of the new Fondaco de' Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on
+the 28th of January 1505. Full particulars will be found in Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle's often-quoted work. Vasari's many manifest errors and
+disconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do not
+predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained
+relations between Giorgione and our painter, to which this particular
+business is supposed to have given rise. That they together decorated
+with a series of frescoes which acquired considerable celebrity the
+exterior of the Fondaco is all that is known for certain, Titian being
+apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Of
+these frescoes only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, and
+facing the Grand Canal, has been preserved, in a much-damaged
+condition--the few fragments that remained of those facing the side
+canal having been destroyed in 1884.[14] Vasari shows us a Giorgione
+angry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior beauty
+of some work on the "_facciata di verso la Merceria,_" which in reality
+belongs to Titian, and thereupon implacably cutting short their
+connection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, but
+refuted by the less contemporary authority of Tizianello's _Anonimo_. Of
+what great painters, standing in the relation of master and pupil, have
+not such stories been told, and--the worst of it is--told with a certain
+foundation of truth? Apocryphal is, no doubt, that which has evolved
+itself from the internal evidence supplied by the _Baptism of Christ_ of
+Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci; but a stronger substructure of fact
+supports the unpleasing anecdotes as to Titian and Tintoretto, as to
+Watteau and Pater, as to our own Hudson and Reynolds, and, alas! as to
+very many others. How touching, on the other hand, is that simple entry
+in Francesco Francia's day-book, made when his chief journeyman,
+Timoteo Viti, leaves him: "1495 a di 4 aprile è partito il mio caro
+Timoteo; chi Dio li dia ogni bene et fortuna!" ("On the 4th day of April
+1495 my dear Timoteo left me. May God grant him all happiness and good
+fortune!")
+
+[Illustration: _The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome.
+From a Photograph by Anderson._]
+
+There is one reason that makes it doubly difficult, relying on
+developments of style only, to make, even tentatively, a chronological
+arrangement of Titian's early works. This is that in those painted
+_poesie_ of the earlier Venetian art of which the germs are to be found
+in Giovanni Bellini and Cima, but the flower is identified with
+Giorgione, Titian surrendered himself to the overmastering influence of
+the latter with less reservation of his own individuality than in his
+sacred works. In the earlier imaginative subjects the vivifying glow of
+Giorgionesque poetry moulds, colours, and expands the genius of Titian,
+but so naturally as neither to obliterate nor to constrain it. Indeed,
+even in the late time of our master--checking an unveiled sensuousness
+which sometimes approaches dangerously near to a downright
+sensuality--the influence of the master and companion who vanished half
+a century before victoriously reasserts itself. It is this _renouveau_
+of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives so
+exquisite a charm to the _Venere del Pardo_, so strange a pathos to that
+still later _Nymph and Shepherd,_ which was a few years ago brought out
+of its obscurity and added to the treasures of the Imperial Gallery at
+Vienna.
+
+The sacred works of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with a
+difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a
+majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation,
+very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness and
+reserve which informs such creations as the _Madonna of Castelfranco_
+and the _Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch_ of the Prado Museum.
+Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque
+ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of the _Assunta_, the true
+passion going hand-in-hand with beauty of the Louvre _Entombment_, the
+rhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the _St. Peter Martyr_.
+
+The _Baptism of Christ_, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the Gallery of
+the Capitol at Rome, had been by Crowe and Cavalcaselle taken away from
+Titian and given to Paris Bordone, but the keen insight of Morelli led
+him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to Titian. Internal
+evidence is indeed conclusive in this case that the picture must be
+assigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.[15]
+Here Titian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christ
+more in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemn
+hieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries.
+The luxuriant landscape is in the main Giorgionesque, save that here and
+there a naked branch among the leafage--and on one of them the
+woodpecker--strongly recalls Giovanni Bellini. The same robust,
+round-limbed young Venetian, with the inexpressive face, does duty here
+as St. John the Baptist, who in the _Three Ages_, presently to be
+discussed, appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd. The
+Christ, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxuriant
+hair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine
+_Cristo della Moneta_. The question at once arises here, Did Titian in
+the type of this figure derive inspiration from Giovanni Bellini's
+splendid _Baptism of Christ_, finished in 1510 for the Church of S.
+Corona at Vicenza, but which the younger artist might well have seen a
+year or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in the
+workshop of the venerable master? Apart from its fresh naïveté, and its
+rare pictorial charm, how trivial and merely anecdotic does the
+conception of Titian appear by the side of that of Bellini, so lofty, so
+consoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunset
+colour![16] Alone in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram,
+placed in the picture with an awkwardness attractive in its naïvete,
+but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standing
+alone.
+
+The beautiful _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida,_ placed in
+the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now at last officially
+restored to Titian, after having been for years innumerable ascribed to
+Giorgione, whose style it not more than generally recalls. Here at any
+rate all the rival wise men are agreed, and it only remains for the
+student of the old masters, working to-day on the solid substructure
+provided for him by his predecessors, to wonder how any other
+attribution could have been accepted. But then the critic of the present
+day is a little too prone to be wise and scornful _à ban marché_,
+forgetting that he has been spared three parts of the road, and that he
+starts for conquest at the high point, to reach which the pioneers of
+scientific criticism in art have devoted a lifetime of noble toil. It is
+in this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early art
+of the Cadorine which Crowe and Cavalcaselle have defined as
+"Palmesque." The _St. Bridget_ and the _St. Ulphus_ are both types
+frequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamasque painter, and
+it has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model with
+hair of wavy gold must have sat to Giorgione, Titian, and Palma. This
+can only be true, however, in a modified sense, seeing that Giorgione
+did not, so much as his contemporaries and followers, affect the type of
+the beautiful Venetian blond, "large, languishing, and lazy." The hair
+of his women--both the sacred personages and the divinities nominally
+classic or wholly Venetian--is, as a rule, of a rich chestnut, or at the
+most dusky fair, and in them the Giorgionesque oval of the face tempers
+with its spirituality the strength of physical passion that the general
+physique denotes. The polished surface of this panel at Madrid, the
+execution, sound and finished without being finicking, the high
+yellowish lights on the crimson draperies, are all very characteristic
+of this, the first manner of Vecelli. The green hangings at the back of
+the picture are such as are very generally associated with the
+colour-schemes of Palma. An old repetition, with a slight variation in
+the Bambino, is in the royal collection at Hampton Court, where it long
+bore--indeed it does so still on the frame--the name of Palma Vecchio.
+
+It will be remembered that Vasari assigns to the _Tobias and the Angel_
+in the Church of S. Marciliano at Venice the exact date 1507, describing
+it, moreover, with greater accuracy than he does any other work by
+Titian. He mentions even "the thicket, in which is a St. John the
+Baptist kneeling as he prays to heaven, whence comes a splendour of
+light." The Aretine biographer is followed in this particular by
+Morelli, usually so eagle-eyed, so little bound by tradition in tracing
+the beginnings of a great painter. The gifted modern critic places the
+picture among the quite early works of our master. Notwithstanding this
+weight of authority, the writer feels bound to dissent from the view
+just now indicated, and in this instance to follow Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, who assign to the _Tobias and the Angel_ a place much
+later on in Titian's long career. The picture, though it hangs high in
+the little church for which it was painted, will speak for itself to
+those who interrogate it without _parti pris_. Neither in the
+figures--the magnificently classic yet living archangel Raphael and the
+more naïve and realistic Tobias--nor in the rich landscape with St. John
+the Baptist praying is there anything left of the early Giorgionesque
+manner. In the sweeping breadth of the execution, the summarising power
+of the brush, the glow from within of the colour, we have so many
+evidences of a style in its fullest maturity. It will be safe,
+therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian's middle period.[17]
+
+The _Three Ages_ in the Bridgewater Gallery and the so-called _Sacred
+and Profane Love_ in the Borghese Gallery represent the apogee of
+Titian's Giorgionesque style. Glowing through and through with the
+spirit of the master-poet among Venetian painters, yet falling short a
+little, it may be, of that subtle charm of his, compounded indefinably
+of sensuous delight and spiritual yearning, these two masterpieces carry
+the Giorgionesque technically a pretty wide step farther than the
+inventor of the style took it. Barbarelli never absolutely threw off the
+trammels of the Quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained to
+the last--not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm--the naïveté,
+the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely
+full-fledged.
+
+The _Three Ages_, from its analogies of type and manner with the
+_Baptism_ of the Capitol, would appear to be the earlier of the two
+imaginative works here grouped together, but to date later than that
+picture.[18] The tonality of the picture is of an exquisite
+silveriness--that of clear, moderate daylight, though this relative
+paleness may have been somewhat increased by time. It may a little
+disconcert at first sight those who have known the lovely pastoral only
+from hot, brown copies, such as the one which, under the name of
+Giorgione, was formerly in the Dudley House Collection, and now belongs
+to Sir William Farrer. It is still so difficult to battle with the
+deeply-rooted notion that there can be no Giorgione, no painting of his
+school, without the accompaniment of a rich brown sauce! The shepherdess
+has a robe of fairest crimson, and her flower-crowned locks in tint more
+nearly approach to the _blond cendré_ which distinguishes so many of
+Palma's _donne_ than to the ruddier gold that Titian himself generally
+affects. The more passionate of the two, she gazes straight into the
+eyes of her strong-limbed rustic lover, who half-reclining rests his
+hand upon her shoulder. On the twin reed-pipes, which she still holds in
+her hands, she has just breathed forth a strain of music, and to it, as
+it still lingers in their ears, they yield themselves entranced. Here
+the youth is naked, the maid clothed and adorned--a reversal, this, of
+Giorgione's _Fête Champêtre_ in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, where the
+women are undraped, and the amorous young cavaliers appear in complete
+and rich attire. To the right are a group of thoroughly Titianesque
+amorini--the winged one, dominating the others, being perhaps Amor
+himself; while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls ranged
+round him on the ground--obvious reminders of the last stage of all, at
+which he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity between
+the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of
+the personages--the one aiding the other to express the moment of pause
+in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all
+that the very whirlwind of passion can give. Near at hand may be
+pitfalls, the smiling love-god may prove less innocent than he looks,
+and in the distance Fate may be foreshadowed by the figure of weary Age
+awaiting Death. Yet this one moment is all the lovers' own, and they
+profane it not by speech, but stir their happy languor only with faint
+notes of music borne on the still, warm air.
+
+[Illustration: _The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery. From the Plate in
+Lafenestre's "Vie et Oeuvre du Titien" (May, Paris.)_]
+
+The _Sacred and Profane Love_ of the Borghese Gallery is one of the
+world's pictures, and beyond doubt the masterpiece of the early or
+Giorgionesque period. To-day surely no one will be found to gainsay
+Morelli when he places it at the end of that period, which it so
+incomparably sums up--not at the beginning, when its perfection would be
+as incomprehensible as the less absolute achievement displayed in other
+early pieces which such a classification as this would place after the
+Borghese picture. The accompanying reproduction obviates all necessity
+for a detailed description. Titian painted afterwards perhaps more
+wonderfully still--with a more sweeping vigour of brush, with a higher
+authority, and a play of light as brilliant and diversified. He never
+attained to a higher finish and perfection of its kind, or more
+admirably suited the technical means to the thing to be achieved. He
+never so completely gave back, coloured with the splendour of his own
+genius, the rays received from Giorgione. The delicious sunset landscape
+has all the Giorgionesque elements, with more spaciousness, and lines of
+a still more suave harmony. The grand Venetian _donna_ who sits
+sumptuously robed, flower-crowned, and even gloved, at the sculptured
+classic fount is the noblest in her pride of loveliness, as she is one
+of the first, of the long line of voluptuous beauties who will occupy
+the greatest brushes of the Cinquecento. The little love-god who,
+insidiously intervening, paddles in the water of the fountain and
+troubles its surface, is Titian's very own, owing nothing to any
+forerunner. The divinely beautiful _Profane Love_--or, as we shall
+presently see, _Venus_--is the most flawless presentment of female
+loveliness unveiled that modern art has known up to this date, save only
+the _Venus_ of Giorgione himself (in the Dresden Gallery), to which it
+can be but little posterior. The radiant freshness of the face, with its
+glory of half-unbound hair, does not, indeed, equal the sovereign
+loveliness of the Dresden _Venus_ or the disquieting charm of the
+Giovanelli _Zingarella_ (properly Hypsipyle). Its beauty is all on the
+surface, while theirs stimulates the imagination of the beholder. The
+body with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and
+movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true
+Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous
+drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high
+lights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that Titian
+ever achieved. Only in the late _Venere del Pardo_, which so closely
+follows the chief motive of Giorgione's _Venus_, does he approach it in
+frankness and purity. Far more genuinely classic is it in spirit,
+because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, than
+anything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous in
+their study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.[19]
+
+[Illustration: _Sacred and Profane Love._]
+
+It is impossible to discuss here in detail all the conjectural
+explanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popular
+of all Venetian pictures--least of all that strange one brought forward
+by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the _Artless and Sated Love_, for which they
+have found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves in
+an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show but a languid desire to
+solve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the pictures
+described by Marcantonio Michiel (the _Anonimo_ of Jacopo Morelli), in
+the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the _Inferno with
+Aeneas and Anchises_ and _Landscape with the Birth of Paris_, Herr Franz
+Wickhoff[20] has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring
+crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of
+Barbarelli's best known works. The _Three Philosophers_ he calls
+_Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas_, the Giovanelli _Tempest with the Gipsy
+and the Soldier_ he explains anew as _Admetus and Hypsipyle_.[21] The
+subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and
+popularly called, or rather miscalled, the _Dream of Raphael_, is
+recognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione.
+He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the
+commentator of Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping
+side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it),
+the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in
+peaceful sleep.
+
+Passing over to the Giorgionesque period of Titian, he boldly sets to
+work on the world-famous _Sacred and Profane Love_, and shows us the
+Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned
+humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the
+_Argonautica_ of Valerius Flaccus--that wearisome imitation of the
+similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea--the sumptuously
+attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)--sits at the fountain in
+unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and
+holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not
+yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love
+is the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comes
+Venus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea's father,
+irresistibly pleading that she shall go to the alien lover, who waits in
+the wood. It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in the
+toils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is the
+subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible--in Titian's realisation
+of the legend--to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main theme
+upon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing[22] had
+already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when he
+described the Borghese picture as _The Maiden with Venus and Amor at the
+Well_. The _vraisemblance_ of Herr Wickhoff's brilliant interpretation
+becomes the greater when we reflect that Titian at least twice
+afterwards borrowed subjects from classical antiquity, taking his
+_Worship of Venus_, now at Madrid, from the _Erotes_ of Philostratus,
+and our own wonderful _Bacchus and Ariadne_ at the National Gallery from
+the _Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ of Catullus. In the future it is
+quite possible that the Austrian savant may propose new and precise
+interpretations for the _Three Ages_ and for Giorgione's _Concert
+Champêtre_ at the Louvre.
+
+[Illustration: _Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria
+Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq._]
+
+It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student of
+Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him
+at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young
+poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly
+allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have hard,
+clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours.
+It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere of pause and
+quiet that they bring with them, the way in which they indefinably take
+possession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond their
+radiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet we
+need not mourn overmuch, or too painfully set to work to revise our
+whole conception of Venetian idyllic art as matured in the first years
+of the Cinquecento. True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo, not
+less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian and
+Giorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the
+lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they
+have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no
+doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more
+fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular
+to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic
+legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of
+the golden prime disdained to represent--or it may be unconsciously
+shrank from representing--the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic
+and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. Giorgione
+embodies in such a picture as the _Adrastus and Hypsipyle_, or the
+_Aeneas and Evander_, not so much what has been related to him of those
+ancient legends as his own mood when he is brought into contact with
+them; he transposes his motive from a dramatic into a lyrical
+atmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something "rich
+and strange," coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmly
+human fantasy. Titian, in the _Sacred and Profane Love_, as for
+identification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep close
+to the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. But
+for all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, for
+the splendour of female loveliness unveiled, for the piquant contrast of
+female loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He has
+presented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such a
+delightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries to
+decipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian in these exquisite
+idylls--for so we may still dare to call them--have consciously or
+unconsciously achieved, is the indissoluble union of humanity outwardly
+quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion, to the
+environing nature. It is Nature herself that in these true painted poems
+mysteriously responds, that interprets to the beholder the moods of man,
+much as a mighty orchestra--Nature ordered and controlled--may by its
+undercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the very
+personages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so we
+may be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his new interpretations,
+not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first
+acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old
+ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from
+another and a more prosaic, because a more precise and literal,
+standpoint.
+
+[Illustration: _Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by
+Hanfstängl_.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Frescoes of the Scuola del Santo--The "Herodias" type of picture--Holy
+Families and Sacred Conversations--Date of the "Cristo della Moneta" Is
+the "Concert" of the Pitti by Titian?--The "Bacchanal" of Alnwick
+Castle.
+
+
+
+It has been pointed out by Titian's biographers that the wars which
+followed upon the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing all
+over North Italy the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation.
+It was not long after this--on the death of his master Giorgione--that
+Sebastiano Luciani migrated to Rome and, so far as he could, shook off
+his allegiance to the new Venetian art; it was then that Titian
+temporarily left the city of his adoption to do work in fresco at Padua
+and Vicenza. If the date 1508, given by Vasari for the great frieze-like
+wood-engraving, _The Triumph of Faith_, be accepted, it must be held
+that it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi[23] cites
+painted compositions of the _Triumph_ as either the originals or the
+repetitions of the wood-engravings, for which Titian himself drew the
+blocks. The frescoes themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out on
+the walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished;
+but that they ever came into existence there would not appear to be any
+direct evidence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in the
+process of translation into wood-engraving, are not materially at
+variance with those in the frescoes of the Scuola del Santo. But the
+movement, the spirit of the whole is essentially different. This mighty,
+onward-sweeping procession, with Adam and Eve, the Patriarchs, the
+Prophets and Sibyls, the martyred Innocents, the great chariot with
+Christ enthroned, drawn by the four Doctors of the Church and impelled
+forward by the Emblems of the four Evangelists, with a great company of
+Apostles and Martyrs following, has all the vigour and elasticity, all
+the decorative amplitude that is wanting in the frescoes of the Santo.
+It is obvious that inspiration was derived from the _Triumphs_ of
+Mantegna, then already so widely popularised by numerous engravings.
+Titian and those under whose inspiration he worked here obviously
+intended an antithesis to the great series of canvases presenting the
+apotheosis of Julius Caesar, which were then to be seen in the not far
+distant Mantua. Have we here another pictorial commentary, like the
+famous _Cristo detta Moneta,_ with which we shall have to deal
+presently, on the "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo," which
+was the favourite device of Alfonso of Ferrara and the legend round his
+gold coins? The whole question is interesting, and deserves more careful
+consideration than can be accorded to it on the present occasion. Hardly
+again, until he reached extreme old age, did such an impulse of sacred
+passion colour the art of the painter of Cadore as here. In the earlier
+section of his life-work the _Triumph of Faith_ constitutes a striking
+exception.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak.
+Fresco in the Scuola del Santo, Padua. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Passing over, as relatively unimportant, Titian's share in the
+much-defaced fresco decorations of the Scuola del Carmine, we come now
+to those more celebrated ones in the Scuola del Santo. Out of the
+sixteen frescoes executed in 1510-11 by Titian, in concert with Domenico
+Campagnola and other assistants of less fame, the following three are
+from the brush of the master himself:--_St. Anthony causes a new-born
+Infant to speak, testifying to the innocence of its Mother; St. Anthony
+heals the leg of a Youth; A jealous Husband puts to death his Wife, whom
+the Saint afterwards restores to life._ Here the figures, the
+composition, the beautiful landscape backgrounds bear unmistakably the
+trace of Giorgione's influence. The composition has just the timidity,
+the lack of rhythm and variety, that to the last marks that of
+Barbarelli. The figures have his naïve truth, his warmth and splendour
+of life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift the
+uninspiring subjects a little above the actual. The _Nobleman putting to
+death his Wife_ is dramatic, almost terrible in its fierce, awkward
+realism, yet it does not rise much higher in interpretation than what
+our neighbours would to-day call the _drame passionel._ The interest is
+much the same that is aroused in a student of Elizabethan literature by
+that study of murder, _Arden of Feversham_, not that higher attraction
+that he feels--horrors notwithstanding--for _The Maid's Tragedy_ of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, or _The Duchess of Malfi_ of Webster.[24]
+
+[Illustration: _"Noli me tangere." National Gallery. From a Photograph
+published by the Autotype Company._]
+
+A convenient date for the magnificent _St. Mark enthroned, with SS.
+Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas, and Damianus_, is 1512, when Titian, having
+completed his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned to
+Venice. True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in the
+truculent _St. Mark_; but, then, as essentially so were the frescoes
+just terminated. The noble altar-piece[25] symbolises, or rather
+commemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with the
+terrors of the League of Cambrai:--on the one side St. Sebastian,
+standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, St. Roch for
+plague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, SS. Cosmas and
+Damianus, suggesting the healing of these evils. The colour is
+Giorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli's own is so to be
+described. Especially does it show points of contact with that of the
+so-called _Three Philosophers_, which, on the authority of Marcantonio
+Michiel (the _Anonimo_), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of the
+last works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is both
+sumptuous and boldly contrasted in the local hues, the sovereign unity
+of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, by
+any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate Giorgionesques.
+Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione
+successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a
+more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These last
+are among the most admirable portrait-figures in the life-work of
+Titian. In them a simplicity, a concentration akin to that of Giovanni
+Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and
+flexibility of Barbarelli. The St. Sebastian is the most beautiful among
+the youthful male figures, as the _Venus_ of Giorgione and the Venus of
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_ are the most beautiful among the female
+figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such
+presentments of youth in its flower abounded. There is something
+androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the strength
+and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its
+suavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that a
+delight in portraying the fresh comeliness, the elastic beauty of form
+proper to the youth just passing into the man was common to many
+Venetian painters at this stage, and coloured their art as it had
+coloured the whole art of Greece.
+
+Hereabouts the writer would like to place the singularly attractive, yet
+a little puzzling, _Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd_,
+which is No. 4 in the National Gallery. The type of the landscape is
+early, and even for that time the execution in this particular is, for
+Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially the
+projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against
+the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. The
+noble type and the stilted attitude of the _St. Joseph_ suggest the _St.
+Mark_ of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of
+the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of
+Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the
+Salute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, by
+a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no
+means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly
+in the _St. Anthony causing a new-born Infant to speak_, of the Scuola.
+Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of
+the early time before complete freedom of design was attained.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della
+Salute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson_.]
+
+[Illustration: _The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
+From a Photograph by Löwy_.]
+
+The splendidly beautiful _Herodias with the head of St. John the
+Baptist_, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but by
+Morelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian,
+belongs to about the same time as the _Sacred and Profane Love_, and
+would therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Padua
+and Vicenza. The intention has been not so much to emphasise the tragic
+character of the motive as to exhibit to the highest advantage the
+voluptuous charm, the languid indifference of a Venetian beauty posing
+for Herod's baleful consort. Repetitions of this _Herodias_ exist in the
+Northbrook Collection and in that of Mr. R.H. Benson. The latter, which
+is presumably from the workshop of the master, and shows variations in
+one or two unimportant particulars from the Doria picture, is here,
+failing the original, reproduced with the kind permission of the owner.
+A conception traceable back to Giorgione would appear to underlie, not
+only this Doria picture, but that _Herodias_ which at Dorchester House
+is, for not obvious reasons, attributed to Pordenone, and another
+similar one by Palma Vecchio, of which a late copy exists in the
+collection of the Earl of Chichester. Especially is this community of
+origin noticeable in the head of St. John on the charger, as it appears
+in each of these works. All of them again show a family resemblance in
+this particular respect to the interesting full-length _Judith_ at the
+Hermitage, now ascribed to Giorgione, to the over-painted half-length
+_Judith_ in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice, and to Hollar's
+print after a picture supposed by the engraver to give the portrait of
+Giorgione himself in the character of David, the slayer of Goliath.[26]
+The sumptuous but much-injured _Vanitas_, which is No. 1110 in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich--a beautiful woman of the same opulent type as the
+_Herodias_, holding a mirror which reflects jewels and other symbols of
+earthly vanity--may be classed with the last-named work. Again we owe it
+to Morelli[27] that this painting, ascribed by Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle--as the _Herodias_ was ascribed--to Pordenone, has been
+with general acceptance classed among the early works of Titian. The
+popular _Flora_ of the Uffizi, a beautiful thing still, though all the
+bloom of its beauty has been effaced, must be placed rather later in
+this section of Titian's life-work, displaying as it does a technique
+more facile and accomplished, and a conception of a somewhat higher
+individuality. The model is surely the same as that which has served for
+the Venus of the _Sacred and Profane Love_, though the picture comes
+some years after that piece. Later still comes the so-called _Alfonso
+d'Este and Laura Dianti_, as to which something will be said farther on.
+Another puzzle is provided by the beautiful "_Noli me tangere_" of the
+National Gallery, which must necessarily have its place somewhere here
+among the early works. Giorgionesque the picture still is, and most
+markedly so in the character of the beautiful landscape; yet the
+execution shows an altogether unusual freedom and mastery for that
+period. The _Magdalen_ is, appropriately enough, of the same type as the
+exquisite, golden blond courtezans--or, if you will, models--who
+constantly appear and reappear in this period of Venetian art. Hardly
+anywhere has the painter exhibited a more wonderful freedom and subtlety
+of brush than in the figure of the Christ, in which glowing flesh is so
+finely set off by the white of fluttering, half-transparent draperies.
+The canvas has exquisite colour, almost without colours; the only local
+tint of any very defined character being the dark red of the Magdalen's
+robe. Yet a certain affectation, a certain exaggeration of fluttering
+movement and strained attitude repel the beholder a little at first, and
+neutralise for him the rare beauties of the canvas. It is as if a wave
+of some strange transient influence had passed over Titian at this
+moment, then again to be dissipated.
+
+[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot.
+Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by Brogi._]
+
+But to turn now once more to the series of our master's Holy Families
+and Sacred Conversations which began with _La Zingarella_, and was
+continued with the _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ of
+Madrid. The most popular of all those belonging to this still early time
+is the _Virgin with the Cherries_ in the Vienna Gallery. Here the
+painter is already completely himself. He will go much farther in
+breadth if not in polish, in transparency, in forcefulness, if not in
+attractiveness of colour; but he is now, in sacred art at any rate,
+practically free from outside influences. For the pensive girl-Madonna
+of Giorgione we now have the radiant young matron of Titian, joyous yet
+calm in her play with the infant Christ, while the Madonna of his master
+and friend was unrestful and full of tender foreboding even in seeming
+repose. Pretty close on this must have followed the _Madonna and Child
+with St. Stephen, St. Ambrose and St. Maurice_, No 439 in the Louvre, in
+which the rich colour-harmonies strike a somewhat deeper note. An
+atelier repetition of this fine original is No. 166 in the Vienna
+Gallery; the only material variation traceable in this last-named
+example being that in lieu of St. Ambrose, wearing a kind of biretta, we
+have St. Jerome bareheaded.
+
+Very near in time and style to this particular series, with which it may
+safely be grouped, is the beautiful and finely preserved _Holy Family_
+in the Bridgewater Gallery, where it is still erroneously attributed to
+Palma Vecchio. It is to be found in the same private apartment on the
+groundfloor of Bridgewater House, that contains the _Three Ages_. Deep
+glowing richness of colour and smooth perfection without smallness of
+finish make this picture remarkable, notwithstanding its lack of any
+deeper significance. Nor must there be forgotten in an enumeration of
+the early Holy Families, one of the loveliest of all, the _Madonna and
+Child with the infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot_, which adorns the
+Venetian section of the Uffizi Gallery. Here the relationship to
+Giorgione is more clearly shown than in any of these Holy Families of
+the first period, and in so far the painting, which cannot be placed
+very early among them, constitutes a partial exception in the series.
+The Virgin is of a more refined and pensive type than in the _Madonna
+with the Cherries_ of Vienna, or the _Madonna with Saints_, No. 439 in
+the Louvre, and the divine Bambino less robust in build and aspect. The
+magnificent St. Anthony is quite Giorgionesque in the serenity tinged
+with sadness of his contemplative mood.
+
+[Illustration: From a photograph by Braün-Clement & Cie. Virgin and
+Child with Saints.]
+
+Last of all in this particular group--another work in respect of which
+Morelli has played the rescuer--is the _Madonna and Child with four
+Saints_, No. 168 in the Dresden Gallery, a much-injured but eminently
+Titianesque work, which may be said to bring this particular series to
+within a couple of years or so of the _Assunta_--that great landmark of
+the first period of maturity. The type of the Madonna here is still very
+similar to that in the _Madonna with the Cherries_.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the
+Stag. From a Drawing by Titian in the British Museum._]
+
+Apart from all these sacred works, and in every respect an exceptional
+production, is the world-famous _Cristo della Moneta_ of the Dresden
+Gallery. As to the exact date to be assigned to this panel among the
+early works of Titian considerable difficulty exists. For once agreeing
+with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Morelli is inclined to disregard the
+testimony of Vasari, from whose text it would result that it was painted
+in or after the year 1514, and to place it as far back as 1508.
+Notwithstanding this weight of authority the writer is strongly
+inclined, following Vasari in this instance, and trusting to certain
+indications furnished by the picture itself, to return to the date 1514
+or thereabouts. There is no valid reason to doubt that the _Christ of
+the Tribute-Money_ was painted for Alfonso I. of Ferrara, and the less
+so, seeing that it so aptly illustrates the already quoted legend on his
+coins: "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo." According to
+Vasari, it was painted _nella porta d'un armario_--that is to say, in
+the door of a press or wardrobe. But this statement need not be taken in
+its most literal sense. If it were to be assumed from this passage that
+the picture was painted on the spot, its date must be advanced to 1516,
+since Titian did not pay his first visit to Ferrara before that year.
+There is no sufficient ground, however, for assuming that he did not
+execute his wonderful panel in the usual fashion--that is to say, at
+home in Venice. The last finishing touches might, perhaps, have been
+given to it _in situ_, as they were to Bellini's _Bacchanal_, done also
+for the Duke of Ferrara. The extraordinary finish of the painting, which
+is hardly to be paralleled in this respect in the life-work of the
+artist, may have been due to his desire to "show his hand" to his new
+patron in a subject which touched him so nearly. And then the finish is
+not of the Quattrocento type, not such as we find, for instance, in the
+_Leonardo Loredano_ of Giovanni Bellini, the finest panels of Cima, or
+the early _Christ bearing the Cross_ of Giorgione. In it exquisite
+polish of surface and consummate rendering of detail are combined with
+the utmost breadth and majesty of composition, with a now perfect
+freedom in the casting of the draperies. It is difficult, indeed, to
+imagine that this masterpiece--so eminently a work of the Cinquecento,
+and one, too, in which the master of Cadore rose superior to all
+influences, even to that of Giorgione--could have been painted in 1508,
+that is some two years before Bellini's _Baptism of Christ_ in S.
+Corona, and in all probability before the _Three Philosophers_ of
+Giorgione himself. The one of Titian's own early pictures with which it
+appears to the writer to have most in common--not so much in technique,
+indeed, as in general style--is the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and than
+this it is very much less Giorgionesque. To praise the _Cristo della
+Moneta_ anew after it has been so incomparably well praised seems almost
+an impertinence. The soft radiance of the colour so well matches the
+tempered majesty, the infinite mansuetude of the conception; the
+spirituality, which is of the essence of the august subject, is so
+happily expressed, without any sensible diminution of the splendour of
+Renaissance art approaching its highest. And yet nothing could well be
+simpler than the scheme of colour as compared with the complex harmonies
+which Venetian art in a somewhat later phase affected. Frank contrasts
+are established between the tender, glowing flesh of the Christ, seen in
+all the glory of achieved manhood, and the coarse, brown skin of the son
+of the people who appears as the Pharisee; between the bright yet
+tempered red of His robe and the deep blue of His mantle. But the golden
+glow, which is Titian's own, envelops the contrasting figures and the
+contrasting hues in its harmonising atmosphere, and gives unity to the
+whole.[28]
+
+[Illustration: _The "Cristo della Moneta." Dresden Gallery. From a
+Photograph by Hanfstängl._]
+
+A small group of early portraits--all of them somewhat difficult to
+place--call for attention before we proceed. Probably the earliest
+portrait among those as yet recognised as from the hand of our
+painter--leaving out of the question the _Baffo_ and the
+portrait-figures in the great _St. Mark_ of the Salute--is the
+magnificent _Ariosto_ in the Earl of Darnley's Collection at Cobham
+Hall.[29] There is very considerable doubt, to say the least, as to
+whether this half-length really represents the court poet of Ferrara,
+but the point requires more elaborate discussion than can be here
+conceded to it. Thoroughly Giorgionesque is the soberly tinted yet
+sumptuous picture in its general arrangement, as in its general tone,
+and in this respect it is the fitting companion and the descendant of
+Giorgione's _Antonio Broccardo_ at Buda-Pesth, of his _Knight of Malta_
+at the Uffizi. Its resemblance, moreover, is, as regards the general
+lines of the composition, a very striking one to the celebrated Sciarra
+_Violin-Player_ by Sebastiano del Piombo, now in the gallery of Baron
+Alphonse Rothschild at Paris, where it is as heretofore given to
+Raphael.[30] The handsome, manly head has lost both subtlety and
+character through some too severe process of cleaning, but Venetian art
+has hardly anything more magnificent to show than the costume, with the
+quilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin which occupies so prominent a
+place in the picture.
+
+[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery.
+From a Photograph by Hanfstängl_.]
+
+The so-called _Concert_ of the Pitti Palace, which depicts a young
+Augustinian monk as he plays on a keyed instrument, having on one side
+of him a youthful cavalier in a plumed hat, on the other a bareheaded
+clerk holding a bass-viol, was, until Morelli arose, almost universally
+looked upon as one of the most typical Giorgiones.[31] The most gifted
+of the purely aesthetic critics who have approached the Italian
+Renaissance, Walter Pater, actually built round this _Concert_ his
+exquisite study on the School of Giorgione. There can be little doubt,
+notwithstanding, that Morelli was right in denying the authorship of
+Barbarelli, and tentatively, for he does no more, assigning the so
+subtly attractive and pathetic _Concert_ to the early time of Titian. To
+express a definitive opinion on the latter point in the present state of
+the picture would be somewhat hazardous. The portrait of the modish
+young cavalier and that of the staid elderly clerk, whose baldness
+renders tonsure impossible--that is just those portions of the canvas
+which are least well preserved--are also those that least conclusively
+suggest our master. The passion-worn, ultra-sensitive physiognomy of the
+young Augustinian is, undoubtedly, in its very essence a Giorgionesque
+creation, for the fellows of which we must turn to the Castelfranco
+master's just now cited _Antonio Broccardo_, to his male portraits in
+Berlin and at the Uffizi, to his figure of the youthful Pallas, son of
+Evander, in the _Three Philosophers_. Closer to it, all the same, are
+the _Raffo_ and the two portraits in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and
+closer still is the supremely fine _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the Salon
+Carré, that later production of Vecelli's early time. The _Concert_ of
+the Pitti, so far as it can be judged through the retouches that cover
+it, displays an art certainly not finer or more delicate, but yet in its
+technical processes broader, swifter, and more synthetic than anything
+that we can with certainty point to in the life-work of Barbarelli. The
+large but handsome and flexible hands of the player are much nearer in
+type and treatment to Titian than they are to his master. The beautiful
+motive--music for one happy moment uniting by invisible bonds of
+sympathy three human beings--is akin to that in the _Three Ages_, though
+there love steps in as the beautifier of rustic harmony. It is to be
+found also in Giorgione's _Concert Champêtre_, in the Louvre, in which
+the thrumming of the lute is, however, one among many delights appealing
+to the senses. This smouldering heat, this tragic passion in which youth
+revels, looking back already with discontent, yet forward also with
+unquenchable yearning, is the keynote of the Giorgionesque and the early
+Titianesque male portraiture. It is summed up by the _Antonio Broccardo_
+of the first, by the _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the second. Altogether
+other, and less due to a reaction from physical ardour, is the exquisite
+sensitiveness of Lorenzo Lotto, who sees most willingly in his sitters
+those qualities that are in the closest sympathy with his own
+highly-strung nature, and loves to present them as some secret,
+indefinable woe tears at their heart-strings. A strong element of the
+Giorgionesque pathos informs still and gives charm to the Sciarra
+_Violin-Player_ of Sebastiano del Piombo; only that there it is already
+tempered by the haughty self-restraint more proper to Florentine and
+Roman portraiture. There is little or nothing to add after this as to
+the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, except that as a representation of
+aristocratic youth it has hardly a parallel among the master's works
+except, perhaps, a later and equally admirable, though less
+distinguished, portrait in the Pitti.
+
+[Illustration: From a Photograph by Braün Clement & Cie. Walter L.
+Colls. ph. sc.
+
+Jeune Homme au gant]
+
+[Illustration: _A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence.
+From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of the
+Venetians, painted in the _pensieroso_ mood his portraits of high-bred
+English cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest manhood,
+was this particular aspect of youth in its flower again depicted with
+the same felicity.[32]
+
+To Crowe and Cavalcaselle's pages the reader must be referred for a
+detailed and interesting account of Titian's intrigues against the
+venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office of
+broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. We see there how,
+on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo
+proposed to Titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the
+Tenth (Giovanni de' Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such a
+step. Titian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds to
+petition the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker's patent for
+life, on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions as
+are conceded to Giovanni Bellini. The petition is presented on the 31st
+of May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that day moves and carries a
+resolution accepting Titian's offer with all the conditions attached.
+Though he has arrived at the extreme limit of his splendid career, old
+Gian Bellino, who has just given new proof of his still transcendent
+power in the great altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), which
+is in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit still
+under the encroachments of his dangerous competitor, younger than
+himself by half a century. On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Ten
+revokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares that
+Titian is not to receive his broker's patent on the first vacancy, but
+must wait his turn. Seemingly nothing daunted, Titian petitions again,
+asking for the reversion of the particular broker's patent which will
+become vacant on the death of Giovanni Bellini; and this new offer,
+which stipulates for certain special payments and provisions, is
+accepted by the Council. Titian, like most other holders of the
+much-coveted office, shows himself subsequently much more eager to
+receive its not inconsiderable emoluments than to finish the pictures,
+the painting of which is the one essential duty attached to the office.
+Some further bargaining takes place with the Council on the 18th of
+January 1516, but, a few days after the death of Giovanni Bellini at the
+end of November in the same year, fresh resolutions are passed
+postponing the grant to Titian of Bellini's patent; notwithstanding
+which, there is conclusive evidence of a later date to show that he is
+allowed the full enjoyment of his "Senseria in Fontego di Tedeschi"
+(_sic_), with all its privileges and immunities, before the close of
+this same year, 1516.
+
+[Illustration: _Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a
+Photograph by Hanfstängl_.]
+
+It is in this year that Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, and
+entered into relations with Alfonso I., which were to become more
+intimate as the position of the master became greater and more
+universally recognised in Italy. It was here, as we may safely assume,
+that he completed, or, it may be, repaired, Giovanni Bellini's last
+picture, the great _Bacchanal_ or _Feast of the Gods on Earth_, now at
+Alnwick Castle. It is there that he obtained the commission for two
+famous works, the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, designed, in
+continuation of the series commenced with Bellini's _Feast of the Gods_,
+to adorn a favourite apartment in Alfonso's castle of Ferrara; the
+series being completed a little later on by that crown and climax of the
+whole set, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the National Gallery.
+
+Bellini appears in an unfamiliar phase in this final production of his
+magnificent old age, on which the signature, together with the date,
+1514, so carefully noted by Vasari, is still most distinctly to be read.
+Much less Giorgionesque--if the term be in this case permissible--and
+more Quattrocentist in style than in the immediately preceding
+altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, he is here hardly less
+interesting. All admirers of his art are familiar with the four
+beautiful _Allegories_ of the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Venice,
+which constitute, besides the present picture, almost his sole excursion
+into the regions of pagan mythology and symbolism. These belong,
+however, to a considerably earlier period of his maturity, and show a
+fire which in the _Bacchanal_ has died out.[33] Vasari describes this
+_Bacchanal_ as "one of the most beautiful works ever executed by Gian
+Bellino," and goes on to remark that it has in the draperies "a certain
+angular (or cutting) quality in accordance with the German style." He
+strangely attributes this to an imitation of Dürer's _Rosenkranzfest_,
+painted some eight years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo,
+adjacent to the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. This particularity, noted by the
+author of the _Vite_, and, in some passages, a certain hardness and
+opacity of colour, give rise to the surmise that, even in the parts of
+the picture which belong to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti may be
+traced. It was he who most probably painted the background and the
+figure of St. Jerome in the master's altar-piece finished in the
+preceding year for S. Giovanni Crisostomo; it was he, too, who to a
+great extent executed, though he cannot have wholly devised, the
+Bellinesque _Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints_ in the Church of San
+Pietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period. Even in
+the _Madonna_ of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian Bellino's
+finest landscape of the late time, certain hardnesses of colour in the
+main group suggest the possibility of a minor co-operation by Basaiti.
+Some passages of the _Bacchanal_, however--especially the figures of the
+two blond, fair-breasted goddesses or nymphs who, in a break in the
+trees, stand relieved against the yellow bands of a sunset sky--are as
+beautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase has
+produced up to the date of the picture's appearance. Very suggestive of
+Bellini is the way in which the hair of some of the personages is
+dressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced by
+artificial means. These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in his
+earliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid.
+Still this coiffure--for as such it must be designated--is to be found
+more or less throughout the master's career. It is very noticeable in
+the _Allegories_ just mentioned.
+
+[Illustration: _Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a
+Photograph by Spooner & Co._]
+
+Infinitely pathetic is the old master's vain attempt to infuse into the
+chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires. An
+atmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously betraying
+life-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like fire
+through the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and Titian. The
+audacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rustic
+festival, in which the gods unbend and, after the homelier fashion of
+mortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, it
+would seem, only _pour la forme_. A careful examination of the picture
+substantially confirms Vasari's story that the _Feast of the Gods_ was
+painted upon by Titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in many
+passages a Titianesque hand. It may well be, at the same time, that
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what the
+younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the
+elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left
+unfinished by him. The whole conception, the _charpente_, the contours
+of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are the
+carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the
+branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of the
+picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground with
+its small pebbles.[34] Even the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a
+castle sunset-lit--so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and
+its castle--is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution. By
+Titian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that might be taken to
+betray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, the
+cloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, the
+upper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to the
+right. If it is Titian that we have here, as certainly appears most
+probable, he cannot be deemed to have exerted his full powers in
+completing or developing the Bellinesque landscape. The task may well,
+indeed, have presented itself to him as an uninviting one. There is
+nothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the
+exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacred
+and Profane Love_, while the broader handling suggests rather the
+technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which
+opens out in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The "Worship of Venus" and "Bacchanal" Place in Art of the
+"Assunta"--The "Bacchus and Ariadne"--So-called Portraits of Alfonso of
+Ferrara and Laura Dianti--The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia--Altar-pieces
+at Ancona and in the Vatican--The "Entombment" of the Louvre--The
+"Madonna di Casa Pesaro"--Place among Titian's works of "St. Peter
+Martyr."
+
+
+In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosto
+brought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_.[35] A
+greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters
+been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's career,
+when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being
+as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that
+in the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, we
+have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who
+infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian
+Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in
+their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very
+pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process
+of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from a
+broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and
+unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation
+to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous
+eccentricity.
+
+[Illustration: _The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a
+Photograph by Braun, Clément, & Cie_.]
+
+In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behind
+already the fresh morning of Titian's genius, represented by the
+Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its
+bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some
+evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more
+delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_
+might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of
+Venus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, a
+renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman
+Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the
+Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of
+paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but
+by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the
+author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the
+Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named
+the "Townley Venus" and the "Vénus d'Arles"--myriads of Loves sport,
+kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them
+shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer
+is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the
+life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the
+splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner)
+dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of the
+angelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the
+Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly
+beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North,
+in touch with the South, as Albrecht Dürer, Mabuse, and Jacob
+Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred
+works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier
+and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To
+say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish
+sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at
+their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in
+similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.[37]
+
+The sumptuous _Bacchanal_, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave the
+commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a less
+delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From
+certain points of analogy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus,
+it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation of
+the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus,
+whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus is,
+however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honour
+to the god, Ariadne's new lover. The revel in a certain audacious
+abandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists have
+retired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certain
+agreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of the
+Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic statues
+then, and until lately, entitled _The Sleeping Ariadne_, does not lead
+the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so
+lately won back from despair. The undraped figure,[38] both in its
+attitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped
+Bacchante, or goddess, in Bellini's _Bacchanal_ at Alnwick. Titian's
+lovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio's
+dazzling _Antiope_ in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's _Venus_ or
+Titian's own _Antiope_, in which a certain feminine dignity
+spiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise
+defenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively Titianesque
+colour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbed
+dancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to the
+spectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we find
+again in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture,
+and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the _Entombment_.
+
+The charming little _Tambourine Player_, which is No. 181 in the Vienna
+Gallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works just
+now described, but rather before than after them.
+
+What that is new remains to be said about the _Assunta_, or _Assumption
+of the Virgin_, which was ordered of Titian as early as 1516, but not
+shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until the
+20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetian
+altar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had and
+what had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the world.
+Thus Raphael had produced the _Stanze_, the _Cartoons_, the _Madonnas of
+Foligno_ and _San Sisto_, but not yet the _Transfiguration;_
+Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his _magnum opus_, the
+Ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four years
+earlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata in
+Florence. Among painters whom, origin notwithstanding, we must group as
+Venetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri at
+S. Maria Formosa his famous _Santa Barbara_; Lorenzo Lotto in the
+following year had produced his characteristic and, in its charm of
+fluttering movement, strangely unconventional altar-piece for S.
+Bartolommeo at Bergamo, the _Madonna with Ten Saints_. In none of these
+masterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen by
+Titian, which was far from being the case, was there any help to be
+derived in the elaboration of a work which cannot be said to have had
+any precursor in the art of Venice. There was in existence one
+altar-piece dealing with the same subject from which Titian might
+possibly have obtained a hint. This was the _Assumption of the Virgin_
+painted by Dürer in 1509 for Jacob Heller, and now only known by Paul
+Juvenel's copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort. The group of the
+Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and
+the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its
+fine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art. Without exercising a
+too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact
+between this group and the corresponding one in the _Assunta_. But
+Titian could not at that time have seen the original of the Heller
+altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it
+remained for a century.[39] He no doubt did see the _Assumption_ in the
+_Marienleben_ completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands in a
+definite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more
+formal--much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The
+_Assunta_ was already in Vasari's time much dimmed, and thus difficult
+to see in its position on the high altar. Joshua Reynolds, when he
+visited the Frari in 1752, says that "he saw it near; it was most
+terribly dark but nobly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle Belle
+Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, but sufficiently
+restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the
+greatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre,
+passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well
+adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly
+contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is
+triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and
+awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of
+which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the
+Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling
+of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with
+awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in
+her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and
+not without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which
+her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the
+climax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous,
+more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure
+in the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual
+character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.
+
+[Illustration: _The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice_.]
+
+Placed as the _Assunta_ now is in the immediate neighbourhood of one of
+Tintoretto's best-preserved masterpieces, the _Miracolo del Schiavo_, it
+undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern
+connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely
+triumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual,
+more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that
+unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its
+agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right
+to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his
+subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above
+the earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, in
+unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in
+poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian
+stands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it were
+necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the
+life-work of the other--making the world the poorer by the loss of
+Titian or Tintoretto--can it be doubted for a moment what the choice
+would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face
+with the mighty genius of the latter?
+
+But to return for a moment to the _Assunta_. The enlargement of
+dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group
+of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It
+carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable,
+without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime
+beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank
+with the finest of those in Raphael's _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in a
+higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of
+vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is
+the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not
+always the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhere
+adhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overrated
+last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. Titian himself
+in the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia, and above all in the much-vaunted
+masterpiece, _The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_, sins in the
+same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his
+better self.
+
+Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, and
+only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possession
+of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.[40]
+What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer
+opposition at the outset. In this case the public, admitted on the high
+festival of St. Bernardino's Day in the year 1518 to see the vast panel,
+showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than
+the friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de' Frari,
+and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology to
+the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against
+the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian's wonderful
+achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.
+
+To the year 1519 belongs the _Annunciation_ in the Cathedral of Treviso,
+the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly
+overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits
+the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the
+foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely
+ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the
+beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to
+the Florentines and the Sienese--both sculptors and painters--south of
+the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of
+the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in the
+Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto's pathetic
+_Annunciation_ at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appear
+dignified by comparison. Titian's own _Annunciation_, bequeathed to the
+Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up
+on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and
+appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better
+known picture.
+
+[Illustration: _The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a
+Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso's Duchess,--the
+passive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character
+has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,--our
+master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we
+are told, the finished _Bacchanal_, already described above. He appears
+to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early part
+of 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed at
+Ferrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our _Bacchus and
+Ariadne_, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture too
+late in the earlier section of Vecelli's work, though, with all its
+freshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a further
+advance on the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, and must be
+deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the _Feast of the Gods_
+of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of Titian already described
+our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time has
+not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of the
+golden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the
+_Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ the allegiance to Giorgiono has
+been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the naïveté remains, but not the
+infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the _Bacchus and
+Ariadne_ Titian's genius flames up with an intensity of passion such as
+will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of
+this class. Certainly, with all the beauties of the _Venuses_, of the
+_Diana and Actaeon_, the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, we
+descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance,
+though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its
+power to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the
+_Venere del Pardo_ of the Louvre and the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna,
+is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier
+times, with its exquisite naïveté and mitigated sensuousness.
+
+[Illustration: _Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph
+published by the Autotype Company._]
+
+The _Bacchus and Ariadne_ is a Titian which even the Louvre, the Museum
+of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in our master's
+works, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most
+readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are interested
+in Italian art. This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or
+subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose
+_Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ he followed with a closeness which did
+not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of
+the subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that had
+animated the original. How is it possible to better express the _At
+parte ex aliâ florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoque
+incensus amore_ of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager
+movement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian? Or to
+paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines: _Horum pars
+tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra
+iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant_? Ariadne's crown of
+stars--the _Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona_ of the
+poem--shines in Titian's sky with a sublime radiance which corresponds
+perfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, of
+Catullus. The splendour of the colour in this piece--hardly equalled in
+its happy audacity, save by the _Madonna del Coniglio_ or _Vierge au
+Lapin_ of the Louvre,[41] would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, did
+the prescribed limits of space admit of such an indulgence. Even here,
+however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the delights
+of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his
+imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic
+harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the
+sake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those
+Veronese transformed into Venetians--Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari;
+or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the
+more violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the
+mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With Titian the
+highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment,
+are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in
+the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be
+considered the supreme exponent.
+
+The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carré of the Louvre now known as
+_Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti_, but in the collection of
+Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, _Titian's
+Mistress after the Life_, comes in very well at this stage. The
+exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound
+hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities
+inspired by Giorgione--the loveliest of all in some respects, the most
+consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still
+to the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue,
+myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole
+enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here
+and there with gleams of light. Vasari described how Titian painted,
+_ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d' artiglieria_, the
+Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who
+afterwards became the wife of the duke, _che è opera stupenda_. It is
+upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between
+the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid
+_donna_ and the _Alfonso of Ferrara_ of the Museo del Prado, that the
+popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably,
+like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a
+lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, the
+accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,[42] comes forward
+with convincing arguments to show that the handsome _insouciant_
+personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in Titian's
+picture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has hitherto been almost
+universally assumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be his
+son, Ercole II. This alone invalidates the favourite designation of the
+Louvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the
+"stupendous" portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari. A
+comparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_
+of Castle Howard--a famous portrait by Titian of a gentleman holding a
+hawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at the
+recent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery--results in something like
+certainty that in both is the same personage portrayed. It is not only
+that the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are the
+same in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree exceedingly
+well; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same impression
+of splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused. This
+means that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the gracious
+Ercole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the Castle
+Howard picture is Alfonso's son and successor portrayed. In the latter
+canvas, which bears, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the later
+signature "Titianus F.," the personage is, it may be, a year or two
+older. Let it be borne in mind that only on the _back_ of the canvas is,
+or rather was, to be found the inscription: "Georgius Cornelius, frater
+Catterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (_sic_)," upon the authority of
+which it bears its present designation.
+
+The altar-piece, _The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St.
+Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor_, now in San Domenico, but formerly in
+San Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature "Titianus
+Cadorinus pinsit," this being about the first instance in which the
+later spelling "Titianus" appears. If as a pictorial achievement it
+cannot rank with the San Niccolò and the Pesaro altar-pieces, it
+presents some special points of interest which make it easily
+distinguishable from these. The conception is marked by a peculiar
+intensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, and
+hardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type. It reveals a
+passionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which one
+expects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in Titian, whose dramatic
+force is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well under
+control. The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter was
+acquainted with Raphael's _Madonna di Foligno_; but it is dramatic and
+real where the Urbinate's masterpiece was lofty and symbolical. Still
+Titian's St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in steadfastness
+and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the
+humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento
+altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a
+master of the full Renaissance. An improved version of the upper portion
+of the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in the
+clouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccolò altar-piece.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS.
+Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the Papal
+Legate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Church
+of SS. Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style and
+sentiment. The _St. Sebastian_ presently to be referred to, constituting
+the right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,[43]
+and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent of
+Duke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure the
+much-talked-of piece for his master. Titian succumbed to an offer of
+sixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first nor
+the last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side of
+his character. But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemy
+of the Legate, drew back and left to Titian the discredit without the
+profit of the transaction. The central compartment of the Brescia
+altar-piece presents _The Resurrection_, the upper panels on the left
+and right show together the _Annunciation_, the lower left panel depicts
+the patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor,
+Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous _St. Sebastian_[44] in
+the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch.
+The _St. Sebastian_ is neither more nor less than the magnificent
+academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to
+bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his
+splendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in the
+beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting
+the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide gulf indeed separates the
+mood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposeful
+charm of the Giorgionesque saint in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, or the
+healthy realism of the unconcerned _St. Sebastian_ in the S. Niccolò
+altar-piece. Here, as later on with the _St. Peter Martyr_, those who
+admire in Venetian art in general, and in that of Titian in particular,
+its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature,
+must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by a
+conception in its very essence artificial. Yet, brought face to face
+with the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, and
+against their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth and
+richness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling and
+painting.[45] Analogies have been drawn between the _Medicean Faun_ and
+the _St. Sebastian_, chiefly on account of the strained position of
+the arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue and
+the painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance,
+notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laocoon
+in the world-famous group of the Vatican. Of this a model had been made
+by Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast was
+kept in Titian's workshop, from which he is said to have studied.
+
+[Illustration: DESIGN FOR A HOLY FAMILY. CHATSWORTH. _From a photograph
+by Braun, Clément & Cie_.]
+
+[Illustration: _La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by
+Neurdein._]
+
+In the _Madonna di S. Niccolò_, which was painted or rather finished in
+the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccolò de'
+Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is
+suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not extravagance
+of technique. The composition must have had much greater unity before
+the barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of the
+circular top which it had in common with the _Assunta_, the Ancona, and
+the Pesaro altar-pieces. Technically superior to the second of these
+great works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action and
+sentiment, by no such passionate identification of the artist with his
+subject. It is only in passing from one of its beauties to another that
+its artistic worth can be fully appreciated. Then we admire the rapt
+expression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the _St.
+Nicholas_,[46] the mansuetude of the _St. Francis_, the Venetian
+loveliness of the _St. Catherine_, the palpitating life of the _St.
+Sebastian_. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump
+young gondolier stripped and painted as he was--contemplating, if
+anything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, _ritratto
+dal' vivo e senza artificio niuno_. The royal saint of Alexandria is a
+sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning
+elaboration of coiffure, to the _St. Catherine_ of the _Madonna del
+Coniglio_, and the not dissimilar figure in our own _Holy Family with
+St. Catherine_ at the National Gallery.
+
+The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with the
+infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in the
+Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge's private apartments to the Senate
+Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as we
+know, Titian's first performance as a _frescante_ since the completion,
+twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of Padua.
+As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and
+brilliant in colour for a fresco, very fairly preserved--deserving, in
+fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, the
+rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the subject
+is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of
+personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly
+transforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is
+greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened
+with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.
+Even the colossal, half-effaced _St. Christopher with the Infant
+Christ_, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the Town
+Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the
+Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the
+_Entombment_ of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other than
+altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded
+which belongs to the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ among purely secular
+subjects? It was in 1523 that Titian acquired a new and illustrious
+patron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son of
+that most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d'Este
+Gonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara. The _Entombment_ being a
+"Mantua piece,"[47] Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally assumed
+that it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as some
+correspondence published by them goes to show, it must have been painted
+at, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523. Judging entirely by the
+style and technical execution of the canvas itself, the writer feels
+strongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years or
+thereabouts--that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closely
+following upon that in which the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_
+were painted. Mature as Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for the
+last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were
+saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type
+and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea
+has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the _Assunta_,
+the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such
+as we meet with in the _Bacchanal_. The Magdalen, with her features
+distorted by grief, resembles--allowing for the necessary differences
+imposed by the situation--the women making offering to the love-goddess
+in the _Worship of Venus_. The figure of the Virgin, on the other hand,
+enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a type
+which would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and his
+school. To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the
+_Entombment_, without by dissection killing it, is a task of difficulty.
+What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye and
+enthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, is
+perhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, of
+informing sentiment. Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection of
+the two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace--the
+well-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to accentuate
+the mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, bound
+together by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from them
+communicates itself, as it were, to the beholder. In the colouring,
+while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a whole,
+each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily asserting, its own
+splendour and its own special significance. And yet the yellow of the
+Magdalen's dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier the
+embrowned flesh of sturdy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson of
+Nicodemus's garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling white
+of the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of the
+Virgin's robe, combine less to produce the impression of great pictorial
+magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous
+tragedy.
+
+Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge's
+chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about
+the altar,[48] with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the
+kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the
+altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.
+
+[Illustration: _The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de'
+Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya_.]
+
+The _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, which Titian finished in 1526, after
+having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the
+masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of
+exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at the
+Frari, the _Assunta_. For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pomp
+and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite
+sufficient _vraisemblance_, of divine and sacred with real personages,
+it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its class. And yet,
+apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties
+overcome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole,
+many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than we
+should care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a more
+splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand.
+It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and less
+interesting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virgin
+and Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by an
+invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed
+crowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's
+_Castelfranco Madonna_, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud in
+their humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of
+Paphos (Baffo), at their head. The natural tie that should unite the
+sacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power to
+impress, is thus greatly diminished, and we are dangerously near to a
+condition in which they become merely grand conventional figures in a
+decorative ensemble of the higher order. To analyse the general scheme
+or the details of the glorious colour-harmony, which has survived so
+many drastic renovations and cleanings, is not possible on this
+occasion, or indeed necessary. The magic of bold and subtle chiaroscuro
+is obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two gigantic
+pillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in the
+main, but illuminated above and below by the light emanating from the
+divine putti; the boldest feature in the scheme is the striking
+cinnamon-yellow mantle of St. Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, the
+two boldly contrasting with the magnificent dark-red and gold banner of
+the Borgias crowned with the olive branch Peace.[49] This is an
+unexpected note of the most stimulating effect, which braces the
+spectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness. Thus, too, Titian
+went to work in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_--giving forth a single clarion
+note in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos. The writer
+is unable to accept as from the master's own hand the unfinished _Virgin
+and Child_ which, at the Uffizi, generally passes for the preliminary
+sketch of the central group in the Pesaro altar-piece. The original
+sketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in the
+Albertina at Vienna. The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds a
+like original study for the kneeling Baffo.
+
+[Illustration: SKETCH FOR THE MADONNA DI CASA PESARO. ALBERTINA, VIENNA.
+_From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Cie_.]
+
+[Illustration: Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving
+by Henri Laurent.]
+
+By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the placing
+of Titian's world-renowned _Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_ on the
+altar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one of
+the most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity. On
+the 16th of August 1867--one of the blackest of days in the calendar for
+the lover of Venetian art--the _St. Peter Martyr_ was burnt in the
+Cappella del Rosario of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of
+Giovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the _Virgin and Child with
+Saints and Angels_, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had caused
+the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during
+the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Now
+the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their
+estimate of the _St. Peter Martyr_ from the numerous existing copies and
+prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the
+picture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impression
+may, under the circumstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well be
+more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist by
+a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has
+conceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had the
+good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the
+marvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselle
+minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by
+the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape,
+in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance
+falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above--with its single
+startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore,
+with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the
+composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing,
+notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the
+overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and
+unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its
+Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing
+influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months
+at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who,
+returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had
+remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the
+exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of
+passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it
+culminated in the _Transfiguration_? All through the wonderful career of
+the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entombment_, and going on
+through the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency to
+consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a
+pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Much
+less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the _Stanze_
+and the _Cartoons_, in which true dramatic significance and the
+sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The
+_Transfiguration_ itself is, however, the most crying example of the
+reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In it
+are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if we
+take them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two
+failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same frame.
+Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here
+stifled. In the _St. Peter Martyr_ the tremendous figure of the
+attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all
+fluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based on
+nothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied
+attitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In the
+same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in
+the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and
+conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for
+the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all
+the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the _dramatis personae_
+of the gruesome scene--extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense
+effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that
+can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must
+ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come face
+to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the _St.
+Sebastian_ of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the magic
+of the painter _par excellence_ would assert itself. Very curiously it
+is not any more less contemporary copy--least of all that by Ludovico
+Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo--that gives this impression that Titian in the original
+would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work. The
+best notion of the _St. Peter Martyr_ is, so far as the writer is aware,
+to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which
+hangs in the great hall of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Even
+through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties, especially
+in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without
+further carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and, criticism
+notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who,
+perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower
+rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be
+discovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la più compiuta, la
+più celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, la
+quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor mai_.
+
+[Illustration: _Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a
+Photograph by Anderson_.]
+
+It was after a public competition between Titian, Palma, and Pordenone,
+instituted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the great
+commission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at the
+end of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. Of
+Pordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finished
+drawing of the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_ in the Uffizi, which is either
+by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any
+rate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem in
+some respects, as compared with Titian's astonishing performance, it
+represents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime in
+its gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitely
+touching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, still
+asserts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to be
+preliminary sketches for the _St. Peter Martyr_ are: a pen-and-ink
+sketch in the Louvre showing the assassin chasing the companion of the
+victim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at the
+saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet
+thumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actual
+massacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is the
+drawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives the
+impression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by Titian
+for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, _A Nobleman murdering his Wife_,
+which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the École des Beaux-Arts
+of Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writer
+feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of Titian
+himself.[50]
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's Bilder zu
+Römischen Heldengedichten" (_Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen
+Kunstsammlungen_: Sechzehnter Band, I. Heft) has most ingeniously, and
+upon what may be deemed solid grounds, renamed this most Giorgionesque
+of all Giorgiones after an incident in the _Thebaid_ of Statius,
+_Adrastus and Hypsipyle_. He gives reasons which may be accepted as
+convincing for entitling the _Three Philosophers_, after a familiar
+incident in Book viii. of the _Aeneid_, "Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas
+contemplating the Rock of the Capitol." His not less ingenious
+explanation of Titian's _Sacred and Profane Love_ will be dealt with a
+little later on. These identifications are all-important, not only in
+connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first
+time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of
+Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of
+the Venetian idyll generally.
+
+[2] For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto's portraits and a
+sustained analysis of his art generally, Mr. Bernard Berenson's _Lorenzo
+Lotto_ should be consulted. See also M. Emile Michel's article, "Les
+Portraits de Lorenzo Lotto," in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, 1896, vol.
+i.
+
+[3] For these and other particulars of the childhood of Titian, see
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate _Life and Times of Titian_ (second
+edition, 1881), in which are carefully summarised all the general and
+local authorities on the subject.
+
+[4] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 29.
+
+[5] _Die Galerien zu München und Dresden_, p. 75.
+
+[6] Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian school of
+art than as a Venetian painter of the late time) expressly states that
+Palma came young to Venice and learnt much from Titan: "_C' egli apprese
+certa dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere prime dello stesso
+Tiziano_" (Lermolieff: _Die Galerien zu München und Dresden_).
+
+[7] Vasari, _Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco_.
+
+[8] One of these is a description of wedding festivities presided over
+by the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other guests from the
+capital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and three ladies. This
+gentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell upon, and embroider
+in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the love of man for woman.
+A subject this which, transposed into an atmosphere at once more frankly
+sensuous and of a higher spirituality, might well have served as the
+basis for such a picture as Giorgione's _Fête Champêtre_ in the Salon
+Carré of the Louvre!
+
+[9] _Magazine of Art_, July 1895.
+
+[10] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 111.
+
+[11] Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects, taken
+after his execution, as _Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo (Borgia) his
+son_.
+
+[12] _La Vie et l'Oeuvre du Titien_, 1887.
+
+[13] The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the picture,
+"Ritratto di uno di Casa Pesaro in Venetia che fu fatto generale di Sta
+chiesa. Titiano fecit," is unquestionably of much later date than the
+work itself. The cartellino is entirely out of perspective with the
+marble floor to which it is supposed to adhere. The part of the
+background showing the galleys of Pesaro's fleet is so coarsely
+repainted that the original touch cannot be distinguished. The form
+"Titiano" is not to be found in any authentic picture by Vecelli.
+"Ticianus," and much more rarely "Tician," are the forms for the earlier
+time; "Titianus" is, as a rule, that of the later time. The two forms
+overlap in certain instances to be presently mentioned.
+
+[14] Kugler's _Italian Schools of Painting_, re-edited by Sir Henry
+Layard.
+
+[15] Marcantonio Michiel, who saw this _Baptism_ in the year 1531 in the
+house of M. Zuanne Ram at S. Stefano in Venice, thus describes it: "La
+tavola del S. Zuane che battezza Cristo nel Giordano, che è nel fiume
+insino alle ginocchia, con el bel paese, ed esso M. Zuanne Ram ritratto
+sino al cinto, e con la schena contro li spettatori, fu de man de
+Tiziano" (_Notizia d' Opere di Disegno_, pubblicata da J. Jacopo
+Morelli, Ed. Frizzoni, 1884).
+
+[16] This picture having been brought to completion in 1510, and Cima's
+great altar-piece with the same subject, behind the high-altar in the
+Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being dated 1494, the
+inference is irresistible that in this case the head of the school
+borrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has always been
+looked upon as one of his close followers. In size, in distribution, in
+the arrangement and characterisation of the chief groups, the two
+altar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a merely accidental
+and family resemblance must be dismissed. This type of Christ, then, of
+a perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness tempering majesty, dates
+back, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred type of the elder
+master is more passionate, more human. Our own _Incredulity of St.
+Thomas_, by Cima, in the National Gallery, shows, in a much more
+perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the beautiful
+_Man of Sorrows_ in the same collection, still nominally ascribed to
+Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any rate from that
+of an artist dominated by his influence. When the life-work of the
+Conegliano master has been more closely studied in connection with that
+of his contemporaries, it will probably appear that he owes very much
+less to Bellini than it has been the fashion to assume. The idea of an
+actual subordinate co-operation with the _caposcuola_, like that of
+Bissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so many others, must be excluded. The
+earlier and more masculine work of Cima bears a definite relation to
+that of Bartolommeo Montagna.
+
+[17] The _Tobias and the Angel_ shows some curious points of contact
+with the large _Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John_ by
+Titian, in the Louvre--a work which is far from equalling the S.
+Marciliano picture throughout in quality. The beautiful head of the St.
+Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John,
+though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type and
+movement of the head. There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice a
+kind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano Titian,
+assigned by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini to
+Santo Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432). Here the adapter
+has ruined Titian's great conception by substituting his own trivial
+archangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copy
+of this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich). A reproduction of
+the Titian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of the
+present monograph (p. 99).
+
+[18] Vasari places the _Three Ages_ after the first visit to Ferrara,
+that is almost as much too late as he places the _Tobias_ of S.
+Marciliano too early. He describes its subject as "un pastore ignudo ed
+una forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni."
+
+[19] From an often-cited passage in the _Anonimo_, describing
+Giorgione's great _Venus_ now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year 1525,
+when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn that
+it was finished by Titian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda,
+che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo da
+Castelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." The
+Cupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but the
+landscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance to
+those which enframe the figures in the _Three Ages, Sacred and Profane
+Love_, and the "_Noli me tangere_" of the National Gallery. The same
+_Anonimo_ in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice a
+_Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, from the hand of Giorgone, which,
+according to him, had been retouched by Titian. It need hardly be
+pointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing in
+common with the coarse and thoroughly second-rate _Dead Christ supported
+by Child-Angels,_ still to be seen at the Monte di Pietà of Treviso. The
+engraving of a _Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, reproduced in M.
+Lafenestre's _Vie et Oeuvre du Titien_ as having possibly been derived
+from Giorgione's original, is about as unlike his work or that of Titian
+as anything in sixteenth-century Italian art could possibly be. In the
+extravagance of its mannerism it comes much nearer to the late style of
+Pordenone or to that of his imitators.
+
+[20] _Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen_, Heft I. 1895.
+
+[21] See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the _Notizia d' Opere
+di Disegno_, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione Frizzoni, 1884.
+
+[22] M. Thausing, _Wiener Kunstbriefe_, 1884.
+
+[23] _Le Meraviglie dell' Arte_.
+
+[24] The original drawing by Titian for the subject of this fresco is to
+be found among those publicly exhibited at the École des Beaux Arts of
+Paris. It is in error given by Morelli as in the Malcolm Collection, and
+curiously enough M. Georges Lafenestre repeats this error in his _Vie et
+Oeuvre du Titien._ The drawing differs so essentially from the fresco
+that it can only be considered as a discarded design for it. It is in
+the style which Domenico Campagnola, in his Giorgionesque-Titianesque
+phase, so assiduously imitates.
+
+[25] One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of Titian
+is to speak of the _St. Mark_ as "una piccola tavoletta, un S. Marco a
+sedere in mezzo a certi santi."
+
+[26] In connection with this group of works, all of them belonging to
+the quite early years of the sixteenth century, there should also be
+mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet little known
+_Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist_ by Sebastiano Luciani,
+bearing the date 1510. This has recently passed into the rich collection
+of Mr. George Salting. It shows the painter admirably in his purely
+Giorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing witness that it was
+painted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco master. It groups
+therefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at S. Giovanni
+Crisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook's injured but still lovely
+_Venetian Lady as the Magdalen_ (the same ruddy blond model), and with
+the four Giorgionesque _Saints_ in the Church of S. Bartolommeo al
+Rialto.
+
+[27] _Die Galerien zu München und Dresden_, p. 74.
+
+[28] The _Christ_ of the Pitti Gallery--a bust-figure of the Saviour,
+relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most solemn
+beauty--must date a good many years after the _Cristo della Moneta_. In
+both works the beauty of the hand is especially remarkable. The head of
+the Pitti _Christ_ in its present state might not conclusively proclaim
+its origin; but the pathetic and intensely significant landscape is one
+of Titian's loveliest.
+
+[29] Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the Royal
+Academy in 1895.
+
+[30] An ingenious suggestion was made, when the _Ariosto_ was last
+publicly exhibited, that it might be that _Portrait of a Gentleman of
+the House of Barbarigo_ which, according to Vasari, Titian painted with
+wonderful skill at the age of eighteen. The broad, masterly technique of
+the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with Vasari's
+description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no boy of
+eighteen, not even Titian, could have attained. And then Vasari's
+"giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-grey
+sleeve of this _Ariosto_, but surely a vest of satin embroidered with
+silver. The late form of signature, "Titianus F.," on the stone
+balustrade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of the
+portrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition. It seems
+likely that the balustrade bore originally only the "V" repeated, which
+curiously enough occurs also on the similar balustrade of the beautiful
+_Portrait of a young Venetian_, by Giorgione, first cited as such by
+Morelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it passed from the
+collection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P. Richter. The signature "Ticianus"
+occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the first
+period. The works in the earlier half of this first period do not appear
+to have been signed, the "Titiano F." of the _Baffo_ inscription being
+admittedly of later date. Thus that the _Cristo della Moneta_ bears the
+"Ticianus F." on the collar of the Pharisee's shirt is an additional
+argument in favour of maintaining its date as originally given by Vasari
+(1514), instead of putting it back to 1508 or thereabouts. Among a good
+many other paintings with this last signature may be mentioned the
+_Jeune Homme au Gant_ and _Vierge au Lapin_ of the Louvre; the _Madonna
+with St. Anthony Abbot_ of the Uffizi; the _Bacchus and Ariadne_, the
+_Assunta_, the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia (dated 1522). The _Virgin and
+Child with St. Catherine_ of the National Gallery, and the _Christ with
+the Pilgrims at Emmaus_ of the Louvre--neither of them early works--are
+signed "Tician." The usual signature of the later time is "Titianus F.,"
+among the first works to show it being the Ancona altar-piece and the
+great _Madonna di San Niccolò_ now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican. It
+has been incorrectly stated that the late _St. Jerome_ of the Brera
+bears the earlier signature, "Ticianus F." This is not the case. The
+signature is most distinctly "Titianus," though in a somewhat unusual
+character.
+
+[31] Crowe and Cavalcaselle describe it as a "picture which has not its
+equal in any period of Giorgione's practice" (_History of Painting in
+North Italy_, vol. ii.).
+
+[32] Among other notable portraits belonging to this early period, but
+to which within it the writer hesitates to assign an exact place, are
+the so-called _Titian's Physician Parma_, No. 167 in the Vienna Gallery;
+the first-rate _Portrait of a Young Man_ (once falsely named _Pietro
+Aretino_), No. 1111 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich; the so-called
+_Alessandro de' Medici_ in the Hampton Court Gallery. The last-named
+portrait is a work injured, no doubt, but of extraordinary force and
+conciseness in the painting, and of no less singular power in the
+characterisation of a sinister personage whose true name has not yet
+been discovered.
+
+[33] The fifth _Allegory_, representing a sphinx or chimaera--now framed
+with the rest as the centre of an ensemble--is from another and far
+inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called
+_Venus_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding the
+signature of Bellini and the date (MDXV.), by Bissolo.
+
+[34] In Bellini's share in the landscape there is not a little to remind
+the beholder of the _Death of St. Peter Martyr_ to be found in the
+Venetian room of the National Gallery, where it is still assigned to the
+great master himself, though it is beyond reasonable doubt by one of his
+late pupils or followers.
+
+[35] The enlarged second edition, with the profile portrait of Ariosto
+by Titian, did not appear until 1532. Among the additions then made were
+the often-quoted lines in which the poet, enumerating the greatest
+painters of the time, couples Titian with Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna,
+Gian Bellino, the two Dossi, Michelangelo, Sebastiano, and Raffael (33rd
+canto, 2nd ed.).
+
+[36] [Greek: Philostratou Eikonon Erotes.]
+
+[37] Let the reader, among other things of the kind, refer to Rubens's
+_Jardin à Amour_, made familiar by so many repetitions and
+reproductions, and to Van Dyck's _Madone aux Perdrix_ at the Hermitage
+(see Portfolio: _The Collections of Charles I._). Rubens copied, indeed,
+both the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, some time between 1601
+and 1608, when the pictures were at Rome. These copies are now in the
+Museum at Stockholm. The realistic vigour of the _Bacchanal_ proved
+particularly attractive to the Antwerp master, and he in more than one
+instance derived inspiration from it. The ultra-realistic _Bacchus
+seated on a Barrel_, in the Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg,
+contains in the chief figure a pronounced reminiscence of Titian's
+picture; while the unconventional attitude of the amorino, or Bacchic
+figure, in attendance on the god, is imitated without alteration from
+that of the little toper whose action Vasari so explicitly describes.
+
+[38] Vasari's simple description is best: "Una donna nuda che dorme,
+tanto bella che pare viva, insieme con altre figure."
+
+[39] Moritz Thausing's _Albrecht Dürer_, Zweiter Band, p. 14.
+
+[40] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 212.
+
+[41] It appears to the writer that this masterpiece of colour and
+reposeful charm, with its wonderful gleams of orange, pale turquoise,
+red, blue, and golden white, with its early signature, "Ticianus F.,"
+should be placed not later than this period. Crowe and Cavalcaselle
+assign it to the year 1530, and hold it to be the _Madonna with St.
+Catherine_, mentioned in a letter of that year written by Giacomo
+Malatesta to Federigo Gonzaga at Mantua. Should not this last picture be
+more properly identified with our own superb _Madonna and Child with St.
+John and St. Catherine_, No. 635 in the National Gallery, the style of
+which, notwithstanding the rather Giorgionesque type of the girlish
+Virgin, shows further advance in a more sweeping breadth and a larger
+generalisation? The latter, as has already been noted, is signed
+"Tician."
+
+[42] "Tizian und Alfons von Este," _Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen
+Kunstsammlungen_, Fünfzehnter Band, II. Heft, 1894.
+
+[43] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.
+237-240.
+
+[44] On the circular base of the column upon which the warrior-saint
+rests his foot is the signature "Ticianus faciebat MDXXII." This, taken
+in conjunction with the signature "Titianus" on the Ancona altar-piece
+painted in 1520, tends to show that the line of demarcation between the
+two signatures cannot be absolutely fixed.
+
+[45] Lord Wemyss possesses a repetition, probably from Titian's
+workshop, of the _St. Sebastian_, slightly smaller than the Brescia
+original. This cannot have been the picture catalogued by Vanderdoort as
+among Charles I.'s treasures, since the latter, like the earliest
+version of the _St. Sebastian_, preceding the definitive work, showed
+the saint tied not to a tree, but to a column, and in it the group of
+St. Roch and the Angel was replaced by the figures of two archers
+shooting.
+
+[46] Ridolfi, followed in this particular by Crowe and Cavalcaselle,
+sees in the upturned face of the _St. Nicholas_ a reflection of that of
+Laocoon in the Vatican group.
+
+[47] It passed with the rest of the Mantua pictures into the collection
+of Charles I., and was after his execution sold by the Commonwealth to
+the banker and dealer Jabach for £120. By the latter it was made over to
+Louis XIV., together with many other masterpieces acquired in the same
+way.
+
+[48] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.
+298, 299.
+
+[49] The victory over the Turks here commemorated was won by Baffo in
+the service of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI., some twenty-three years
+before. This gives a special significance to the position in the picture
+of St. Peter, who, with the keys at his feet, stands midway between the
+Bishop and the Virgin. We have seen Baffo in one of Titian's earliest
+works (_circa_ 1503) recommended to St. Peter by Alexander VI. just
+before his departure for this same expedition.
+
+[50] It has been impossible in the first section of these remarks upon
+the work of the master of Cadore to go into the very important question
+of the drawings rightly and wrongly ascribed to him. Some attempt will
+be made in the second section, to be entitled _The Later Work of
+Titian_, to deal summarily with this branch of the subject, which has
+been placed on a more solid basis since Giovanni Morelli disentangled
+the genuine landscape drawings of the master from those of Domenico
+Campagnola, and furnished a firm basis for further study.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+"Alfonso d'Este and Laura Dianti" (Louvre)
+Altar-piece at Brescia
+"Annunciation, The" (Treviso)
+"Annunciation, The" (Venice)
+"Aretino, Portrait of" (Florence)
+"Ariosto, Portrait of" (Cobham Hall)
+"Assumption of the Virgin, The,"
+"Bacchanal, A,"
+"Bacchus and Ariadne" (National Gallery),
+"Baptism of Christ, The" (Rome),
+"Battle of Cadore, The"
+"Bella, La" (Florence)
+"Bishop of Paphos recommended by Alexander VI. to St. Peter, The" (Antwerp)
+
+
+"Christ at Emmaus"
+"Christ bearing the Cross" (Venice)
+"Christ between St. Andrew and St. Catherine" (Venice)
+"Charles V. at Mühlberg" (Madrid)
+"Concert, A" (Florence)
+"Cornaro, Portrait of" (Castle Howard)
+"Cristo della Moneta, Il" (Dresden)
+
+
+"Death of St. Peter Martyr, The"
+"Diana and Actaeon"
+"Diana and Calisto"
+
+
+"Entombment, The" (Louvre)
+
+
+"Feast of the Gods, The" (Alnwick Castle)
+"Flora" (Florence)
+Fresco of St. Christopher in the Doge's Palace
+Frescoes in the Scuola del Santo, Padua
+Frescoes on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, Venice
+
+
+"Herodias"
+"Holy Family" (Bridgewater Gallery)
+"Holy Family with St. Catherine" (National Gallery)
+
+
+"Jupiter and Antiope" (Louvre)
+
+
+"Madonna di Casa Pesaro, The" (Venice)
+"Madonna di San Niccolò, The" (Rome)
+"Man, Portrait of a" (Munich)
+"Man in Black, The" (Louvre)
+"Man of Sorrows, The" (Venice)
+"Man with the Glove, The" (Louvre)
+"Medici, Portrait of Ippolito de'"
+
+
+"Noli me tangere" (National Gallery)
+"Nymph and Shepherd" (Vienna)
+
+
+"Philip II., Portrait of"
+"Pietà" (Milan)
+
+
+"Rape of Europa, The"
+
+
+"Sacred and Profane Love" (Rome)
+"Sacred Conversation, A" (Chantilly)
+"Sacred Conversation, A" (Florence)
+"St. Mark enthroned, with four other Saints" (Venice)
+"St. Sebastian": see _Altar-piece at Brescia_
+
+
+"Tambourine-Player, The" (Vienna)
+"Three Ages, The" (Bridgewater Gallery)
+"Tobias and the Angel" (Venice)
+"Tribute-Money, The": see _Cristo della Moneta_
+"Triumph of Faith, The"
+
+
+"Vanitas" (Munich)
+"Venere del Pardo": see _Jupiter and Antiope_
+"Virgin and Child" (Mr. R.H. Benson)
+"Virgin and Child" (Florence)
+"Virgin and Child" (St. Petersburg)
+"Virgin and Child" (Vienna): see _Zingarella, La_
+"Virgin and Child with Saints" (Captain Holford)
+"Virgin and Child with four Saints" (Dresden)
+"Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot"
+   (Florence)
+"Virgin and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd" (National Gallery)
+"Virgin and Child with Saints, Angels, and a Donor" (Ancona)
+"Virgin and Child with SS. Stephen, Ambrose, and Maurice" (Louvre)
+"Virgin and Child with SS. Ulphus and Bridget" (Madrid)
+"Virgin with the Cherries, The" (Vienna)
+"Virgin with the Rabbit, The" (Louvre)
+
+
+"Worship of Venus, The" (Madrid)
+
+
+"Zingarella, La" (Vienna)
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12626 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12626 ***</div>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Earlier Work of Titian, by Claude Phillips</h1>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr class="full" />
+<br />
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="Flora"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 679px;" alt="Flora" title="Flora"
+ src="images/image01.jpg" /></div>
+<h1>THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN</h1>
+<h1><small><i>By</i></small></h1>
+<h1>CLAUDE PHILLIPS</h1>
+<h2><i>Keeper of the Wallace Collection</i></h2>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 372px; height: 471px;"
+ alt="The Portfolio Artistic Monographs With many Illustrations]"
+ title="The Portfolio Artistic Monographs With many Illustrations]"
+ src="images/image02.jpg" /></p>
+<h3>1897</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<i>PLATES</i><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#Flora">Flora</a>. Uffizi Gallery, Florence<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Sacred_and_Profane_Love.">Sacred and Profane Love</a>.
+Borghese Gallery, Rome</li>
+  <li><a href="#Virgin_and_Child_with_Saints">Virgin and Child, with
+Saints</a>. Louvre</li>
+  <li><a href="#Jeune_Homme_au_gant">Le Jeune Homme au Gant</a>. Louvre</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<i>ILLUSTRATIONS PRINTED IN COLOUR</i><br />
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#Design_for_a_Holy_Family">Design for a Holy Family</a>.
+Chatsworth</li>
+  <li><a href="#Sketch_for_the_Madonna">Sketch for the Madonna di Casa
+Pesaro</a>. Albertina</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<i>ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT</i><br />
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#The_man_of_sorrows">The Man of Sorrows.</a> In the
+Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice</li>
+  <li><a href="#La_Zingarella">Virgin and Child, known as "La
+Zingarella."</a> Imperial Gallery,
+Vienna</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_baptisme_of_Christ">The Baptism of Christ</a>.
+Gallery of the Capitol, Rome</li>
+  <li><a href="#the_three_ages">The Three Ages</a>. Bridgewater Gallery<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Herodias">Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist.</a>
+Doria Gallery, Rome</li>
+  <li><a href="#Vanitas">Vanitas</a>. Alte Pinakothek, Munich</li>
+  <li><a href="#St_Anthony_of_Padua">St. Anthony of Padua causing a
+new-born Infant to speak</a>. Fresco
+in the Scuola del Santo, Padua</li>
+  <li><a href="#Noli_me_tangere">"Noli me tangere."</a> National Gallery</li>
+  <li><a href="#St_Mark_enthroned">St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints</a>.
+S. Maria della Salute,
+Venice<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#The_madonna_with_the_cherries">The Madonna with the
+Cherries</a>. Imperial Gallery, Vienna<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Madonna_and_Child">Madonna and Child, with St. John and
+St. Anthony Abbot</a>. Uffizi
+Gallery, Florence</li>
+  <li><a href="#St._Eustace">St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the
+Miracle of the Stag.</a> British
+Museum<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Cristo_della_Moneta">The "Cristo della Moneta."</a>
+Dresden Gallery</li>
+  <li><a href="#Madonna_and_Child_with_four_saints">Madonna and Child,
+with four Saints.</a> Dresden Gallery</li>
+  <li><a href="#A_Concert">A Concert</a>. Probably by Titian. Pitti
+Palace, Florence</li>
+  <li><a href="#Portrait_of_a_Man">Portrait of a Man</a>. Alte
+Pinakothek, Munich</li>
+  <li><a href="#Alessandro_de_Medici">Alessandro de' Medici</a> (so
+called). Hampton Court</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_Worship_of_Venus">The Worship of Venus</a>. Prado
+Gallery, Madrid</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_Assunta">The Assunta</a>. Accademia delle Belle
+Arti, Venice</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_Annunciation">The Annunciation</a>. Cathedral at
+Treviso</li>
+  <li><a href="#Bacchus_and_Ariadne">Bacchus and Ariadne</a>. National
+Gallery</li>
+  <li><a href="#St_Sebastian">St. Sebastian</a>. Wing of altar-piece in
+the Church of SS. Nazzaro e
+Celso, Brescia</li>
+  <li><a href="#La_Vierge_au_Lapin">La Vierge au Lapin</a>. Louvre<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#St_Christopher">St. Christopher with the Infant Christ</a>.
+Fresco in the Doge's
+Palace, Venice</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_Madonna_di_Casa_Pesaro">The Madonna di Casa Pesaro</a>.
+Church of S. Maria dei Frari, Venice<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Martyrdom_of_St_Peter">Martyrdom of St. Peter the
+Dominican</a><br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Tobias_and_the_Angel">Tobias and the Angel</a>. S.
+Marciliano, Venice</li>
+</ul>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1><a name="Page_5"></a>THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN</h1>
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+<br />
+<p>There is no greater name in Italian art&#8212;therefore no greater in
+art&#8212;than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high
+as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so
+mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil
+them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect
+balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael
+an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is
+wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the
+poet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than any
+one of these. Titian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, nor
+the most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, even
+of his time and country. Yet is it possible, remembering the
+<i>Entombment</i> of the Louvre, the <i>Assunta</i>, the <i>Madonna
+di Casa Pesaro</i>,
+the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i>, to say that he has, take him all in all,
+been
+surpassed in this the highest branch of his art? Certainly nowhere else
+have the pomp and splendour of the painter's achievement at its apogee
+been so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly ever
+overstepping the bounds of nature. The sacred art of no other painter
+of
+the full sixteenth century&#8212;not even that of Raphael himself&#8212;has to an
+equal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of the
+world, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred passion
+must perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is not
+necessarily a distortion of truth.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_6"></a>And then as a portraitist&#8212;we are dealing, be it
+remembered, with
+Italian art only&#8212;there must be conceded to him the first place, as a
+limner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner in
+his secret heart for some other master. One will remember the
+disquieting power, the fascination in the true sense of the word, of
+Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on
+occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the
+Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del
+Piombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic
+truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of
+Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective
+and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate the
+other. Yet another will cite the lofty melancholy, the aristocratic
+charm of the Brescian Moretto, or the marvellous power of the
+Bergamasque Moroni to present in their natural union, with no
+indiscretion of over-emphasis, the spiritual and physical elements
+which
+go to make up that mystery of mysteries, the human individuality. There
+is, however, no advocate of any of these great masters who, having
+vaunted the peculiar perfections in portraiture of his own favourite,
+will not end&#8212;with a sigh perhaps&#8212;by according the palm to Titian.</p>
+<p>In landscape his pre-eminence is even more absolute and
+unquestioned. He
+had great precursors here, but no equal; and until Claude Lorrain long
+afterwards arose, there appeared no successor capable, like himself, of
+expressing the quintessence of Nature's most significant beauties
+without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.
+Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had,
+unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, and
+the Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesque
+influence, the true gift of the landscape-painter. Atmospheric
+conditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions;
+and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity
+of
+the landscape in the great <i>Piet&agrave;</i> of the Brera, the
+ominous sunset in
+our own <i>Agony in the Garden</i> of the National Gallery, the
+cheerful
+all-pervading glow of the beautiful little <i>Sacred Conversation</i>
+at the
+Uffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late <i>Baptism of Christ</i>
+in
+the <a name="Page_7"></a>Church of S. Corona at Vicenza. To attempt a
+discussion of the
+landscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as
+well
+as the most fascinating of subjects&#8212;so various is it even in the few
+well-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument of
+expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of
+his personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione&#8212;judging it from
+such unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of
+Castelfranco, the so-called <i>Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the
+Soldier</i><a name="FNanchor_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1"><sup>[1]</sup></a>
+in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called <i>Three
+Philosophers</i> in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna&#8212;has in it still a
+slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection.
+It
+was reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullest
+development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the <i>Three Ages</i>
+and
+the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>. Then all himself, and with hardly
+a rival
+in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of
+earth and sky which enframe the figures in the <i>Worship of Venus</i>,
+the
+<i>Bacchanal</i>, and, above all, the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>; to
+give back his
+impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty
+which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred
+Conversations. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the <i>St.
+Peter Martyr</i>, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic
+amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.
+The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be
+said to exist in the late <i>Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo)</i>
+of
+the Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose and
+Giorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late <i>Rape of Europa</i>,
+the
+bold sweep and the rainbow hues of the <a name="Page_8"></a>landscape
+in which recall the
+much earlier <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>. In the exquisite <i>Shepherd
+and
+Nymph</i> of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna&#8212;a masterpiece in monotone
+of
+quite the last period&#8212;the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque time
+reappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, as
+in the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by that
+solemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the final
+years of Titian's old age.</p>
+<p>Thus, though there cannot be claimed for Titian that universality in
+art
+and science which the lovers of Leonardo's painting must ever deplore,
+since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of
+scope
+of Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht
+D&uuml;rer;
+it must be seen that as a <i>painter</i> he covered more ground than
+any
+first-rate master of the sixteenth century. While in more than one
+branch of the painter's art he stood forth supreme and without a rival,
+in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorial
+decorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his younger
+rivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves more
+practised and more successfully daring in this particular branch.</p>
+<p>To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, such
+parallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must
+go
+to Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or had
+been, the great merchant city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly be
+styled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian
+predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was
+during
+the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle
+of
+supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer
+period
+during the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation of
+those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned
+them; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as an
+accessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who,
+in his greatest efforts&#8212;those sumptuous and almost truculent <i>portraits
+d'apparat</i> of princes, nobles, and splendid dames&#8212;knew no superior,
+though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and
+Velazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more
+demonstrative, a seemingly <a name="Page_9"></a>closer embrace,
+drawing from the contact a
+more exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness some
+of the stain of earth. Titian, though he was at least as genuine a
+realist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mere
+outsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which was
+everywhere&#8212;in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home of
+his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art had
+ever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine
+harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion, that
+distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art that
+is not Italian.</p>
+<p>The relation of the two masters&#8212;both of them in the first line of
+the
+world's painters&#8212;was much that of Venice to Antwerp. The apogee of each
+city in its different way represented the highest point that modern
+Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as
+distinguished from mental culture. But then Venice was wrapped in the
+transfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering above
+the rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains,
+the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region. Reality, with
+all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality.
+But
+it was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the method
+of presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could
+add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the
+splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the
+genuine naturalness of such a mode of life. Art itself could only add
+to
+it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the
+colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression
+to
+the beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charm
+of the people. This is what Titian, supreme among his contemporaries of
+the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which,
+in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek
+for a parallel.</p>
+<p>Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly
+enlist
+our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in
+some
+special branch of their art; yet, after all, we find <a name="Page_10"></a>ourselves
+invariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them&#8212;taking <i>him</i>
+as
+the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries
+and
+successors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may
+be,
+combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his
+creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has
+never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then
+Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the
+poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a
+higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been
+able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself
+so
+incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments
+of
+a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme
+limits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great
+<i>Madonna del Carmelo</i> at the Venice Academy and the magnificent
+<i>Trinity</i> in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near
+Udine may
+be taken to prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms
+to the painter of the <i>Assunta</i>, the <i>Entombment</i> and the <i>Christ
+at
+Emmaus</i>? Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of
+illumination,
+a Titanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit and
+placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not
+altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in
+art.
+All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between
+the
+two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, even
+though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive
+the
+supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred
+drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A not
+dissimilar comparison might be instituted between the portraits of
+Lorenzo Lotto and those of our master. No Venetian painter of the
+golden
+prime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him,
+while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individuality
+submitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his own
+tremulous sensitiveness and charm. In this way no portraits of the
+sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in
+deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar
+temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical <a
+ name="Page_11"></a>and mental
+characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.<a
+ name="FNanchor_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2"><sup>[2]</sup></a></p>
+<p>Yet where is the critic bold enough to place even the finest of
+these
+exquisite productions on the same level as <i>Le Jeune Homme au Gant</i>
+and
+<i>L'Homme en Noir</i> of the Louvre, the <i>Ippolito de' Medici</i>,
+the <i>Bella
+di Tiziano</i>, the <i>Aretino</i> of the Pitti, the <i>Charles V. at
+the Battle
+of M&uuml;hlberg</i> and the full-length <i>Philip II.</i> of the
+Prado Museum at
+Madrid?</p>
+<p>Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that Titian has
+serious rivals in those Veronese developed into Venetians, the two
+elder
+Bonifazi and Paolo Veronese; that is, there will be found lovers of
+painting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours in
+frank juxtaposition to a palette relatively restricted, used with an
+art
+more subtle, if less dazzling than theirs, and resulting in a deeper,
+graver richness, a more significant beauty, if in a less stimulating
+gaiety and variety of aspect. No less a critic than Morelli himself
+pronounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliant
+colourist of the Venetian school; and the <i>Dives and Lazarus</i> of
+the
+Venice Academy, the <i>Finding of Moses</i> at the Brera are at hand
+to give
+solid support to such an assertion.</p>
+<p>In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be
+the
+greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be
+found in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinal
+principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors&#8212;painters such
+as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri,
+Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci&#8212;Caliari
+dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as
+well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors,
+however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing the
+abruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing and
+tempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural masses of a vibrant
+grey and large depths of cool dark shadow&#8212;brown shot through with
+silver. No other Venetian master could have painted the <i>Mystic
+Marriage
+of St. Catherine</i> <a name="Page_12"></a>in the church of that name
+at Venice, the <i>Allegory
+on the Victory of Lepanto</i> in the Palazzo Ducale, or the vast <i>Nozze
+di
+Cana</i> of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it is in
+one
+sense a step in advance even of Giorgione, Titian, Palma, and Paris
+Bordone&#8212;constituting as it does more particularly a further development
+of painting from the purely decorative standpoint&#8212;must appear just a
+little superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the nobler,
+graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods of
+Titian. With him, as with Giorgione, and, indeed, with Tintoretto,
+colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was
+to
+give a realisation, at once splendid and penetrating in its truth, of
+the subject presented; and colour in accordance with the true Venetian
+principle was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the very
+body and soul of painting&#8212;as what it is, indeed, in Nature.</p>
+<p>To put forward Paolo Veronese as merely the dazzling virtuoso would
+all
+the same be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art.
+He can rise as high in dramatic passion and pathos as the greatest of
+them all, when he is in the vein; but these are precisely the occasions
+on which he most resolutely subordinates his colour to his subject and
+makes the most poetic use of chiaroscuro; as in the great altar-piece
+<i>The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian</i> in the church of that name, the
+too
+little known <i>St. Francis receiving the Stigmata</i> on a ceiling
+compartment of the Academy of Arts at Vienna, and the wonderful
+<i>Crucifixion</i> which not many years ago was brought down from the
+sky-line of the Long Gallery in the Louvre, and placed, where it
+deserves to be, among the masterpieces. And yet in this last piece the
+colour is not only in a singular degree interpretative of the subject,
+but at the same time technically astonishing&#8212;with certain subtleties of
+unusual juxtaposition and modulation, delightful to the craftsman,
+which
+are hardly seen again until we come to the latter half of the present
+century. So that here we have the great Veneto-Veronese master escaping
+altogether from our theory, and showing himself at one and the same
+time
+profoundly moving, intensely significant, and admirably decorative in
+colour. Still what was with him the splendid exception was with Titian,
+and those who have been grouped with Titian, the guiding rule of art.
+Though our master remains, take him all in all, the greatest of
+Venetian
+colourists, he never condescends <a name="Page_13"></a>to vaunt all
+that he knows, or to
+select his subjects as a groundwork for bravura, even the most
+legitimate. He is the greatest painter of the sixteenth century, just
+because, being the greatest colourist of the higher order, and in
+legitimate mastery of the brush second to none, he makes the worthiest
+use of his unrivalled accomplishment, not merely to call down the
+applause due to supreme pictorial skill and the victory over self-set
+difficulties, but, above all, to give the fullest and most legitimate
+expression to the subjects which he presents, and through them to
+himself.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_14"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3><i>Cadore and Venice&#8212;Early Giorgionesque works up to the date of
+the
+residence in Padua&#8212;New interpretations of Giorgione's and Titian's
+pictures.</i></h3>
+<br />
+<p>Tiziano Vecelli was born in or about the year 1477 at Pieve di
+Cadore, a
+district of the southern Tyrol then belonging to the Republic of
+Venice,
+and still within the Italian frontier. He was the son of Gregorio di
+Conte Vecelli by his wife Lucia, his father being descended from an
+ancient family of the name of Guecello (or Vecellio), established in
+the
+valley of Cadore. An ancestor, Ser Guecello di Tommasro da Pozzale, had
+been elected Podesta of Cadore as far back as 1321.<a name="FNanchor_3"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> The name Tiziano
+would appear to have been a traditional one in the family. Among others
+we find a contemporary Tiziano Vecelli, who is a lawyer of note
+concerned in the administration of Cadore, keeping up a kind of
+obsequious friendship with his famous cousin at Venice. The Tizianello
+who, in 1622, dedicated to the Countess of Arundel an anonymous Life of
+Titian known as Tizianello's <i>Anonimo</i>, and died at Venice in
+1650, was
+Titian's cousin thrice removed.</p>
+<p>Gregorio Vecelli was a valiant soldier, distinguished for his
+bravery in
+the field and his wisdom in the council of Cadore, but not, it may be
+assumed, possessed of wealth or, in a poor mountain district like
+Cadore, endowed with the means of obtaining it. The other offspring of
+the marriage with Lucia were Francesco,&#8212;supposed, though without
+substantial proof, to have been older than his brother,&#8212;Caterina, and
+Orsa. At the age of nine, according to Dolce <a name="Page_15"></a>in
+the <i>Dialogo della
+Pittura</i>, or of ten, according to Tizianello's <i>Anonimo</i>,
+Titian was
+taken from Cadore to Venice, there to enter upon the serious study of
+painting. Whether he had previously received some slight tuition in the
+rudiments of the art, or had only shown a natural inclination to become
+a painter, cannot be ascertained with any precision; nor is the point,
+indeed, one of any real importance. What is much more vital in our
+study
+of the master's life-work is to ascertain how far the scenery of his
+native Cadore left a permanent impress on his landscape art, and in
+what
+way his descent from a family of mountaineers and soldiers, hardy, yet
+of a certain birth and breeding, contributed to shape his individuality
+in its development to maturity. It has been almost universally assumed
+that Titian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery of
+Cadore in the backgrounds to his pictures; and yet, if we except the
+great <i>Battle of Cadore</i> itself (now known only in Fontana's
+print, in a
+reduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Uffizi,
+and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in a
+modified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altar-pieces,
+Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawings
+of the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we
+find
+the jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. In
+the
+majority of instances, however, the middle distance and foreground to
+these is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts,
+its monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountain
+sides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring, but the richer
+vegetation of the Friulan mountains in their lower slopes, or of the
+beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian
+plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the
+play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of
+Venetian
+art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery
+of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for
+studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and
+back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland.
+How far Titian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needy
+mountaineers, may be taken to account for his excessive eagerness to
+reap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for his
+unresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to be
+got in, <a name="Page_16"></a>must be a matter for individual
+appreciation. Josiah
+Gilbert&#8212;quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle<a name="FNanchor_4"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_4"><sup>[4]</sup></a>&#8212;pertinently asks, "Might
+this mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewd
+Swiss?" In the getting, Titian was certainly all this, but in the
+spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and
+voluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of his
+career. Vasari relates that Titian was lodged at Venice with his uncle,
+an "honourable citizen," who, seeing his great inclination for
+painting,
+placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became a
+proficient. Dolce, apparently better instructed, gives, in his <i>Dialogo
+della Pittura</i>, Zuccato, best known as a mosaic worker, as his first
+master; next makes him pass into the studio of Gentile Bellini, and
+thence into that of the <i>caposcuola</i> Giovanni Bellini; to take,
+however,
+the last and by far the most important step of his early career when he
+becomes the pupil and partner, or assistant, of Giorgione. Morelli<a
+ name="FNanchor_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>
+would prefer to leave Giovanni Bellini altogether out of Titian's
+artistic descent. However this may be, certain traces of Gentile's
+influence may be observed in the art of the Cadorine painter,
+especially
+in the earlier portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technical
+execution generally. On the other hand, no extant work of his
+beginnings
+suggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino's
+pupils&#8212;one of the <i>discipuli</i>, as some of these were fond of
+describing
+themselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the
+fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the
+influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his
+following or not. Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art of
+Venice and the <i>Veneto</i> an influence not less strong of its kind
+than
+that which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regions
+during his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on the
+works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the
+painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and
+Borgognone&#8212;such men as Ambrogio de' Predis, Bernardino de' Conti, and,
+indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself. To the fashion for
+the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class, even Alvise Vivarini,
+the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocento
+develop<a name="Page_17"></a>ment, bowed when he painted the Madonnas
+of the Redentore and S.
+Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the Vienna
+Gallery. Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr.
+Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under
+the
+paramount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the
+altar-piece
+of S. Cristina near Treviso, the <i>Madonna and Child with Saints</i>
+in the
+Ellesmere collection, and the <i>Madonna and Child with St. Peter
+Martyr</i>
+in the Naples Gallery, while in the <i>Marriage of St. Catherine</i>
+at
+Munich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regards
+exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour,
+essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise's
+death, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could,
+faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in his
+later years was transformed into something very like a satellite of
+Giovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather
+to
+the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent
+overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the
+point
+of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.</p>
+<p>What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both of
+Giorgione and Titian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is not
+so much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent
+lean
+on Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves. Neither of
+them is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutely
+dependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for a
+time held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliest
+manhood held towards Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent
+also
+of Lorenzo Lotto, who, in the earliest known examples&#8212;the so-called
+<i>Dana&euml;</i> of Sir Martin Conway's collection, and the <i>St.
+Jerome</i> of the
+Louvre&#8212;is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art passes through
+successive developments, he will still show himself open to more or
+less
+enduring influences from the one side and the other. Sebastiano del
+Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly be
+accounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career out
+of leading-strings. First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling <i>Piet&agrave;</i>
+in
+the Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authentic
+inscription, "Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus
+(<i>sic</i>)," is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece
+of
+documentary evidence, it <a name="Page_18"></a>would even now pass as
+such. Next, he becomes
+the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save
+perhaps
+Titian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in a
+quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque,
+that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, have
+acquired a world-wide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soul
+to Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of early
+training and association, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal
+itself,
+he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the
+very end of his career.</p>
+<p>Giorgione and Titian were as nearly as possible of the same age,
+being
+both of them born in or about 1477. Lorenzo Lotto's birth is to be
+placed about the year 1476&#8212;or, as others would have it, 1480. Palma saw
+the light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485. So
+that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier
+half of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eight
+years&#8212;between 1477 and 1485.</p>
+<p>In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's <i>Life and Times of Titian</i> a
+revolutionary
+theory, foreshadowed in their <i>Painting in North Italy</i>, was for
+the
+first time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained. They
+sought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, that
+Palma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced and
+shaped the art of his contemporary Titian, instead of having been
+influenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artists
+would have induced the student to believe. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's
+theory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelli
+appears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to be
+found on a <i>Santa Conversazione</i>, once in the collection of M.
+Reiset,
+and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d'Aumale. This date now
+proves with the artist's signature to be a forgery, and the picture in
+question, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode of
+conception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more modern
+technique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma in
+the development of the full Renaissance types and the full Renaissance
+methods of execution. There can be small doubt that this particular
+theory of the indefatigable critics, to whom the history of Italian art
+owes so much, will little by little be allowed to die a natural death,
+if it be not, indeed, already defunct. <a name="Page_19"></a>More and
+more will the view so
+forcibly stated by Giovanni Morelli recommend itself, that Palma in
+many
+of those elements of his art most distinctively Palmesque leans upon
+the
+master of Cadore. The Bergamasque painter was not indeed a personality
+in art sufficiently strong and individual to dominate a Titian, or to
+leave upon his style and methods profound and enduring traces. As such,
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle themselves hesitate to put him forward, though
+they cling with great persistency to their pet theory of his influence.
+This exquisite artist, though by no means inventive genius, did, on the
+other hand, permanently shape the style of Cariani and the two elder
+Bonifazi; imparting, it may be, also some of his voluptuous charm in
+the
+rendering of female loveliness to Paris Bordone, though the latter
+must,
+in the main, be looked upon as the artistic offspring of Titian.</p>
+<p>It is by no means certain, all the same, that this question of
+influence
+imparted and submitted to can with advantage be argued with such
+absoluteness of statement as has been the rule up to the present time,
+both on the one side and the other. It should be remembered that we are
+dealing with three young painters of about the same age, working in the
+same art-centre, perhaps, even, for a time in the same studio&#8212;issuing,
+at any rate, all three from the flank of Giovanni Bellini. In a
+situation like this, it is not only the preponderance of age&#8212;two or
+three years at the most, one way or the other&#8212;that is to be taken into
+account, but the preponderance of genius and the magic gift of
+influence. It is easy to understand how the complete renewal, brought
+about by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini's teaching and example,
+operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open
+to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness
+of
+sensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible
+was
+the fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over his
+youthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influence
+widen, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellino
+himself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there
+could
+be no question of light received back from painters of his own
+generation in exchange for that diffused around him; but with Titian
+and
+Palma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell here
+in each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous
+<a name="Page_20"></a>plant of the same family, yet with all its
+Giorgionesque colour of a
+quite distinctive loveliness. Titian, we shall see, carried the style
+to
+its highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways
+a
+new thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in
+nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than
+Giorgione, Titian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to that
+element of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a way
+counteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interprets
+the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic
+attributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itself
+beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this
+frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this <i>terre
+&agrave;
+terre</i> energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early
+work of
+Titian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was
+influenced?<a name="FNanchor_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6"><sup>[6]</sup></a>
+There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the
+Giorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to the
+everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and
+this not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, in
+which, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular
+resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the
+important <i>Adam and Eve</i> of his earlier time in the Brunswick
+Gallery&#8212;once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione&#8212;and
+the preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found
+in
+Titian's <i>Three Ages</i> at Bridgewater House, in his so-called <i>Sacred
+and
+Profane Love (Medea and Venus)</i> of the Borghese Gallery, in such
+sacred
+pieces as the <i>Madonna and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida</i> at
+the Prado
+Gallery of Madrid, and the large <i>Madonna and Child with four Saints</i>
+at
+Dresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception
+stripped
+of a little of its poetic glamour, but retaining unabashed its splendid
+sensuousness, which is thus made the more markedly to stand out. We
+notice, too, in Titian's works belonging to this particular group
+another characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only because
+Palma indulged in it in a <a name="Page_21"></a>great number of his
+Sacred Conversations and
+similar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin, the
+muscular form, of some male saint, or it may be some shepherd of the
+uplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddy
+gold, of a female saint, or a fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdess
+or a heroine of antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishing
+characteristics as these&#8212;and others that could easily be singled
+out&#8212;as wholly and solely Titianesque of the early time? If so, we ought
+to assume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palma
+came from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken to
+have transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the less
+subtle shape into which he had already transmuted it. But should not
+such an assumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main,
+be made with all the allowances which the situation demands?</p>
+<p>That, when a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to
+overturn
+barriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy
+to
+unravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lines
+everywhere, one or two modern examples much nearer to our own time may
+roughly serve to illustrate. Take, for instance, the friendship that
+developed itself between the youthful Bonington and the youthful
+Delacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre:
+the
+one communicating to the other something of the stimulating quality,
+the
+frankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished the
+English from the French school; the other contributing to shape, with
+the fire of his romantic temperament, the art of the young Englishman
+who was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of the
+P.R.B.&#8212;Millais, Rossetti, and Mr. Holman Hunt&#8212;who is to state <i>ex
+cathedra</i> where influence was received, where transmitted; or
+whether
+the first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time of
+their complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, the
+third the conscience of the group? A similar puzzle would await him who
+should strive to unravel the delicate thread which winds itself round
+the artistic relation between Frederick Walker and the noted
+landscapist
+Mr. J.W. North. Though we at once recognise Walker as the dominant
+spirit, and see his influence even to-day, more than twenty years after
+his death, affirmed rather than weakened, there are certain
+characteristics of the style recognised <a name="Page_22"></a>and
+imitated as his, of which
+it would be unsafe to declare that he and not his companion originated
+them.</p>
+<p>In days of artistic upheaval and growth like the last years of the
+fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the <i>milieu</i>
+must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who
+most
+influence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeply
+rooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not be
+doubted that when in Giorgione's breast had been lighted the first
+sparks of the Promethean fire, which, with the soft intensity of its
+glow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire
+ran
+like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth, his
+contemporaries and juniors, just because their blood was of the stuff
+to
+ignite and flame like his own.</p>
+<p>The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question
+merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a
+brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that "they who
+were
+excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of
+life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of
+flesh, etc."<a name="FNanchor_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7"><sup>[7]</sup></a>
+It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and
+style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the
+Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life
+aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just
+as
+the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of
+lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which,
+in
+Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first
+years of the Cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when&#8212;to take one
+instance only among many&#8212;the Ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble Venetian
+Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance
+with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was ever of love. In
+that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina's
+courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty,
+Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa
+illustrissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius,
+the leaflets which, under the title <i>Gli Asolani, ne' quali si
+ragiona
+d' amore</i>,<a name="FNanchor_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8"><sup>[8]</sup></a>
+soon became a famous book in Italy.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Page_23"></a><a
+ name="The_man_of_sorrows"></a><img style="width: 512px; height: 382px;"
+ alt="The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya."
+ title="The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya."
+ src="images/image03.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The most Bellinesque work of Titian's youth with which we are
+acquainted
+is the curious <i>Man of Sorrows</i> of the Scuola di S. Rocco at
+Venice, a
+work so faded, so injured by restoration that to dogmatise as to its
+technique would be in the highest degree unsafe. The type approaches,
+among the numerous versions of the <i>Piet&agrave;</i> by and ascribed
+to Giovanni
+Bellini, most nearly to that in the Palazzo del Commune at Rimini.
+Seeing that Titian was in 1500 twenty-three years old, and a student of
+painting of some thirteen years' standing, there may well exist, or at
+any rate there may well have existed, from his hand things in a yet
+earlier and more distinctively Quattrocento-style than anything with
+which we are at present acquainted. This <i>Man of Sorrows</i> itself
+may
+well be a little earlier than 1500, but on this point it is not easy to
+form <a name="Page_24"></a>a definite conclusion. Perhaps it is
+reserved in the future to
+some student uniting the qualities of patience and keen insight to do
+for the youthful Titian what Morelli and his school have done for
+Correggio&#8212;that is, to restore to him a series of paintings earlier in
+date than those which criticism has, up to the present time, been
+content to accept as showing his first independent steps in art.
+Everything else that we can at present safely attribute to the youthful
+Vecelli is deeply coloured with the style and feeling of Giorgione,
+though never, as is the case with the inferior Giorgionesques, so
+entirely as to obliterate the strongly marked individuality of the
+painter himself. The <i>Virgin and Child</i> in the Imperial Gallery
+of
+Vienna, popularly known as <i>La Zingarella</i>, which, by general
+consent,
+is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this
+class,
+is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception and
+arrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength, and richness of the
+colour-chord, in the atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the
+landscape
+background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already
+Giorgionesque. Nay, even here Titian, above all, asserts <i>himself</i>,
+and
+lays the foundation of his own manner. The type of the divine Bambino
+differs widely from that adopted by Giorgione in the altar-pieces of
+Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The virgin is a woman
+beautified only by youth and intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgione
+and Titian in their loveliest types of womanhood are sensuous as
+compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as
+Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. But
+Giorgione's sensuousness is that which may fitly characterise the
+goddess, while Titian's is that of the woman, much nearer to the
+everyday world in which both artists lived.</p>
+<p>In the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is a
+beautiful <i>Madonna and Child</i> in a niche of coloured marble
+mosaic,
+which is catalogued as an early Titian under the influence of Giovanni
+Bellini. Judging only from the reproduction on a large scale done by
+Messrs. Braun and Co., the writer has ventured to suggest
+elsewhere<a name="FNanchor_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9"><sup>[9]</sup></a>&#8212;prefacing
+his suggestions with the avowal that he is not
+acquainted with the picture itself&#8212;that we may have here, not an early
+Titian, but that rarer thing an early Giorgione. From the list of the
+former master's works it must at any rate be struck out, as even the
+most superficial <a name="Page_25"></a>comparison with, for instance, <i>La
+Zingarella</i>
+suffices to prove. In the notable display of Venetian art made at the
+New Gallery in the winter of 1895 were included two pictures (Nos. 1
+and
+7 in the catalogue) ascribed to the early time of Titian and evidently
+from the same hand. These were a <i>Virgin and Child</i> from the
+collection,
+so rich in Venetian works, of Mr. R.H. Benson (formerly among the
+Burghley House pictures), and a less well-preserved <i>Virgin and
+Child
+with Saints</i> from the collection of Captain Holford at Dorchester
+House.
+The former is ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the early time of
+the master himself.<a name="FNanchor_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10"><sup>[10]</sup></a>
+Both are, in their rich harmony of colour and
+their general conception, entirely Giorgionesque. They reveal the hand
+of some at present anonymous Venetian of the second order, standing
+midway between the young Giorgione and the young Titian&#8212;one who, while
+<a name="Page_26"></a>imitating the types and the landscape of these
+greater contemporaries
+of his, replaced their depth and glow by a weaker, a more superficial
+prettiness, which yet has its own suave charm.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="La_Zingarella"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 429px;"
+ alt="Virgin and Child, known as &quot;La Zingarella.&quot; Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by L&ouml;wy."
+ title="Virgin and Child, known as &quot;La Zingarella.&quot; Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by L&ouml;wy."
+ src="images/image04.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The famous <i>Christ bearing the Cross</i> in the Chiesa di S.
+Rocco at
+Venice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed by
+Vasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to
+that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The
+biographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to be
+from the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in
+Venice,
+and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and
+Giorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life." This
+too great popularity of the work as a wonder-working picture is perhaps
+the cause that it is to-day in a state as unsatisfactory as is the <i>Man
+of Sorrows</i> in the adjacent Scuola. The picture which presents
+"Christ
+dragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in the
+background," resembles most among Giorgione's authentic creations the
+<i>Christ bearing the Cross</i> in the Casa Loschi at Vicenza. The
+resemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since this
+last&#8212;one of the earliest of Giorgiones&#8212;still recalls Giovanni Bellini,
+and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception.
+In both renderings of the divine countenance there is&#8212;or it may be the
+writer fancies that there is&#8212;underlying that expression of serenity and
+humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject, a sinister,
+disquieting look, almost a threat. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called
+attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as
+compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar
+disproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the <i>Christ
+between St. Andrew and St. Catherine</i> in the Church of SS. Ermagora
+and
+Fortunato (commonly called S. Marcuola) at Venice. Here the head of the
+infant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the
+two
+saints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest.
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle had refused to accept this picture as a genuine
+Titian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful place
+among the early works.</p>
+<p>Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the <i>Three
+Ages</i> and the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, the writer is
+inclined to place
+the <i>Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI. to St.
+<a name="Page_27"></a>Peter</i>, once in the collection of Charles I.<a
+ name="FNanchor_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> and
+now in the Antwerp
+Gallery. The main elements of Titian's art may be seen here, in
+imperfect fusion, as in very few even of his early productions. The not
+very dignified St. Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with
+a
+high relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again in
+the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or
+rather his
+immediate followers; the magnificently robed Alexander VI. (Rodrigo
+Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, gives back the style in portraiture
+of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio; while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro&#8212;an
+ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of
+fleets, as the background suggests&#8212;is one of the most characteristic
+portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos, its intensity,
+contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same
+<i>Baffo</i> in the renowned <i>Madonna di Casa Pesaro</i>, painted
+twenty-three
+years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It
+is the first in order of a great series, including the <i>Ariosto</i>
+of
+Cobham, the <i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i>, the <i>Portrait of a Man</i>
+in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous <i>Concert</i> of the
+Pitti,
+ascribed to Giorgione. Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. Georges
+Lafenestre<a name="FNanchor_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12"><sup>[12]</sup></a>
+have called attention to the fact that the detested
+Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot
+well have been executed after that time. He would have been a bold man
+who should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI.
+into a votive picture painted immediately after his death! How is it
+possible to assume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless assume, that
+the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, one of the masterpieces of
+Venetian art,
+was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at the
+latest, in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione
+himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted
+his Castelfranco altar-piece, his <i>Venus</i>, or his <i>Three
+Philosophers
+(Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas)</i>. Old Gian Bellino himself had not
+entered
+upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S.
+Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.<a name="FNanchor_13"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_13"><sup>[13]</sup></a></p>
+<p><a name="Page_28"></a>It is impossible on the present occasion to
+give any detailed account
+of the fresco decorations painted by Giorgione and Titian on the
+facades
+of the new Fondaco de' Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on
+the 28th of January 1505. Full particulars will be found in Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle's often-quoted work. Vasari's many manifest errors and
+disconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do not
+predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained
+relations between Giorgione and our painter, to which this particular
+business is supposed to have given rise. That they together decorated
+with a series of frescoes which acquired considerable celebrity the
+exterior of the Fondaco is all that is known for certain, Titian being
+apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Of
+these frescoes only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, and
+facing the Grand Canal, has been preserved, in a much-damaged
+condition&#8212;the few fragments that remained of those facing the side
+canal having been destroyed in 1884.<a name="FNanchor_14"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_14"><sup>[14]</sup></a> Vasari shows us a Giorgione
+angry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior
+beauty
+of some work on the "<i>facciata di verso la Merceria,</i>" which in
+reality
+belongs to Titian, and thereupon implacably cutting short their
+connection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, but
+refuted by the less contemporary authority of Tizianello's <i>Anonimo</i>.
+Of
+what great painters, standing in the relation of master and pupil, have
+not such stories been told, and&#8212;the worst of it is&#8212;told with a certain
+foundation of truth? Apocryphal is, no doubt, that which has evolved
+itself from the internal evidence supplied by the <i>Baptism of Christ</i>
+of
+Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci; but a stronger substructure of fact
+supports the unpleasing anecdotes as to Titian and Tintoretto, as to
+Watteau and Pater, as to our own Hudson and Reynolds, and, alas! as to
+very many others. How touching, on the other hand, is that simple entry
+in Francesco Francia's day-book, made when <a name="Page_29"></a><a
+ name="Page_30"></a>his chief journeyman,
+Timoteo Viti, leaves him: "1495 a di 4 aprile &egrave; partito il mio
+caro
+Timoteo; chi Dio li dia ogni bene et fortuna!" ("On the 4th day of
+April
+1495 my dear Timoteo left me. May God grant him all happiness and good
+fortune!")</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_baptisme_of_Christ"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 695px;"
+ alt="The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ title="The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ src="images/image05.jpg" /></p>
+<p>There is one reason that makes it doubly difficult, relying on
+developments of style only, to make, even tentatively, a chronological
+arrangement of Titian's early works. This is that in those painted
+<i>poesie</i> of the earlier Venetian art of which the germs are to be
+found
+in Giovanni Bellini and Cima, but the flower is identified with
+Giorgione, Titian surrendered himself to the overmastering influence of
+the latter with less reservation of his own individuality than in his
+sacred works. In the earlier imaginative subjects the vivifying glow of
+Giorgionesque poetry moulds, colours, and expands the genius of Titian,
+but so naturally as neither to obliterate nor to constrain it. Indeed,
+even in the late time of our master&#8212;checking an unveiled sensuousness
+which sometimes approaches dangerously near to a downright
+sensuality&#8212;the influence of the master and companion who vanished half
+a century before victoriously reasserts itself. It is this <i>renouveau</i>
+of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives so
+exquisite a charm to the <i>Venere del Pardo</i>, so strange a pathos
+to that
+still later <i>Nymph and Shepherd,</i> which was a few years ago
+brought out
+of its obscurity and added to the treasures of the Imperial Gallery at
+Vienna.</p>
+<p>The sacred works of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with
+a
+difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a
+majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation,
+very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness
+and
+reserve which informs such creations as the <i>Madonna of Castelfranco</i>
+and the <i>Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch</i> of the Prado
+Museum.
+Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque
+ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of the <i>Assunta</i>, the
+true
+passion going hand-in-hand with beauty of the Louvre <i>Entombment</i>,
+the
+rhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i>.</p>
+<p>The <i>Baptism of Christ</i>, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the
+Gallery of
+the Capitol at Rome, had been by Crowe and Cavalcaselle taken away from
+Titian and given to Paris Bordone, but the keen insight of Morelli led
+him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to Titian.
+Internal
+<a name="Page_31"></a>evidence is indeed conclusive in this case that
+the picture must be
+assigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.<a
+ name="FNanchor_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15"><sup>[15]</sup></a>
+Here Titian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christ
+more in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemn
+hieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries.
+The luxuriant landscape is in the main Giorgionesque, save that here
+and
+there a naked branch among the leafage&#8212;and on one of them the
+woodpecker&#8212;strongly recalls Giovanni Bellini. The same robust,
+round-limbed young Venetian, with the inexpressive face, does duty here
+as St. John the Baptist, who in the <i>Three Ages</i>, presently to be
+discussed, appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd. The
+Christ, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxuriant
+hair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine
+<i>Cristo della Moneta</i>. The question at once arises here, Did
+Titian in
+the type of this figure derive inspiration from Giovanni Bellini's
+splendid <i>Baptism of Christ</i>, finished in 1510 for the Church of
+S.
+Corona at Vicenza, but which the younger artist might well have seen a
+year or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in the
+workshop of the venerable master? Apart from its fresh
+na&iuml;vet&eacute;, and its
+rare pictorial charm, how trivial and merely anecdotic does the
+conception of Titian appear by the side of that of Bellini, so lofty,
+so
+consoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunset
+colour!<a name="FNanchor_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16"><sup>[16]</sup></a>
+Alone in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram,
+placed <a name="Page_32"></a>in the picture with an awkwardness
+attractive in its na&iuml;vete,
+but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standing
+alone.</p>
+<p>The beautiful <i>Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida,</i>
+placed in
+the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now at last officially
+restored to Titian, after having been for years innumerable ascribed to
+Giorgione, whose style it not more than generally recalls. Here at any
+rate all the rival wise men are agreed, and it only remains for the
+student of the old masters, working to-day on the solid substructure
+provided for him by his predecessors, to wonder how any other
+attribution could have been accepted. But then the critic of the
+present
+day is a little too prone to be wise and scornful <i>&agrave; ban
+march&eacute;</i>,
+forgetting that he has been spared three parts of the road, and that he
+starts for conquest at the high point, to reach which the pioneers of
+scientific criticism in art have devoted a lifetime of noble toil. It
+is
+in this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early
+art
+of the Cadorine which Crowe and Cavalcaselle have defined as
+"Palmesque." The <i>St. Bridget</i> and the <i>St. Ulphus</i> are
+both types
+frequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamasque painter, and
+it has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model with
+hair of wavy gold must have sat to Giorgione, Titian, and Palma. This
+can only be true, however, in a modified sense, seeing that Giorgione
+did not, so much as his contemporaries and followers, affect the type
+of
+the beautiful Venetian blond, "large, languishing, and lazy." The hair
+of his women&#8212;both the sacred personages and the divinities nominally
+classic or wholly Venetian&#8212;is, as a rule, of a rich chestnut, or at the
+most dusky fair, and in them the Giorgionesque oval of the face tempers
+with its spirituality the strength of physical passion that the general
+physique denotes. The polished surface of this panel at Madrid, the
+execution, sound and finished without being finicking, the high
+yellowish lights on the crimson draperies, are all very characteristic
+of this, the first manner of Vecelli. The green hangings at the back of
+the picture are such as are very generally associated with the
+colour-schemes of Palma. An old repetition, with <a name="Page_33"></a>a
+slight variation in
+the Bambino, is in the royal collection at Hampton Court, where it long
+bore&#8212;indeed it does so still on the frame&#8212;the name of Palma Vecchio.</p>
+<p>It will be remembered that Vasari assigns to the <i>Tobias and the
+Angel</i>
+in the Church of S. Marciliano at Venice the exact date 1507,
+describing
+it, moreover, with greater accuracy than he does any other work by
+Titian. He mentions even "the thicket, in which is a St. John the
+Baptist kneeling as he prays to heaven, whence comes a splendour of
+light." The Aretine biographer is followed in this particular by
+Morelli, usually so eagle-eyed, so little bound by tradition in tracing
+the beginnings of a great painter. The gifted modern critic places the
+picture among the quite early works of our master. Notwithstanding this
+weight of authority, the writer feels bound to dissent from the view
+just now indicated, and in this instance to follow Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, who assign to the <i>Tobias and the Angel</i> a place
+much
+later on in Titian's long career. The picture, though it hangs high in
+the little church for which it was painted, will speak for itself to
+those who interrogate it without <i>parti pris</i>. Neither in the
+figures&#8212;the magnificently classic yet living archangel Raphael and the
+more na&iuml;ve and realistic Tobias&#8212;nor in the rich landscape with St.
+John
+the Baptist praying is there anything left of the early Giorgionesque
+manner. In the sweeping breadth of the execution, the summarising power
+of the brush, the glow from within of the colour, we have so many
+evidences of a style in its fullest maturity. It will be safe,
+therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian's middle period.<a
+ name="FNanchor_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17"><sup>[17]</sup></a></p>
+<p>The <i>Three Ages</i> in the Bridgewater Gallery and the so-called <i>Sacred
+and Profane Love</i> in the Borghese Gallery represent the apogee of
+Titian's Giorgionesque style. Glowing through and through with the
+<a name="Page_34"></a>spirit of the master-poet among Venetian
+painters, yet falling short a
+little, it may be, of that subtle charm of his, compounded indefinably
+of sensuous delight and spiritual yearning, these two masterpieces
+carry
+the Giorgionesque technically a pretty wide step farther than the
+inventor of the style took it. Barbarelli never absolutely threw off
+the
+trammels of the Quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained to
+the last&#8212;not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm&#8212;the
+na&iuml;vet&eacute;,
+the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely
+full-fledged.</p>
+<p>The <i>Three Ages</i>, from its analogies of type and manner with
+the
+<i>Baptism</i> of the Capitol, would appear to be the earlier of the
+two
+imaginative works here grouped together, but to date later than that
+picture.<a name="FNanchor_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18"><sup>[18]</sup></a>
+The tonality of the picture is of an exquisite
+silveriness&#8212;that of clear, moderate daylight, though this relative
+paleness may have been somewhat increased by time. It may a little
+disconcert at first sight those who have known the lovely pastoral only
+from hot, brown copies, such as the one which, under the name of
+Giorgione, was formerly in the Dudley House Collection, and now belongs
+to Sir William Farrer. It is still so difficult to battle with the
+deeply-rooted notion that there can be no Giorgione, no painting of his
+school, without the accompaniment of a rich brown sauce! The
+shepherdess
+has a robe of fairest crimson, and her flower-crowned locks in tint
+more
+nearly approach to the <i>blond cendr&eacute;</i> which distinguishes
+so many of
+Palma's <i>donne</i> than to the ruddier gold that Titian himself
+generally
+affects. The more passionate of the two, she gazes straight into the
+eyes of her strong-limbed rustic lover, who half-reclining rests his
+hand upon her shoulder. On the twin reed-pipes, which she still holds
+in
+her hands, she has just breathed forth a strain of music, and to it, as
+it still lingers in their ears, they yield themselves entranced. Here
+the youth is naked, the maid clothed and adorned&#8212;a reversal, this, of
+Giorgione's <i>F&ecirc;te Champ&ecirc;tre</i> in the Salon
+Carr&eacute; of the Louvre, where the
+women are undraped, and the amorous young cavaliers appear in complete
+and rich attire. To the right are a group of thoroughly Titianesque
+amorini&#8212;the winged one, dominating the others, being perhaps Amor
+himself; while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls ranged
+<a name="Page_35"></a>round him on the ground&#8212;obvious reminders of the
+last stage of all, at
+which he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity between
+the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of
+the personages&#8212;the one aiding the other to express the moment of pause
+in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all
+that the very whirlwind of passion can give. Near at hand may be
+pitfalls, the smiling love-god may prove less innocent than he looks,
+and in the distance Fate may be foreshadowed by the figure of weary Age
+awaiting Death. Yet this one moment is all the lovers' own, and they
+profane it not by speech, but stir their happy languor only with faint
+notes of music borne on the still, warm air.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="the_three_ages"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 365px;"
+ alt="The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery. From the Plate in Lafenestre's &quot;Vie et Oeuvre du Titien&quot; (May, Paris.)"
+ title="The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery. From the Plate in Lafenestre's &quot;Vie et Oeuvre du Titien&quot; (May, Paris.)"
+ src="images/image06.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i> of the Borghese Gallery is one
+of the
+world's pictures, and beyond doubt the masterpiece of the early or
+Giorgionesque period. To-day surely no one will be found to gainsay
+Morelli when he places it at the end of that period, which it so
+incomparably sums up&#8212;not at the beginning, when its perfection would be
+as incomprehensible as the less absolute achievement displayed in other
+early pieces which such a classification as this would place after the
+Borghese picture. The accompanying reproduction obviates all necessity
+<a name="Page_36"></a>for a detailed description. Titian painted
+afterwards perhaps more
+wonderfully still&#8212;with a more sweeping vigour of brush, with a higher
+authority, and a play of light as brilliant and diversified. He never
+attained to a higher finish and perfection of its kind, or more
+admirably suited the technical means to the thing to be achieved. He
+never so completely gave back, coloured with the splendour of his own
+genius, the rays received from Giorgione. The delicious sunset
+landscape
+has all the Giorgionesque elements, with more spaciousness, and lines
+of
+a still more suave harmony. The grand Venetian <i>donna</i> who sits
+sumptuously robed, flower-crowned, and even gloved, at the sculptured
+classic fount is the noblest in her pride of loveliness, as she is one
+of the first, of the long line of voluptuous beauties who will occupy
+the greatest brushes of the Cinquecento. The little love-god who,
+insidiously intervening, paddles in the water of the fountain and
+troubles its surface, is Titian's very own, owing nothing to any
+forerunner. The divinely beautiful <i>Profane Love</i>&#8212;or, as we shall
+presently see, <i>Venus</i>&#8212;is the most flawless presentment of female
+loveliness unveiled that modern art has known up to this date, save
+only
+the <i>Venus</i> of Giorgione himself (in the Dresden Gallery), to
+which it
+can be but little posterior. The radiant freshness of the face, with
+its
+glory of half-unbound hair, does not, indeed, equal the sovereign
+loveliness of the Dresden <i>Venus</i> or the disquieting charm of the
+Giovanelli <i>Zingarella</i> (properly Hypsipyle). Its beauty is all
+on the
+surface, while theirs stimulates the imagination of the beholder. The
+body with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and
+movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true
+Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous
+drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high
+lights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that
+Titian
+ever achieved. Only in the late <i>Venere del Pardo</i>, which so
+closely
+follows the chief motive of Giorgione's <i>Venus</i>, does he approach
+it in
+frankness and purity. Far more genuinely classic is it in spirit,
+because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, than
+anything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous
+in
+their study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.<a
+ name="FNanchor_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19"><sup>[19]</sup></a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Sacred_and_Profane_Love."></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 244px;" alt="Sacred and Profane Love."
+ title="Sacred and Profane Love." src="images/image07.jpg" /></p>
+<p><a name="Page_37"></a>It is impossible to discuss here in detail all
+the conjectural
+explanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popular
+of all Venetian pictures&#8212;least of all that strange one brought forward
+by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the <i>Artless and Sated Love</i>, for
+which they
+have found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves in
+an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show but a languid desire to
+solve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the
+pictures
+described by Marcantonio Michiel (the <i>Anonimo</i> of Jacopo
+Morelli), in
+the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the <i>Inferno with
+Aeneas and Anchises</i> and <i>Landscape with the Birth of Paris</i>,
+Herr Franz
+Wickhoff<a name="FNanchor_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20"><sup>[20]</sup></a>
+has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring
+crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of
+Barbarelli's best known works. The <i>Three Philosophers</i> he calls
+<i>Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas</i>, the Giovanelli <i>Tempest with the
+Gipsy
+and the Soldier</i> he explains anew as <i>Admetus and Hypsipyle</i>.<a
+ name="FNanchor_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21"><sup>[21]</sup></a> The
+subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and
+popularly called, or rather miscalled, the <i>Dream of Raphael</i>, is
+recognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione.
+He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the
+commentator of Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping
+side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it),
+the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in
+peaceful sleep.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_38"></a>Passing over to the Giorgionesque period of
+Titian, he boldly sets to
+work on the world-famous <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, and shows us
+the
+Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned
+humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the
+<i>Argonautica</i> of Valerius Flaccus&#8212;that wearisome imitation of the
+similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea&#8212;the sumptuously
+attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)&#8212;sits at the fountain in
+unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and
+holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not
+yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love
+is the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comes
+Venus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea's father,
+irresistibly pleading that she shall go to the alien lover, who waits
+in
+the wood. It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in the
+toils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is the
+subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible&#8212;in Titian's realisation
+of the legend&#8212;to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main theme
+upon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing<a
+ name="FNanchor_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22"><sup>[22]</sup></a> had
+already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when
+he
+described the Borghese picture as <i>The Maiden with Venus and Amor at
+the
+Well</i>. The <i>vraisemblance</i> of Herr Wickhoff's brilliant
+interpretation
+becomes the greater when we reflect that Titian at least twice
+afterwards borrowed subjects from classical antiquity, taking his
+<i>Worship of Venus</i>, now at Madrid, from the <i>Erotes</i> of
+Philostratus,
+and our own wonderful <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i> at the National
+Gallery from
+the <i>Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos</i> of Catullus. In the future
+it is
+quite possible that the Austrian savant may propose new and precise
+interpretations for the <i>Three Ages</i> and for Giorgione's <i>Concert
+Champ&ecirc;tre</i> at the Louvre.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Herodias"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 642px;"
+ alt="Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq."
+ title="Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq."
+ src="images/image08.jpg" /></p>
+<p>It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student
+of
+Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him
+at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young
+poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly
+allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have
+hard,
+clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours.
+It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere of pause and
+quiet <a name="Page_39"></a>that they bring with them, the way in
+which they indefinably take
+possession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond their
+radiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet
+we
+need not mourn overmuch, or too painfully set to work to revise our
+whole <a name="Page_40"></a>conception of Venetian idyllic art as
+matured in the first years
+of the Cinquecento. True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo,
+not
+less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian
+and
+Giorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and
+the
+lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they
+have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would
+no
+doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more
+fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular
+to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic
+legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of
+the golden prime disdained to represent&#8212;or it may be unconsciously
+shrank from representing&#8212;the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic
+and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. Giorgione
+embodies in such a picture as the <i>Adrastus and Hypsipyle</i>, or
+the
+<i>Aeneas and Evander</i>, not so much what has been related to him of
+those
+ancient legends as his own mood when he is brought into contact with
+them; he transposes his motive from a dramatic into a lyrical
+atmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something "rich
+and strange," coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmly
+human fantasy. Titian, in the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, as for
+identification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep close
+to the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. But
+for all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, for
+the splendour of female loveliness unveiled, for the piquant contrast
+of
+female loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He
+has
+presented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such a
+delightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries
+to
+decipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian in these exquisite
+idylls&#8212;for so we may still dare to call them&#8212;have consciously or
+unconsciously achieved, is the indissoluble union of humanity outwardly
+quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion, to the
+environing nature. It is Nature herself that in these true painted
+poems
+mysteriously responds, that interprets to the beholder the moods of
+man,
+much as a mighty orchestra&#8212;Nature ordered and controlled&#8212;may by its
+undercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the very
+personages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so
+we
+may be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his <a name="Page_41"></a>new
+interpretations,
+not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first
+acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our
+old
+ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art
+from
+another and a more prosaic, because a more precise and literal,
+standpoint.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Vanitas"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 631px;"
+ alt="Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ title="Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ src="images/image09.jpg" /></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_42"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<br />
+<h3><i>Frescoes of the Scuola del Santo&#8212;The "Herodias" type of
+picture&#8212;Holy
+Families and Sacred Conversations&#8212;Date of the "Cristo della Moneta" Is
+the "Concert" of the Pitti by Titian?&#8212;The "Bacchanal" of Alnwick
+Castle</i>.</h3>
+<br />
+<p>It has been pointed out by Titian's biographers that the wars which
+followed upon the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing all
+over North Italy the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation.
+It was not long after this&#8212;on the death of his master Giorgione&#8212;that
+Sebastiano Luciani migrated to Rome and, so far as he could, shook off
+his allegiance to the new Venetian art; it was then that Titian
+temporarily left the city of his adoption to do work in fresco at Padua
+and Vicenza. If the date 1508, given by Vasari for the great
+frieze-like
+wood-engraving, <i>The Triumph of Faith</i>, be accepted, it must be
+held
+that it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi<a
+ name="FNanchor_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23"><sup>[23]</sup></a>
+cites
+painted compositions of the <i>Triumph</i> as either the originals or
+the
+repetitions of the wood-engravings, for which Titian himself drew the
+blocks. The frescoes themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out on
+the walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished;
+but that they ever came into existence there would not appear to be any
+direct evidence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in the
+process of translation into wood-engraving, are not materially at
+variance with those in the frescoes of the Scuola del Santo. But the
+movement, the spirit of the whole is essentially different. This
+mighty,
+onward-sweeping procession, with Adam and Eve, the Patriarchs, the
+Prophets and Sibyls, the martyred Innocents, the great chariot with
+Christ enthroned, drawn by the four Doctors of the Church and impelled
+forward by the Emblems of the four <a name="Page_43"></a>Evangelists,
+with a great company of
+Apostles and Martyrs following, has all the vigour and elasticity, all
+the decorative amplitude that is wanting in the frescoes of the Santo.
+It is obvious that inspiration was derived from the <i>Triumphs</i> of
+Mantegna, then already so widely popularised by numerous engravings.
+Titian and those under whose inspiration he worked here obviously
+intended an antithesis to the great series of canvases presenting the
+apotheosis of Julius Caesar, which were then to be seen in the not far
+distant Mantua. Have we here another pictorial <a name="Page_44"></a>commentary,
+like the
+famous <i>Cristo detta Moneta,</i> with which we shall have to deal
+presently, on the "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo," which
+was the favourite device of Alfonso of Ferrara and the legend round his
+gold coins? The whole question is interesting, and deserves more
+careful
+consideration than can be accorded to it on the present occasion.
+Hardly
+again, until he reached extreme old age, did such an impulse of sacred
+passion colour the art of the painter of Cadore as here. In the earlier
+section of his life-work the <i>Triumph of Faith</i> constitutes a
+striking
+exception.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St_Anthony_of_Padua"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 549px;"
+ alt="St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak. Fresco in the Scuola del Santo, Padua. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak. Fresco in the Scuola del Santo, Padua. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image10.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Passing over, as relatively unimportant, Titian's share in the
+much-defaced fresco decorations of the Scuola del Carmine, we come now
+to those more celebrated ones in the Scuola del Santo. Out of the
+sixteen frescoes executed in 1510-11 by Titian, in concert with
+Domenico
+Campagnola and other assistants of less fame, the following three are
+from the brush of the master himself:&#8212;<i>St. Anthony causes a new-born
+Infant to speak, testifying to the innocence of its Mother; St. Anthony
+heals the leg of a Youth; A jealous Husband puts to death his Wife,
+whom
+the Saint afterwards restores to life.</i> Here the figures, the
+composition, the beautiful landscape backgrounds bear unmistakably the
+trace of Giorgione's influence. The composition has just the timidity,
+the lack of rhythm and variety, that to the last marks that of
+Barbarelli. The figures have his na&iuml;ve truth, his warmth and
+splendour
+of life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift the
+uninspiring subjects a little above the actual. The <i>Nobleman
+putting to
+death his Wife</i> is dramatic, almost terrible in its fierce, awkward
+realism, yet it does not rise much higher in interpretation than what
+our neighbours would to-day call the <i>drame passionel.</i> The
+interest is
+much the same that is aroused in a student of Elizabethan literature by
+that study of murder, <i>Arden of Feversham</i>, not that higher
+attraction
+that he feels&#8212;horrors notwithstanding&#8212;for <i>The Maid's Tragedy</i> of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, or <i>The Duchess of Malfi</i> of Webster.<a
+ name="FNanchor_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24"><sup>[24]</sup></a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Noli_me_tangere"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 653px;"
+ alt="&quot;Noli me tangere.&quot; National Gallery. From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company."
+ title="&quot;Noli me tangere.&quot; National Gallery. From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company."
+ src="images/image11.jpg" /></p>
+<p><a name="Page_47"></a>A convenient date for the magnificent <i>St.
+Mark enthroned, with SS.
+Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas, and Damianus</i>, is 1512, when Titian, having
+completed his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned to
+Venice. True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in the
+truculent <i>St. Mark</i>; but, then, as essentially so were the
+frescoes
+just terminated. The noble altar-piece<a name="FNanchor_25"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_25"><sup>[25]</sup></a> symbolises, or rather
+commemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with the
+terrors of the League of Cambrai:&#8212;on the one side St. Sebastian,
+standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, St. Roch
+for
+plague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, SS. Cosmas and
+Damianus, suggesting the healing of these evils. The colour is
+Giorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli's own is so to be
+described. Especially does it show points of contact with that of the
+so-called <i>Three Philosophers</i>, which, on the authority of
+Marcantonio
+Michiel (the <i>Anonimo</i>), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of
+the
+last works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is both
+sumptuous and boldly contrasted in the local hues, the sovereign unity
+of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, by
+any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate
+Giorgionesques.
+Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione
+successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a
+more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These last
+are among the most admirable portrait-figures in the life-work of
+Titian. In them a simplicity, a concentration akin to that of Giovanni
+Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and
+flexibility of Barbarelli. The St. Sebastian is the most beautiful
+among
+the youthful male figures, as the <i>Venus</i> of Giorgione and the
+Venus of
+the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i> are the most beautiful among the
+female
+figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such
+presentments of youth in its flower abounded. There is something
+androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the
+strength
+and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its
+suavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that a
+delight in portraying the fresh comeliness, the elastic beauty of form
+proper to the youth just passing into the man was common to many
+Venetian <a name="Page_48"></a>painters at this stage, and coloured
+their art as it had
+coloured the whole art of Greece.</p>
+<p>Hereabouts the writer would like to place the singularly attractive,
+yet
+a little puzzling, <i>Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd</i>,
+which is No. 4 in the National Gallery. The type of the landscape is
+early, and even for that time the execution in this particular is, for
+Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially the
+projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against
+the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. The
+noble type and the stilted attitude of the <i>St. Joseph</i> suggest
+the <i>St.
+Mark</i> of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket
+of
+the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of
+Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the
+Salute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, by
+a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no
+means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly
+in the <i>St. Anthony causing a new-born Infant to speak</i>, of the
+Scuola.
+Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of
+the early time before complete freedom of design was attained.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St_Mark_enthroned"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 808px;"
+ alt="St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della Salute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ title="St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della Salute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ src="images/image12.jpg" /></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_madonna_with_the_cherries"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 453px;"
+ alt="The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by L&ouml;wy."
+ title="The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by L&ouml;wy."
+ src="images/image13.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The splendidly beautiful <i>Herodias with the head of St. John the
+Baptist</i>, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone,
+but by
+Morelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian,
+belongs to about the same time as the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>,
+and
+would therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Padua
+and Vicenza. The intention has been not so much to emphasise the tragic
+character of the motive as to exhibit to the highest advantage the
+voluptuous charm, the languid indifference of a Venetian beauty posing
+for Herod's baleful consort. Repetitions of this <i>Herodias</i> exist
+in the
+Northbrook Collection and in that of Mr. R.H. Benson. The latter, which
+is presumably from the workshop of the master, and shows variations in
+one or two unimportant particulars from the Doria picture, is here,
+failing the original, reproduced with the kind permission of the owner.
+A conception traceable back to Giorgione would appear to underlie, not
+only this Doria picture, but that <i>Herodias</i> which at Dorchester
+House
+is, for not obvious reasons, attributed to Pordenone, and another
+similar one by Palma Vecchio, of which a late copy exists <a
+ name="Page_51"></a>in the
+collection of the Earl of Chichester. Especially is this community of
+origin noticeable in the head of St. John on the charger, as it appears
+in each of these works. All of them again show a family resemblance in
+this particular respect to the interesting full-length <i>Judith</i>
+at the
+Hermitage, now ascribed to Giorgione, to the over-painted half-length
+<i>Judith</i> in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice, and to
+Hollar's
+print after a picture supposed by the engraver to give the portrait of
+Giorgione himself in the character of David, the slayer of Goliath.<a
+ name="FNanchor_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26"><sup>[26]</sup></a>
+<a name="Page_52"></a>The sumptuous but much-injured <i>Vanitas</i>,
+which is No. 1110 in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich&#8212;a beautiful woman of the same opulent type as the
+<i>Herodias</i>, holding a mirror which reflects jewels and other
+symbols of
+earthly vanity&#8212;may be classed with the last-named work. Again we owe it
+to Morelli<a name="FNanchor_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27"><sup>[27]</sup></a>
+that this painting, ascribed by Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle&#8212;as the <i>Herodias</i> was ascribed&#8212;to Pordenone, has
+been
+with general acceptance classed among the early works of Titian. The
+popular <i>Flora</i> of the Uffizi, a beautiful thing still, though
+all the
+bloom of its beauty has been effaced, must be placed rather later in
+this section of Titian's life-work, displaying as it does a technique
+more facile and accomplished, and a conception of a somewhat higher
+individuality. The model is surely the same as that which has served
+for
+the Venus of the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, though the picture
+comes
+some years after that piece. Later still comes the so-called <i>Alfonso
+d'Este and Laura Dianti</i>, as to which something will be said farther
+on.
+Another puzzle is provided by the beautiful "<i>Noli me tangere</i>" of
+the
+National Gallery, which must necessarily have its place somewhere here
+among the early works. Giorgionesque the picture still is, and most
+markedly so in the character of the beautiful landscape; yet the
+execution shows an altogether unusual freedom and mastery for that
+period. The <i>Magdalen</i> is, appropriately enough, of the same type
+as the
+exquisite, golden blond courtezans&#8212;or, if you will, models&#8212;who
+constantly appear and reappear in this period of Venetian art. Hardly
+anywhere has the painter exhibited a more wonderful freedom and
+subtlety
+of brush than in the figure of the Christ, in which glowing flesh is so
+finely set off by the white of fluttering, half-transparent draperies.
+The canvas has exquisite colour, almost without colours; the only local
+tint of any very defined character being the dark red of the Magdalen's
+robe. Yet a certain affectation, a certain exaggeration of fluttering
+movement and strained attitude repel the beholder a little at first,
+and
+neutralise for him the rare beauties of the canvas. It is as if a wave
+of some strange transient influence had passed over Titian at this
+moment, then again to be dissipated.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Page_53"></a><a
+ name="Madonna_and_Child"></a><img style="width: 512px; height: 386px;"
+ alt="Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by Brogi."
+ title="Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by Brogi."
+ src="images/image14.jpg" /></p>
+<p><a name="Page_54"></a>But to turn now once more to the series of our
+master's Holy Families
+and Sacred Conversations which began with <i>La Zingarella</i>, and
+was
+continued with the <i>Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida</i>
+of
+Madrid. The most popular of all those belonging to this still early
+time
+is the <i>Virgin with the Cherries</i> in the Vienna Gallery. Here the
+painter is already completely himself. He will go much farther in
+breadth if not in polish, in transparency, in forcefulness, if not in
+attractiveness of colour; but he is now, in sacred art at any rate,
+practically free from outside influences. For the pensive girl-Madonna
+of Giorgione we now have the radiant young matron of Titian, joyous yet
+calm in her play with the infant Christ, while the Madonna of his
+master
+and friend was unrestful and full of tender foreboding even in seeming
+repose. Pretty close on this must have followed the <i>Madonna and
+Child
+with St. Stephen, St. Ambrose and St. Maurice</i>, No 439 in the
+Louvre, in
+which the rich colour-harmonies strike a somewhat deeper note. An
+atelier repetition of this fine original is No. 166 in the Vienna
+Gallery; the only material variation traceable in this last-named
+example being that in lieu of St. Ambrose, wearing a kind of biretta,
+we
+have St. Jerome bareheaded.</p>
+<p>Very near in time and style to this particular series, with which it
+may
+safely be grouped, is the beautiful and finely preserved <i>Holy Family</i>
+in the Bridgewater Gallery, where it is still erroneously attributed to
+Palma Vecchio. It is to be found in the same private apartment on the
+groundfloor of Bridgewater House, that contains the <i>Three Ages</i>.
+Deep
+glowing richness of colour and smooth perfection without smallness of
+finish make this picture remarkable, notwithstanding its lack of any
+deeper significance. Nor must there be forgotten in an enumeration of
+the early Holy Families, one of the loveliest of all, the <i>Madonna
+and
+Child with the infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot</i>, which adorns
+the
+Venetian section of the Uffizi Gallery. Here the relationship to
+Giorgione is more clearly shown than in any of these Holy Families of
+the first period, and in so far the painting, which cannot be placed
+very early among them, constitutes a partial exception in the series.
+The Virgin is of a more refined and pensive type than in the <i>Madonna
+with the Cherries</i> of Vienna, or the <i>Madonna with Saints</i>,
+No. 439 in
+the Louvre, and the divine Bambino less robust in build and aspect. The
+magnificent St. Anthony is quite Giorgionesque in the serenity tinged
+with sadness of his contemplative mood.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Virgin_and_Child_with_Saints"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 431px;"
+ alt="Virgin and Child with Saints. From a photograph by Bra&uuml;n-Clement &amp; Cie."
+ title="Virgin and Child with Saints. From a photograph by Bra&uuml;n-Clement &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image15.jpg" /></p>
+<p><a name="Page_55"></a>Last of all in this particular group&#8212;another
+work in respect of which
+Morelli has played the rescuer&#8212;is the <i>Madonna and Child with four
+Saints</i>, No. 168 in the Dresden Gallery, a much-injured but
+eminently
+Titianesque work, which may be said to bring this particular series to
+within a couple of years or so of the <i>Assunta</i>&#8212;that great
+landmark of
+the first period of maturity. The type of the Madonna here is still
+very
+similar to that in the <i>Madonna with the Cherries</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St._Eustace"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 382px;"
+ alt="St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the Stag. From a Drawing by Titian in the British Museum."
+ title="St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the Stag. From a Drawing by Titian in the British Museum."
+ src="images/image16.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Apart from all these sacred works, and in every respect an
+exceptional
+production, is the world-famous <i>Cristo della Moneta</i> of the
+Dresden
+Gallery. As to the exact date to be assigned to this panel among the
+early works of Titian considerable difficulty exists. For once agreeing
+with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Morelli is inclined to disregard the
+testimony of Vasari, from whose text it would result that it was
+painted
+in or after the year 1514, and to place it as far back as 1508.
+Notwithstanding this weight of authority the writer is strongly
+inclined, following Vasari in this instance, and trusting to certain
+<a name="Page_56"></a>indications furnished by the picture itself, to
+return to the date 1514
+or thereabouts. There is no valid reason to doubt that the <i>Christ
+of
+the Tribute-Money</i> was painted for Alfonso I. of Ferrara, and the
+less
+so, seeing that it so aptly illustrates the already quoted legend on
+his
+coins: "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo." According to
+Vasari, it was painted <i>nella porta d'un armario</i>&#8212;that is to say,
+in
+the door of a press or wardrobe. But this statement need not be taken
+in
+its most literal sense. If it were to be assumed from this passage that
+the picture was painted on the spot, its date must be advanced to 1516,
+since Titian did not pay his first visit to Ferrara before that year.
+There is no sufficient ground, however, for assuming that he did not
+execute his wonderful panel in the usual fashion&#8212;that is to say, at
+home in Venice. The last finishing touches might, perhaps, have been
+given to it <i>in situ</i>, as they were to Bellini's <i>Bacchanal</i>,
+done also
+for the Duke of Ferrara. The extraordinary finish of the painting,
+which
+is hardly to be paralleled in this respect in the life-work of the
+artist, may have been due to his desire to "show his hand" to his new
+patron in a subject which touched him so nearly. And then the finish is
+not of the Quattrocento type, not such as we find, for instance, in the
+<i>Leonardo Loredano</i> of Giovanni Bellini, the finest panels of
+Cima, or
+the early <i>Christ bearing the Cross</i> of Giorgione. In it
+exquisite
+polish of surface and consummate rendering of detail are combined with
+the utmost breadth and majesty of composition, with a now perfect
+freedom in the casting of the draperies. It is difficult, indeed, to
+imagine that this masterpiece&#8212;so eminently a work of the Cinquecento,
+and one, too, in which the master of Cadore rose superior to all
+influences, even to that of Giorgione&#8212;could have been painted in 1508,
+that is some two years before Bellini's <i>Baptism of Christ</i> in S.
+Corona, and in all probability before the <i>Three Philosophers</i> of
+Giorgione himself. The one of Titian's own early pictures with which it
+appears to the writer to have most in common&#8212;not so much in technique,
+indeed, as in general style&#8212;is the <i>St. Mark</i> of the Salute, and
+than
+this it is very much less Giorgionesque. To praise the <i>Cristo della
+Moneta</i> anew after it has been so incomparably well praised seems
+almost
+an impertinence. The soft radiance of the colour so well matches the
+tempered majesty, the infinite mansuetude of the conception; the
+spirituality, which is of the essence of the august subject, <a
+ name="Page_57"></a><a name="Page_58"></a>is so
+happily expressed, without any sensible diminution of the splendour of
+Renaissance art approaching its highest. And yet nothing could well be
+simpler than the scheme of colour as compared with the complex
+harmonies
+which Venetian art in a somewhat later phase affected. Frank contrasts
+are established between the tender, glowing flesh of the Christ, seen
+in
+all the glory of achieved manhood, and the coarse, brown skin of the
+son
+of the people who appears as the Pharisee; between the bright yet
+tempered red of His robe and the deep blue of His mantle. But the
+golden
+glow, which is Titian's own, envelops the contrasting figures and the
+contrasting hues in its harmonising atmosphere, and gives unity to the
+whole.<a name="FNanchor_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28"><sup>[28]</sup></a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Cristo_della_Moneta"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 710px;"
+ alt="The &quot;Cristo della Moneta.&quot; Dresden Gallery. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ title="The &quot;Cristo della Moneta.&quot; Dresden Gallery. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ src="images/image17.jpg" /></p>
+<p>A small group of early portraits&#8212;all of them somewhat difficult to
+place&#8212;call for attention before we proceed. Probably the earliest
+portrait among those as yet recognised as from the hand of our
+painter&#8212;leaving out of the question the <i>Baffo</i> and the
+portrait-figures in the great <i>St. Mark</i> of the Salute&#8212;is the
+magnificent <i>Ariosto</i> in the Earl of Darnley's Collection at
+Cobham
+Hall.<a name="FNanchor_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29"><sup>[29]</sup></a>
+There is very considerable doubt, to say the least, as to
+whether this half-length really represents the court poet of Ferrara,
+but the point requires more elaborate discussion than can be here
+conceded to it. Thoroughly Giorgionesque is the soberly tinted yet
+sumptuous picture in its general arrangement, as in its general tone,
+and in this respect it is the fitting companion and the descendant of
+Giorgione's <i>Antonio Broccardo</i> at Buda-Pesth, of his <i>Knight
+of Malta</i>
+at the Uffizi. Its resemblance, moreover, is, as regards the general
+lines of the composition, a very striking one to the celebrated Sciarra
+<i>Violin-Player</i> by Sebastiano del Piombo, now in the gallery of
+Baron
+Alphonse Rothschild at Paris, where it is as heretofore given to
+Raphael.<a name="FNanchor_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30"><sup>[30]</sup></a>
+The handsome, <a name="Page_59"></a><a name="Page_61"></a>manly head
+has lost both subtlety and
+character through some too severe process of cleaning, but Venetian art
+has hardly anything more magnificent to show than the costume, with the
+quilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin which occupies so prominent a
+place in the picture.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a
+ name="Madonna_and_Child_with_four_saints"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 370px;"
+ alt="Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ title="Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ src="images/image18.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The so-called <i>Concert</i> of the Pitti Palace, which depicts a
+young
+Augustinian monk as he plays on a keyed instrument, having on one side
+of him a youthful cavalier in a plumed hat, on the other a bareheaded
+clerk holding a bass-viol, was, until Morelli arose, almost universally
+looked upon as one of the most typical Giorgiones.<a name="FNanchor_31"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_31"><sup>[31]</sup></a> The most gifted
+of the purely aesthetic critics who have approached the Italian
+Renaissance, Walter Pater, actually built round this <i>Concert</i>
+his
+exquisite study on the School of Giorgione. There can be little doubt,
+notwithstanding, that Morelli was right in denying the authorship of
+Barbarelli, and tentatively, for he does no more, assigning the so
+subtly attractive and pathetic <i>Concert</i> to the early time of
+Titian. To
+express a definitive opinion on the latter point in the present state
+of
+<a name="Page_62"></a>the picture would be somewhat hazardous. The
+portrait of the modish
+young cavalier and that of the staid elderly clerk, whose baldness
+renders tonsure impossible&#8212;that is just those portions of the canvas
+which are least well preserved&#8212;are also those that least conclusively
+suggest our master. The passion-worn, ultra-sensitive physiognomy of
+the
+young Augustinian is, undoubtedly, in its very essence a Giorgionesque
+creation, for the fellows of which we must turn to the Castelfranco
+master's just now cited <i>Antonio Broccardo</i>, to his male
+portraits in
+Berlin and at the Uffizi, to his figure of the youthful Pallas, son of
+Evander, in the <i>Three Philosophers</i>. Closer to it, all the same,
+are
+the <i>Raffo</i> and the two portraits in the <i>St. Mark</i> of the
+Salute, and
+closer still is the supremely fine <i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i> of the
+Salon
+Carr&eacute;, that later production of Vecelli's early time. The <i>Concert</i>
+of
+the Pitti, so far as it can be judged through the retouches that cover
+it, displays an art certainly not finer or more delicate, but yet in
+its
+technical processes broader, swifter, and more synthetic than anything
+that we can with certainty point to in the life-work of Barbarelli. The
+large but handsome and flexible hands of the player are much nearer in
+type and treatment to Titian than they are to his master. The beautiful
+motive&#8212;music for one happy moment uniting by invisible bonds of
+sympathy three human beings&#8212;is akin to that in the <i>Three Ages</i>,
+though
+there love steps in as the beautifier of rustic harmony. It is to be
+found also in Giorgione's <i>Concert Champ&ecirc;tre</i>, in the
+Louvre, in which
+the thrumming of the lute is, however, one among many delights
+appealing
+to the senses. This smouldering heat, this tragic passion in which
+youth
+revels, looking back already with discontent, yet forward also with
+unquenchable yearning, is the keynote of the Giorgionesque and the
+early
+Titianesque male portraiture. It is summed up by the <i>Antonio
+Broccardo</i>
+of the first, by the <i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i> of the second.
+Altogether
+other, and less due to a reaction from physical ardour, is the
+exquisite
+sensitiveness of Lorenzo Lotto, who sees most willingly in his sitters
+those qualities that are in the closest sympathy with his own
+highly-strung nature, and loves to present them as some secret,
+indefinable woe tears at their heart-strings. A strong element of the
+Giorgionesque pathos informs still and gives charm to the Sciarra
+<i>Violin-Player</i> of Sebastiano del Piombo; only that there it is
+already
+tempered by the haughty self-restraint more proper to Florentine and
+Roman <a name="Page_63"></a>portraiture. There is little or nothing to
+add after this as to
+the <i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i>, except that as a representation of
+aristocratic youth it has hardly a parallel among the master's works
+except, perhaps, a later and equally admirable, though less
+distinguished, portrait in the Pitti.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Jeune_Homme_au_gant"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 610px;"
+ alt="Jeune Homme au gant. Walter L. Colls. ph. sc. From a Photograph by Bra&uuml;n Clement &amp; Cie."
+ title="Jeune Homme au gant. Walter L. Colls. ph. sc. From a Photograph by Bra&uuml;n Clement &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image19.jpg" /><br />
+</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="A_Concert"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 483px;"
+ alt="A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image20.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of the
+Venetians, painted in the <i>pensieroso</i> mood his portraits of
+high-bred
+English cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest manhood,
+was this particular aspect of youth in its flower again depicted with
+the same felicity.<a name="FNanchor_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32"><sup>[32]</sup></a></p>
+<p><a name="Page_64"></a>To Crowe and Cavalcaselle's pages the reader
+must be referred for a
+detailed and interesting account of Titian's intrigues against the
+venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office
+of
+broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. We see there how,
+on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo
+proposed to Titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the
+Tenth (Giovanni de' Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such a
+step. Titian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds to
+petition the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker's patent for
+life, on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions
+as
+are conceded to Giovanni Bellini. The petition is presented on the 31st
+of May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that day moves and carries a
+resolution accepting Titian's offer with all the conditions attached.
+Though he has arrived at the extreme limit of his splendid career, old
+Gian Bellino, who has just given new proof of his still transcendent
+power in the great altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), which
+is in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit still
+under the encroachments of his dangerous competitor, younger than
+himself by half a century. On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Ten
+revokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares that
+Titian is not to receive his broker's patent on the first vacancy, but
+must wait his turn. Seemingly nothing daunted, Titian petitions again,
+asking for the reversion of the particular broker's patent which will
+become vacant on the death of Giovanni Bellini; and this new offer,
+which stipulates for certain special payments and provisions, is
+accepted by the Council. Titian, like most other holders of the
+much-coveted office, shows himself subsequently much more eager to
+receive its not inconsiderable emoluments than to finish the pictures,
+the painting of which is the one essential duty attached to the office.
+Some further bargaining takes place with the Council on the 18th of
+January 1516, but, a few days after the death of Giovanni Bellini at
+the
+end of November in the same year, fresh resolutions are passed
+post<a name="Page_65"></a>poning the grant to Titian of Bellini's
+patent; notwithstanding
+which, there is conclusive evidence of a later date to show that he is
+allowed the full enjoyment of his "Senseria in Fontego di Tedeschi"
+(sic), with all its privileges and immunities, before the close
+of
+this same year, 1516.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Portrait_of_a_Man"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 663px;"
+ alt="Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ title="Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ src="images/image21.jpg" /></p>
+<p>It is in this year that Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, and
+entered <a name="Page_66"></a>into relations with Alfonso I., which
+were to become more
+intimate as the position of the master became greater and more
+universally recognised in Italy. It was here, as we may safely assume,
+that he completed, or, it may be, repaired, Giovanni Bellini's last
+picture, the great <i>Bacchanal</i> or <i>Feast of the Gods on Earth</i>,
+now at
+Alnwick Castle. It is there that he obtained the commission for two
+famous works, the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>,
+designed, in
+continuation of the series commenced with Bellini's <i>Feast of the
+Gods</i>,
+to adorn a favourite apartment in Alfonso's castle of Ferrara; the
+series being completed a little later on by that crown and climax of
+the
+whole set, the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i> of the National Gallery.</p>
+<p>Bellini appears in an unfamiliar phase in this final production of
+his
+magnificent old age, on which the signature, together with the date,
+1514, so carefully noted by Vasari, is still most distinctly to be
+read.
+Much less Giorgionesque&#8212;if the term be in this case permissible&#8212;and
+more Quattrocentist in style than in the immediately preceding
+altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, he is here hardly less
+interesting. All admirers of his art are familiar with the four
+beautiful <i>Allegories</i> of the Accademia delle Belle Arti at
+Venice,
+which constitute, besides the present picture, almost his sole
+excursion
+into the regions of pagan mythology and symbolism. These belong,
+however, to a considerably earlier period of his maturity, and show a
+fire which in the <i>Bacchanal</i> has died out.<a name="FNanchor_33"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_33"><sup>[33]</sup></a> Vasari describes this
+<i>Bacchanal</i> as "one of the most beautiful works ever executed by
+Gian
+Bellino," and goes on to remark that it has in the draperies "a certain
+angular (or cutting) quality in accordance with the German style." He
+strangely attributes this to an imitation of D&uuml;rer's <i>Rosenkranzfest</i>,
+painted some eight years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo,
+adjacent to the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. This particularity, noted by the
+author of the <i>Vite</i>, and, in some passages, a certain hardness
+and
+opacity of colour, give rise to the surmise that, even in the parts of
+the picture which belong to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti may be
+traced. It was he who most probably painted the background and the
+figure of St. Jerome in the master's altar-piece finished in <a
+ name="Page_67"></a>the
+preceding year for S. Giovanni Crisostomo; it was he, too, who to a
+great extent executed, though he cannot have wholly devised, the
+Bellinesque <i>Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints</i> in the Church of
+San
+Pietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period. Even in
+the <i>Madonna</i> of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian
+Bellino's
+finest landscape of the late time, certain hardnesses of colour in the
+main group <a name="Page_68"></a>suggest the possibility of a minor
+co-operation by Basaiti.
+Some passages of the <i>Bacchanal</i>, however&#8212;especially the figures
+of the
+two blond, fair-breasted goddesses or nymphs who, in a break in the
+trees, stand relieved against the yellow bands of a sunset sky&#8212;are as
+beautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase has
+produced up to the date of the picture's appearance. Very suggestive of
+Bellini is the way in which the hair of some of the personages is
+dressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced by
+artificial means. These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in his
+earliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid.
+Still this coiffure&#8212;for as such it must be designated&#8212;is to be found
+more or less throughout the master's career. It is very noticeable in
+the <i>Allegories</i> just mentioned.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Alessandro_de_Medici"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 655px;"
+ alt="Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a Photograph by Spooner &amp; Co."
+ title="Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a Photograph by Spooner &amp; Co."
+ src="images/image22.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Infinitely pathetic is the old master's vain attempt to infuse into
+the
+chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires. An
+atmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously
+betraying
+life-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like fire
+through the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and Titian. The
+audacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rustic
+festival, in which the gods unbend and, after the homelier fashion of
+mortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, it
+would seem, only <i>pour la forme</i>. A careful examination of the
+picture
+substantially confirms Vasari's story that the <i>Feast of the Gods</i>
+was
+painted upon by Titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in many
+passages a Titianesque hand. It may well be, at the same time, that
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what the
+younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the
+elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left
+unfinished by him. The whole conception, the <i>charpente</i>, the
+contours
+of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are the
+carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the
+branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of the
+picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground
+with
+its small pebbles.<a name="FNanchor_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34"><sup>[34]</sup></a>
+Even <a name="Page_69"></a>the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a
+castle sunset-lit&#8212;so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and
+its castle&#8212;is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution. By
+Titian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that might be taken to
+betray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, the
+cloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, the
+upper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to the
+right. If it is Titian that we have here, as certainly appears most
+probable, he cannot be deemed to have exerted his full powers in
+completing or developing the Bellinesque landscape. The task may well,
+indeed, have presented itself to him as an uninviting one. There is
+nothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the
+exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the <i>Three Ages</i> and the <i>Sacred
+and Profane Love</i>, while the broader handling suggests rather the
+technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which
+opens out in the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_70"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3><i>The "Worship of Venus" and "Bacchanal" Place in Art of the
+"Assunta"&#8212;The "Bacchus and Ariadne"&#8212;So-called Portraits of Alfonso of
+Ferrara and Laura Dianti&#8212;The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia&#8212;Altar-pieces
+at Ancona and in the Vatican&#8212;The "Entombment" of the Louvre&#8212;The
+"Madonna di Casa Pesaro"&#8212;Place among Titian's works of "St. Peter
+Martyr."</i></h3>
+<br />
+<p>In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosto
+brought out there his first edition of the <i>Orlando Farioso</i>.<a
+ name="FNanchor_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35"><sup>[35]</sup></a> A
+greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some
+quarters
+been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's
+career,
+when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being
+as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that
+in the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>, painted for
+Alfonso, we
+have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who
+infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian
+Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in
+their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very
+pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process
+of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from
+a
+broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and
+unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation
+to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous
+eccentricity.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_Worship_of_Venus"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 548px;"
+ alt="The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment, &amp; Cie."
+ title="The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment, &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image23.jpg" /></p>
+<p>In the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i> we have
+left behind
+<a name="Page_71"></a>already the fresh morning of Titian's genius,
+represented by the
+Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its
+bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some
+evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more
+delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The <i>Worship of Venus</i>
+might be more appropriately named <i>Games of the Loves in Honour of
+Venus</i>. The subject is taken from the <i>Imagines</i><a
+ name="FNanchor_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36"><sup>[36]</sup></a> of
+Philostratus, a
+renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman
+<a name="Page_72"></a>Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious
+grace and charm of the
+Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of
+paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples,
+but
+by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the
+author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the
+Praxitelean type&#8212;a more earthly sister of those which have been named
+the "Townley Venus" and the "V&eacute;nus d'Arles"&#8212;myriads of Loves
+sport,
+kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of
+them
+shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry
+answer
+is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the
+life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the
+splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner)
+dimmed it. These delicious pagan <i>amorini</i> are the successors of
+the
+angelic <i>putti</i> of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of
+the
+Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly
+beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the
+North,
+in touch with the South, as Albrecht D&uuml;rer, Mabuse, and Jacob
+Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred
+works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier
+and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To
+say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish
+sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at
+their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in
+similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.<a name="FNanchor_37"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_37"><sup>[37]</sup></a></p>
+<p>The sumptuous <i>Bacchanal</i>, for which, we are told, Alfonso
+gave the
+commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance <a
+ name="Page_73"></a>of a less
+delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From
+certain points of analogy with an <i>Ariadne</i> described by
+Philostratus,
+it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation
+of
+the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus,
+whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus
+is,
+however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honour
+to the god, Ariadne's new lover. The revel in a certain audacious
+abandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists have
+retired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certain
+agreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of the
+Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic
+statues
+then, and until lately, entitled <i>The Sleeping Ariadne</i>, does not
+lead
+the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so
+lately won back from despair. The undraped figure,<a name="FNanchor_38"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_38"><sup>[38]</sup></a> both in its
+attitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped
+Bacchante, or goddess, in Bellini's <i>Bacchanal</i> at Alnwick.
+Titian's
+lovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio's
+dazzling <i>Antiope</i> in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's <i>Venus</i>
+or
+Titian's own <i>Antiope</i>, in which a certain feminine dignity
+spiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise
+defenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively Titianesque
+colour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbed
+dancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to the
+spectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we find
+again in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture,
+and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the <i>Entombment</i>.</p>
+<p>The charming little <i>Tambourine Player</i>, which is No. 181 in
+the Vienna
+Gallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works just
+now described, but rather before than after them.</p>
+<p>What that is new remains to be said about the <i>Assunta</i>, or <i>Assumption
+of the Virgin</i>, which was ordered of Titian as early as 1516, but
+not
+shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until
+the
+20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetian
+altar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had <a
+ name="Page_74"></a>and
+what had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the
+world.
+Thus Raphael had produced the <i>Stanze</i>, the <i>Cartoons</i>, the
+<i>Madonnas of
+Foligno</i> and <i>San Sisto</i>, but not yet the <i>Transfiguration;</i>
+Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his <i>magnum opus</i>,
+the
+Ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four years
+earlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata in
+Florence. Among painters whom, origin notwithstanding, we must group as
+Venetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri
+at
+S. Maria Formosa his famous <i>Santa Barbara</i>; Lorenzo Lotto in the
+following year had produced his characteristic and, in its charm of
+fluttering movement, strangely unconventional altar-piece for S.
+Bartolommeo at Bergamo, the <i>Madonna with Ten Saints</i>. In none of
+these
+masterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen by
+Titian, which was far from being the case, was there any help to be
+derived in the elaboration of a work which cannot be said to have had
+any precursor in the art of Venice. There was in existence one
+altar-piece dealing with the same subject from which Titian might
+possibly have obtained a hint. This was the <i>Assumption of the Virgin</i>
+painted by D&uuml;rer in 1509 for Jacob Heller, and now only known by
+Paul
+Juvenel's copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort. The group of the
+Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and
+the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its
+fine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art. Without exercising
+a
+too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact
+between this group and the corresponding one in the <i>Assunta</i>.
+But
+Titian could not at that time have seen the original of the Heller
+altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it
+remained for a century.<a name="FNanchor_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39"><sup>[39]</sup></a>
+He no doubt did see the <i>Assumption</i> in the
+<i>Marienleben</i> completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands
+in a
+definite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more
+formal&#8212;much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The
+<i>Assunta</i> was already in Vasari's time much dimmed, and thus
+difficult
+to see in its position on the high altar. Joshua Reynolds, when he
+visited the Frari in 1752, says that "he saw it near; it was most
+terribly dark but nobly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle Belle
+Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, <a name="Page_75"></a><a
+ name="Page_77"></a>but sufficiently
+restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the
+greatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre,
+passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well
+adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly
+contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is
+triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and
+awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of
+which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of
+the
+Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling
+of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with
+awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in
+her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and
+not without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which
+her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the
+climax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous,
+more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure
+in the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual
+character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_Assunta"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 1013px;"
+ alt="The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice."
+ title="The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice."
+ src="images/image24.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Placed as the <i>Assunta</i> now is in the immediate neighbourhood
+of one of
+Tintoretto's best-preserved masterpieces, the <i>Miracolo del Schiavo</i>,
+it
+undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern
+connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely
+triumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual,
+more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that
+unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its
+agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right
+to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his
+subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above
+the earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, in
+unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in
+poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian
+stands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it were
+necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the
+life-work of the other&#8212;making the world the poorer by the loss of
+Titian or Tintoretto&#8212;can it be doubted for a moment what the choice
+would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face
+with the mighty genius of the latter?</p>
+<p><a name="Page_78"></a>But to return for a moment to the <i>Assunta</i>.
+The enlargement of
+dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent
+group
+of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It
+carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable,
+without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime
+beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank
+with the finest of those in Raphael's <i>Cartoons</i>, yet they
+preserve in a
+higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of
+vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture
+is
+the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not
+always the case with the <i>Cartoons</i>, and the reverse process,
+everywhere
+adhered to in the <i>Transfiguration</i>, is what gives to that
+overrated
+last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. Titian himself
+in the <i>St. Sebastian</i> of Brescia, and above all in the
+much-vaunted
+masterpiece, <i>The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican</i>, sins in
+the
+same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his
+better self.</p>
+<p>Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain,
+and
+only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into
+possession
+of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.<a
+ name="FNanchor_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40"><sup>[40]</sup></a>
+What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer
+opposition at the outset. In this case the public, admitted on the high
+festival of St. Bernardino's Day in the year 1518 to see the vast
+panel,
+showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than
+the friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de'
+Frari,
+and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology
+to
+the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against
+the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian's wonderful
+achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.</p>
+<p>To the year 1519 belongs the <i>Annunciation</i> in the Cathedral
+of Treviso,
+the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly
+overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits
+the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the
+foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely
+ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the
+beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to
+the Floren<a name="Page_79"></a>tines and the Sienese&#8212;both sculptors
+and painters&#8212;south of
+the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of
+the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in
+the
+Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto's pathetic
+<i>Annunciation</i> at Recanati, <a name="Page_80"></a>for all its
+excess of agitation, appear
+dignified by comparison. Titian's own <i>Annunciation</i>, bequeathed
+to the
+Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up
+on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and
+appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better
+known picture.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><i><a name="The_Annunciation"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 641px;"
+ alt="The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image25.jpg" /></i></p>
+<p>Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso's Duchess,&#8212;the
+passive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character
+has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,&#8212;our
+master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we
+are told, the finished <i>Bacchanal</i>, already described above. He
+appears
+to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early
+part
+of 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed at
+Ferrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our <i>Bacchus and
+Ariadne</i>, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture
+too
+late in the earlier section of Vecelli's work, though, with all its
+freshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a further
+advance on the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>, and
+must be
+deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the <i>Feast of the
+Gods</i>
+of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of Titian already
+described
+our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time
+has
+not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of
+the
+golden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the
+<i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i> the allegiance to
+Giorgiono has
+been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the na&iuml;vet&eacute;
+remains, but not the
+infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the <i>Bacchus
+and
+Ariadne</i> Titian's genius flames up with an intensity of passion such
+as
+will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of
+this class. Certainly, with all the beauties of the <i>Venuses</i>, of
+the
+<i>Diana and Actaeon</i>, the <i>Diana and Calisto</i>, the <i>Rape
+of Europa</i>, we
+descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance,
+though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its
+power to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the
+<i>Venere del Pardo</i> of the Louvre and the <i>Nymph and Shepherd</i>
+of Vienna,
+is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier
+times, with its exquisite na&iuml;vet&eacute; and mitigated
+sensuousness.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Bacchus_and_Ariadne"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 510px;"
+ alt="Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company."
+ title="Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company."
+ src="images/image26.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i> is a Titian which even the Louvre,
+the Museum
+of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in <a
+ name="Page_81"></a>our master's
+works, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most
+readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are
+interested
+in Italian art. This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or
+subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose
+<i>Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos</i> he followed with a closeness
+which did
+not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of
+the subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that had
+animated the original. How is it possible to better express the <i>At
+parte ex ali&acirc; florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna,
+tuoque
+incensus amore</i> of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager
+movement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian? Or to
+<a name="Page_82"></a>paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those
+other lines: <i>Horum pars
+tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra
+iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant</i>? Ariadne's crown
+of
+stars&#8212;the <i>Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona</i> of the
+poem&#8212;shines in Titian's sky with a sublime radiance which corresponds
+perfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, of
+Catullus. The splendour of the colour in this piece&#8212;hardly equalled in
+its happy audacity, save by the <i>Madonna del Coniglio</i> or <i>Vierge
+au
+Lapin</i> of the Louvre,<a name="FNanchor_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41"><sup>[41]</sup></a>
+would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, did
+the prescribed limits of space admit of such an indulgence. Even here,
+however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the
+delights
+of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his
+imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic
+harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the
+sake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those
+Veronese transformed into Venetians&#8212;Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari;
+or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the
+more violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the
+mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With Titian the
+highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment,
+are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in
+the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be
+considered the supreme exponent.</p>
+<p>The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carr&eacute; of the Louvre now
+known as
+<i>Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti</i>, but in the collection of
+Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, <i>Titian's
+Mistress after the Life</i>, comes in very well at this stage. The
+exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound
+hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities
+inspired by Giorgione&#8212;the <a name="Page_83"></a>loveliest of all in
+some respects, the most
+consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still
+to the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue,
+myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole
+enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here
+and there with gleams of light. Vasari described how Titian painted,
+<i>ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d' artiglieria</i>,
+the
+Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who
+afterwards became the wife of the duke, <i>che &egrave; opera stupenda</i>.
+It is
+upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between
+the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid
+<i>donna</i> and the <i>Alfonso of Ferrara</i> of the Museo del Prado,
+that the
+popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably,
+like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a
+lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, the
+accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,<a
+ name="FNanchor_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42"><sup>[42]</sup></a>
+comes forward
+with convincing arguments to show that the handsome <i>insouciant</i>
+personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in Titian's
+picture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has hitherto been almost
+universally assumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be
+his
+son, Ercole II. This alone invalidates the favourite designation of the
+Louvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the
+"stupendous" portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari. A
+comparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called <i>Giorgio Cornaro</i>
+of Castle Howard&#8212;a famous portrait by Titian of a gentleman holding a
+hawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at the
+recent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery&#8212;results in something like
+certainty that in both is the same personage portrayed. It is not only
+that the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are the
+same in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree
+exceedingly
+well; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same
+impression
+of splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused. This
+means that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the gracious
+Ercole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the Castle
+Howard picture is Alfonso's son and successor portrayed. In the latter
+canvas, which bears, according <a name="Page_84"></a>to Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, the later
+signature "Titianus F.," the personage is, it may be, a year or two
+older. Let it be borne in mind that only on the <i>back</i> of the
+canvas is,
+or rather was, to be found the inscription: "Georgius Cornelius, frater
+Catterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (<i>sic</i>)," upon the
+authority of
+which it bears its present designation.</p>
+<p>The altar-piece, <i>The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St.
+Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor</i>, now in San Domenico, but formerly
+in
+San Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature
+"Titianus
+Cadorinus pinsit," this being about the first instance in which the
+later spelling "Titianus" appears. If as a pictorial achievement it
+cannot rank with the San Niccol&ograve; and the Pesaro altar-pieces, it
+presents some special points of interest which make it easily
+distinguishable from these. The conception is marked by a peculiar
+intensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, and
+hardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type. It reveals a
+passionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which one
+expects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in Titian, whose dramatic
+force is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well
+under
+control. The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter
+was
+acquainted with Raphael's <i>Madonna di Foligno</i>; but it is
+dramatic and
+real where the Urbinate's masterpiece was lofty and symbolical. Still
+Titian's St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in
+steadfastness
+and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the
+humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento
+altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a
+master of the full Renaissance. An improved version of the upper
+portion
+of the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in the
+clouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccol&ograve; altar-piece.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St_Sebastian"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 970px;"
+ alt="St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image27.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the Papal
+Legate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Church
+of SS. Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style and
+sentiment. The <i>St. Sebastian</i> presently to be referred to,
+constituting
+the right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,<a
+ name="FNanchor_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43"><sup>[43]</sup></a>
+and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent of
+Duke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure the
+much-talked-of piece <a name="Page_86"></a>for his master. Titian
+succumbed to an offer of
+sixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first nor
+the last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side
+of
+his character. But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemy
+of the Legate, drew back and left to Titian the discredit without the
+profit of the transaction. The central compartment of the Brescia
+altar-piece presents <i>The Resurrection</i>, the upper panels on the
+left
+and right show together the <i>Annunciation</i>, the lower left panel
+depicts
+the patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor,
+Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous <i>St. Sebastian</i><a
+ name="FNanchor_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44"><sup>[44]</sup></a> in
+the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch.
+The <i>St. Sebastian</i> is neither more nor less than the magnificent
+academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to
+bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his
+splendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in the
+beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting
+the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide gulf indeed separates the
+mood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposeful
+charm of the Giorgionesque saint in the <i>St. Mark</i> of the Salute,
+or the
+healthy realism of the unconcerned <i>St. Sebastian</i> in the S.
+Niccol&ograve;
+altar-piece. Here, as later on with the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i>, those
+who
+admire in Venetian art in general, and in that of Titian in particular,
+its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature,
+must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by a
+conception in its very essence artificial. Yet, brought face to face
+with the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, and
+against their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth and
+richness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling and
+painting.<a name="FNanchor_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45"><sup>[45]</sup></a>
+Analogies have been drawn between the <i>Medicean Faun</i> and
+the <i>St. Sebastian</i>, chiefly on account of the strained posi<a
+ name="Page_87"></a><a name="Page_88"></a>tion of
+the arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue and
+the painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance,
+notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laocoon
+in the world-famous group of the Vatican. Of this a model had been made
+by Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast
+was
+kept in Titian's workshop, from which he is said to have studied.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Design_for_a_Holy_Family"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 423px;"
+ alt="Design for a Holy Family. Chatsworth. From a photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment &amp; Cie."
+ title="Design for a Holy Family. Chatsworth. From a photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image28.jpg" /></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="La_Vierge_au_Lapin"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 418px;"
+ alt="La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by Neurdein."
+ title="La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by Neurdein."
+ src="images/image29.jpg" /></p>
+<p>In the <i>Madonna di S. Niccol&ograve;</i>, which was painted or
+rather finished in
+the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccol&ograve;
+de'
+Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is
+suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not
+extravagance
+of technique. The composition must have had much greater unity before
+the barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of the
+circular top which it had in common with the <i>Assunta</i>, the
+Ancona, and
+the Pesaro altar-pieces. Technically superior to the second of these
+great works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action and
+sentiment, by no such passionate identification of the artist with his
+subject. It is only in passing from one of its beauties to another that
+its artistic worth can be fully appreciated. Then we admire the rapt
+expression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the <i>St.
+Nicholas</i>,<a name="FNanchor_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46"><sup>[46]</sup></a>
+the mansuetude of the <i>St. Francis</i>, the Venetian
+loveliness of the <i>St. Catherine</i>, the palpitating life of the <i>St.
+Sebastian</i>. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump
+young gondolier stripped and painted as he was&#8212;contemplating, if
+anything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, <i>ritratto
+dal' vivo e senza artificio niuno</i>. The royal saint of Alexandria is
+a
+sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning
+elaboration of coiffure, to the <i>St. Catherine</i> of the <i>Madonna
+del
+Coniglio</i>, and the not dissimilar figure in our own <i>Holy Family
+with
+St. Catherine</i> at the National Gallery.</p>
+<p>The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with
+the
+infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in
+the
+Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge's private apartments to the Senate
+Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as
+we
+know, Titian's first performance as a <i>frescante</i> since the
+completion,
+twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of
+Padua.
+As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and
+brilliant in <a name="Page_90"></a><a name="Page_91"></a>colour for a
+fresco, very fairly preserved&#8212;deserving, in
+fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, the
+rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the
+subject
+is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of
+personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly
+transforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is
+greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened
+with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.
+Even the colossal, half-effaced <i>St. Christopher with the Infant
+Christ</i>, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the
+Town
+Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St_Christopher"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 901px;"
+ alt="St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image30.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the
+<i>Entombment</i> of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other
+than
+altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded
+which belongs to the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i> among purely secular
+subjects? It was in 1523 that Titian acquired a new and illustrious
+patron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son
+of
+that most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d'Este
+Gonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara. The <i>Entombment</i> being
+a
+"Mantua piece,"<a name="FNanchor_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47"><sup>[47]</sup></a>
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally assumed
+that it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as
+some
+correspondence published by them goes to show, it must have been
+painted
+at, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523. Judging entirely by the
+style and technical execution of the canvas itself, the writer feels
+strongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years or
+thereabouts&#8212;that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closely
+following upon that in which the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>
+were painted. Mature as Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for the
+last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were
+saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type
+and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea
+has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the <a
+ name="Page_92"></a><i>Assunta</i>,
+the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such
+as we meet with in the <i>Bacchanal</i>. The Magdalen, with her
+features
+distorted by grief, resembles&#8212;allowing for the necessary differences
+imposed by the situation&#8212;the women making offering to the love-goddess
+in the <i>Worship of Venus</i>. The figure of the Virgin, on the other
+hand,
+enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a type
+which would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and his
+school. To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the
+<i>Entombment</i>, without by dissection killing it, is a task of
+difficulty.
+What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye and
+enthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, is
+perhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, of
+informing sentiment. Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection
+of
+the two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace&#8212;the
+well-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to
+accentuate
+the mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, bound
+together by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from them
+communicates itself, as it were, to the beholder. In the colouring,
+while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a
+whole,
+each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily asserting, its own
+splendour and its own special significance. And yet the yellow of the
+Magdalen's dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier the
+embrowned flesh of sturdy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson of
+Nicodemus's garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling white
+of the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of the
+Virgin's robe, combine less to produce the impression of great
+pictorial
+magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous
+tragedy.</p>
+<p>Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the
+Doge's
+chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about
+the altar,<a name="FNanchor_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48"><sup>[48]</sup></a>
+with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the
+kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the
+altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_Madonna_di_Casa_Pesaro"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 917px;"
+ alt="The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de' Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya."
+ title="The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de' Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya."
+ src="images/image31.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The <i>Madonna di Casa Pesaro</i>, which Titian finished in 1526,
+after
+having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the
+masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of
+exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at
+the
+<a name="Page_93"></a><a name="Page_95"></a>Frari, the <i>Assunta</i>.
+For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pomp
+and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite
+sufficient <i>vraisemblance</i>, of divine and sacred with real
+personages,
+it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its class. And yet,
+apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties
+overcome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole,
+many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than we
+should care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a more
+splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand.
+It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and
+less
+interesting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virgin
+and Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by an
+invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed
+crowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's
+<i>Castelfranco Madonna</i>, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud
+in
+their humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop
+of
+Paphos (Baffo), at their head. The natural tie that should unite the
+sacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power to
+impress, is thus greatly diminished, and we are dangerously near to a
+condition in which they become merely grand conventional figures in a
+decorative ensemble of the higher order. To analyse the general scheme
+or the details of the glorious colour-harmony, which has survived so
+many drastic renovations and cleanings, is not possible on this
+occasion, or indeed necessary. The magic of bold and subtle chiaroscuro
+is obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two gigantic
+pillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in the
+main, but illuminated above and below by the light emanating from the
+divine putti; the boldest feature in the scheme is the striking
+cinnamon-yellow mantle of St. Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, the
+two boldly contrasting with the magnificent dark-red and gold banner of
+the Borgias crowned with the olive branch Peace.<a name="FNanchor_49"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_49"><sup>[49]</sup></a> This is an
+unexpected note of the most stimulating effect, which <a name="Page_96"></a>braces
+the
+spectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness. Thus, too, Titian
+went to work in the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>&#8212;giving forth a single
+clarion
+note in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos. The writer
+is unable to accept as from the master's own hand the unfinished <i>Virgin
+and Child</i> which, at the Uffizi, generally passes for the
+preliminary
+sketch of the central group in the Pesaro altar-piece. The original
+sketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in the
+Albertina at Vienna. The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds a
+like original study for the kneeling Baffo.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Sketch_for_the_Madonna"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 653px;"
+ alt="Sketch for the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Albertina, Vienna. From a photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment &amp; Cie."
+ title="Sketch for the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Albertina, Vienna. From a photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image32.jpg" /></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Martyrdom_of_St_Peter"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 864px;"
+ alt="Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving by Henri Laurent."
+ title="Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving by Henri Laurent."
+ src="images/image33.jpg" /></p>
+<p>By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the
+placing
+of Titian's world-renowned <i>Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican</i>
+on the
+altar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one
+of
+the most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity. On
+the 16th of August 1867&#8212;one of the blackest of days in the calendar for
+the lover of Venetian art&#8212;the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> was burnt in the
+Cappella del Rosario of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of
+Giovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the <i>Virgin and Child with
+Saints and Angels</i>, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had
+caused
+the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during
+the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Now
+the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their
+estimate of the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> from the numerous existing
+copies and
+prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the
+picture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal
+impression
+may, under the circumstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well be
+more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist by
+a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has
+conceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had the
+good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the
+marvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselle
+minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by
+the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape,
+in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance
+falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above&#8212;with its single
+startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore,
+with a certain <a name="Page_97"></a><a name="Page_98"></a>amount of
+reluctance that he ventures to own that the
+composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing,
+notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the
+overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and
+unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its
+Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing
+influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months
+at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who,
+returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had
+remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the
+exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of
+passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it
+culminated in the <i>Transfiguration</i>? All through the wonderful
+career of
+the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese <i>Entombment</i>, and going
+on
+through the <i>Spasimo di Sicilia</i> to the end, there is this
+tendency to
+consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a
+pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Much
+less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the <i>Stanze</i>
+and the <i>Cartoons</i>, in which true dramatic significance and the
+sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The
+<i>Transfiguration</i> itself is, however, the most crying example of
+the
+reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In it
+are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if we
+take them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two
+failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same
+frame.
+Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here
+stifled. In the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> the tremendous figure of the
+attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all
+fluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based on
+nothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied
+attitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In the
+same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in
+the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and
+conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing
+for
+the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all
+the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the <i>dramatis personae</i>
+of the gruesome scene&#8212;extraordinary facial expressiveness. An <a
+ name="Page_99"></a><a name="Page_101"></a>immense
+effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that
+can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must
+ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come face
+to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the <i>St.
+Sebastian</i> of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the
+magic
+of the painter <i>par excellence</i> would assert itself. Very
+curiously it
+is not any more less contemporary copy&#8212;least of all that by Ludovico
+Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo&#8212;that gives this impression that Titian in the original
+would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work.
+The
+best notion of the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> is, so far as the writer is
+aware,
+to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which
+hangs in the great hall of the &Eacute;cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
+Even
+through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties,
+especially
+in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without
+further carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and,
+criticism
+notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who,
+perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower
+rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be
+discovered in Venetian painting, described it as <i>la pi&ugrave;
+compiuta, la
+pi&ugrave; celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che
+altra, la
+quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto</i> (sic) <i>ancor mai</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Tobias_and_the_Angel"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 796px;"
+ alt="Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ title="Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ src="images/image34.jpg" /></p>
+<p>It was after a public competition between Titian, Palma, and
+Pordenone,
+instituted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the great
+commission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at
+the
+end of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. Of
+Pordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finished
+drawing of the <i>Martyrdom of St. Peter</i> in the Uffizi, which is
+either
+by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any
+rate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem in
+some respects, as compared with Titian's astonishing performance, it
+represents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime in
+its gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitely
+touching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, still
+asserts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to be
+preliminary sketches for the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> are: a
+pen-and-ink
+sketch in the Louvre <a name="Page_102"></a>showing the assassin
+chasing the companion of the
+victim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at the
+saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet
+thumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actual
+massacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is the
+drawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives the
+impression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by
+Titian
+for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, <i>A Nobleman murdering his
+Wife</i>,
+which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the &Eacute;cole des
+Beaux-Arts
+of Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writer
+feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of Titian
+himself.<a name="FNanchor_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50"><sup>[50]</sup></a></p>
+<br />
+<p style="font-weight: bold;">NOTES:</p>
+<a name="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1">[1]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's
+Bilder zu R&ouml;mischen Heldengedichten" (<i>Jahrbuch der
+K&ouml;niglich
+Preussischen Kunstsammlungen</i>: Sechzehnter Band, I. Heft) has most
+ingeniously, and upon what may be deemed solid grounds, renamed this
+most Giorgionesque of all Giorgiones after an incident in the <i>Thebaid</i>
+of Statius, <i>Adrastus and Hypsipyle</i>. He gives reasons which may
+be
+accepted as convincing for entitling the <i>Three Philosophers</i>,
+after a
+familiar incident in Book viii. of the <i>Aeneid</i>, "Aeneas,
+Evander, and
+Pallas contemplating the Rock of the Capitol." His not less ingenious
+explanation of Titian's <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i> will be dealt
+with a
+little later on. These identifications are all-important, not only in
+connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first
+time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of
+Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of
+the Venetian idyll generally.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2">[2]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto's
+portraits and a sustained analysis of his art generally, Mr. Bernard
+Berenson's <i>Lorenzo Lotto</i> should be consulted. See also M. Emile
+Michel's article, "Les Portraits de Lorenzo Lotto," in the <i>Gazette
+des
+Beaux Arts</i>, 1896, vol. i.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3">[3]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> For these and other particulars of the childhood of Titian,
+see Crowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>
+(second edition, 1881), in which are carefully summarised all the
+general and local authorities on the subject.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4">[4]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol. i. p. 29.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5">[5]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Die Galerien zu M&uuml;nchen und Dresden</i>, p. 75.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6">[6]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian
+school of art than as a Venetian painter of the late time) expressly
+states that Palma came young to Venice and learnt much from Titan: "<i>C'
+egli apprese certa dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere
+prime
+dello stesso Tiziano</i>" (Lermolieff: <i>Die Galerien zu M&uuml;nchen
+und
+Dresden</i>).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7">[7]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Vasari, <i>Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco</i>.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8">[8]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> One of these is a description of wedding festivities
+presided over by the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other
+guests from the capital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and
+three ladies. This gentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell
+upon, and embroider in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the
+love of man for woman. A subject this which, transposed into an
+atmosphere at once more frankly sensuous and of a higher spirituality,
+might well have served as the basis for such a picture as Giorgione's
+<i>F&ecirc;te Champ&ecirc;tre</i> in the Salon Carr&eacute; of the
+Louvre!</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9">[9]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Magazine of Art</i>, July 1895.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10">[10]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol. i. p. 111.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11">[11]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects,
+taken after his execution, as <i>Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo
+(Borgia) his son</i>.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12">[12]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>La Vie et l'Oeuvre du Titien</i>, 1887.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13">[13]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the
+picture, "Ritratto di uno di Casa Pesaro in Venetia che fu fatto
+generale di Sta chiesa. Titiano fecit," is unquestionably of much later
+date than the work itself. The cartellino is entirely out of
+perspective
+with the marble floor to which it is supposed to adhere. The part of
+the
+background showing the galleys of Pesaro's fleet is so coarsely
+repainted that the original touch cannot be distinguished. The form
+"Titiano" is not to be found in any authentic picture by Vecelli.
+"Ticianus," and much more rarely "Tician," are the forms for the
+earlier
+time; "Titianus" is, as a rule, that of the later time. The two forms
+overlap in certain instances to be presently mentioned.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14">[14]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Kugler's <i>Italian Schools of Painting</i>, re-edited by Sir
+Henry Layard.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15">[15]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Marcantonio Michiel, who saw this <i>Baptism</i> in the year
+1531 in the house of M. Zuanne Ram at S. Stefano in Venice, thus
+describes it: "La tavola del S. Zuane che battezza Cristo nel Giordano,
+che &egrave; nel fiume insino alle ginocchia, con el bel paese, ed esso
+M.
+Zuanne Ram ritratto sino al cinto, e con la schena contro li
+spettatori,
+fu de man de Tiziano" (<i>Notizia d' Opere di Disegno</i>, pubblicata
+da J.
+Jacopo Morelli, Ed. Frizzoni, 1884).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16">[16]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> This picture having been brought to completion in 1510,
+and Cima's great altar-piece with the same subject, behind the
+high-altar in the Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being
+dated 1494, the inference is irresistible that in this case the head of
+the school borrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has
+always been looked upon as one of his close followers. In size, in
+distribution, in the arrangement and characterisation of the chief
+groups, the two altar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a
+merely accidental and family resemblance must be dismissed. This type
+of
+Christ, then, of a perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness
+tempering
+majesty, dates back, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred
+type of the elder master is more passionate, more human. Our own
+<i>Incredulity of St. Thomas</i>, by Cima, in the National Gallery,
+shows, in
+a much more perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the
+beautiful <i>Man of Sorrows</i> in the same collection, still
+nominally
+ascribed to Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any
+rate from that of an artist dominated by his influence. When the
+life-work of the Conegliano master has been more closely studied in
+connection with that of his contemporaries, it will probably appear
+that
+he owes very much less to Bellini than it has been the fashion to
+assume. The idea of an actual subordinate co-operation with the
+<i>caposcuola</i>, like that of Bissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so
+many
+others, must be excluded. The earlier and more masculine work of Cima
+bears a definite relation to that of Bartolommeo Montagna.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17">[17]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The <i>Tobias and the Angel</i> shows some curious points of
+contact with the large <i>Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John</i>
+by Titian, in the Louvre&#8212;a work which is far from equalling the S.
+Marciliano picture throughout in quality. The beautiful head of the St.
+Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John,
+though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type and
+movement of the head. There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice a
+kind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano Titian,
+assigned by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini to
+Santo Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432). Here the adapter
+has ruined Titian's great conception by substituting his own trivial
+archangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copy
+of this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich). A reproduction of
+the Titian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of the
+present monograph (p. 99).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18">[18]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Vasari places the <i>Three Ages</i> after the first visit to
+Ferrara, that is almost as much too late as he places the <i>Tobias</i>
+of S.
+Marciliano too early. He describes its subject as "un pastore ignudo ed
+una forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni."</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19">[19]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> From an often-cited passage in the <i>Anonimo</i>, describing
+Giorgione's great <i>Venus</i> now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year
+1525,
+when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn that
+it was finished by Titian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda,
+che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo da
+Castelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." The
+Cupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but the
+landscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance
+to
+those which enframe the figures in the <i>Three Ages, Sacred and
+Profane
+Love</i>, and the "<i>Noli me tangere</i>" of the National Gallery. The
+same
+<i>Anonimo</i> in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice
+a
+<i>Dead Christ supported by an Angel</i>, from the hand of Giorgone,
+which,
+according to him, had been retouched by Titian. It need hardly be
+pointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing in
+common with the coarse and thoroughly second-rate <i>Dead Christ
+supported
+by Child-Angels,</i> still to be seen at the Monte di Piet&agrave; of
+Treviso. The
+engraving of a <i>Dead Christ supported by an Angel</i>, reproduced in
+M.
+Lafenestre's <i>Vie et Oeuvre du Titien</i> as having possibly been
+derived
+from Giorgione's original, is about as unlike his work or that of
+Titian
+as anything in sixteenth-century Italian art could possibly be. In the
+extravagance of its mannerism it comes much nearer to the late style of
+Pordenone or to that of his imitators.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20">[20]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen</i>, Heft I.
+1895.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21">[21]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the <i>Notizia
+d' Opere di Disegno</i>, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione
+Frizzoni, 1884.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22">[22]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> M. Thausing, <i>Wiener Kunstbriefe</i>, 1884.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23">[23]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Le Meraviglie dell' Arte</i>.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24">[24]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The original drawing by Titian for the subject of this
+fresco is to be found among those publicly exhibited at the
+&Eacute;cole des
+Beaux Arts of Paris. It is in error given by Morelli as in the Malcolm
+Collection, and curiously enough M. Georges Lafenestre repeats this
+error in his <i>Vie et Oeuvre du Titien.</i> The drawing differs so
+essentially from the fresco that it can only be considered as a
+discarded design for it. It is in the style which Domenico Campagnola,
+in his Giorgionesque-Titianesque phase, so assiduously imitates.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25">[25]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of
+Titian is to speak of the <i>St. Mark</i> as "una piccola tavoletta,
+un S.
+Marco a sedere in mezzo a certi santi."</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26">[26]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> In connection with this group of works, all of them
+belonging to the quite early years of the sixteenth century, there
+should also be mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet
+little known <i>Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist</i> by
+Sebastiano Luciani, bearing the date 1510. This has recently passed
+into
+the rich collection of Mr. George Salting. It shows the painter
+admirably in his purely Giorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing
+witness that it was painted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco
+master. It groups therefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at
+S. Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook's injured but
+still lovely <i>Venetian Lady as the Magdalen</i> (the same ruddy
+blond
+model), and with the four Giorgionesque <i>Saints</i> in the Church of
+S.
+Bartolommeo al Rialto.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27">[27]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Die Galerien zu M&uuml;nchen und Dresden</i>, p. 74.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28">[28]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The <i>Christ</i> of the Pitti Gallery&#8212;a bust-figure of the
+Saviour, relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most
+solemn beauty&#8212;must date a good many years after the <i>Cristo della
+Moneta</i>. In both works the beauty of the hand is especially
+remarkable.
+The head of the Pitti <i>Christ</i> in its present state might not
+conclusively proclaim its origin; but the pathetic and intensely
+significant landscape is one of Titian's loveliest.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29">[29]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the
+Royal Academy in 1895.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30">[30]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> An ingenious suggestion was made, when the <i>Ariosto</i> was
+last publicly exhibited, that it might be that <i>Portrait of a
+Gentleman
+of the House of Barbarigo</i> which, according to Vasari, Titian
+painted
+with wonderful skill at the age of eighteen. The broad, masterly
+technique of the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with
+Vasari's description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no
+boy of eighteen, not even Titian, could have attained. And then
+Vasari's
+"giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-grey
+sleeve of this <i>Ariosto</i>, but surely a vest of satin embroidered
+with
+silver. The late form of signature, "Titianus F.," on the stone
+balustrade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of the
+portrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition. It seems
+likely that the balustrade bore originally only the "V" repeated, which
+curiously enough occurs also on the similar balustrade of the beautiful
+<i>Portrait of a young Venetian</i>, by Giorgione, first cited as such
+by
+Morelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it passed from the
+collection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P. Richter. The signature
+"Ticianus"
+occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the
+first
+period. The works in the earlier half of this first period do not
+appear
+to have been signed, the "Titiano F." of the <i>Baffo</i> inscription
+being
+admittedly of later date. Thus that the <i>Cristo della Moneta</i>
+bears the
+"Ticianus F." on the collar of the Pharisee's shirt is an additional
+argument in favour of maintaining its date as originally given by
+Vasari
+(1514), instead of putting it back to 1508 or thereabouts. Among a good
+many other paintings with this last signature may be mentioned the
+<i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i> and <i>Vierge au Lapin</i> of the Louvre;
+the <i>Madonna
+with St. Anthony Abbot</i> of the Uffizi; the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>,
+the
+<i>Assunta</i>, the <i>St. Sebastian</i> of Brescia (dated 1522). The <i>Virgin
+and
+Child with St. Catherine</i> of the National Gallery, and the <i>Christ
+with
+the Pilgrims at Emmaus</i> of the Louvre&#8212;neither of them early
+works&#8212;are
+signed "Tician." The usual signature of the later time is "Titianus
+F.,"
+among the first works to show it being the Ancona altar-piece and the
+great <i>Madonna di San Niccol&ograve;</i> now in the Pinacoteca of
+the Vatican. It
+has been incorrectly stated that the late <i>St. Jerome</i> of the
+Brera
+bears the earlier signature, "Ticianus F." This is not the case. The
+signature is most distinctly "Titianus," though in a somewhat unusual
+character.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31">[31]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Crowe and Cavalcaselle describe it as a "picture which has
+not its equal in any period of Giorgione's practice" (<i>History of
+Painting in North Italy</i>, vol. ii.).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32">[32]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Among other notable portraits belonging to this early
+period, but to which within it the writer hesitates to assign an exact
+place, are the so-called <i>Titian's Physician Parma</i>, No. 167 in
+the
+Vienna Gallery; the first-rate <i>Portrait of a Young Man</i> (once
+falsely
+named <i>Pietro Aretino</i>), No. 1111 in the Alte Pinakothek of
+Munich; the
+so-called <i>Alessandro de' Medici</i> in the Hampton Court Gallery.
+The
+last-named portrait is a work injured, no doubt, but of extraordinary
+force and conciseness in the painting, and of no less singular power in
+the characterisation of a sinister personage whose true name has not
+yet
+been discovered.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33">[33]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The fifth <i>Allegory</i>, representing a sphinx or
+chimaera&#8212;now framed with the rest as the centre of an ensemble&#8212;is from
+another and far inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions.
+The so-called <i>Venus</i> of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is,
+notwithstanding the signature of Bellini and the date (MDXV.), by
+Bissolo.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34">[34]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> In Bellini's share in the landscape there is not a little
+to remind the beholder of the <i>Death of St. Peter Martyr</i> to be
+found in
+the Venetian room of the National Gallery, where it is still assigned
+to
+the great master himself, though it is beyond reasonable doubt by one
+of
+his late pupils or followers.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35">[35]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The enlarged second edition, with the profile portrait of
+Ariosto by Titian, did not appear until 1532. Among the additions then
+made were the often-quoted lines in which the poet, enumerating the
+greatest painters of the time, couples Titian with Leonardo, Andrea
+Mantegna, Gian Bellino, the two Dossi, Michelangelo, Sebastiano, and
+Raffael (33rd canto, 2nd ed.).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36">[36]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <span lang="el" title="Philostratou Eikonon Erotes.">&#934;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#963;&#964;&#961;&#945;&#964;&#959;&#965;
+&#917;&#953;&#954;&#959;&#957;&#969;&#957; &#917;&#961;&#969;&#964;&#949;&#962;</span></p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37">[37]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Let the reader, among other things of the kind, refer to
+Rubens's <i>Jardin &agrave; Amour</i>, made familiar by so many
+repetitions and
+reproductions, and to Van Dyck's <i>Madone aux Perdrix</i> at the
+Hermitage
+(see Portfolio: <i>The Collections of Charles I.</i>). Rubens copied,
+indeed,
+both the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>, some time
+between 1601
+and 1608, when the pictures were at Rome. These copies are now in the
+Museum at Stockholm. The realistic vigour of the <i>Bacchanal</i>
+proved
+particularly attractive to the Antwerp master, and he in more than one
+instance derived inspiration from it. The ultra-realistic <i>Bacchus
+seated on a Barrel</i>, in the Gallery of the Hermitage at St.
+Petersburg,
+contains in the chief figure a pronounced reminiscence of Titian's
+picture; while the unconventional attitude of the amorino, or Bacchic
+figure, in attendance on the god, is imitated without alteration from
+that of the little toper whose action Vasari so explicitly describes.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38">[38]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Vasari's simple description is best: "Una donna nuda che
+dorme, tanto bella che pare viva, insieme con altre figure."</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39">[39]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Moritz Thausing's <i>Albrecht D&uuml;rer</i>, Zweiter Band, p. 14.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40">[40]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Crowe and Cavalcaselle, <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol.
+i. p. 212.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41">[41]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> It appears to the writer that this masterpiece of colour
+and reposeful charm, with its wonderful gleams of orange, pale
+turquoise, red, blue, and golden white, with its early signature,
+"Ticianus F.," should be placed not later than this period. Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle assign it to the year 1530, and hold it to be the <i>Madonna
+with St. Catherine</i>, mentioned in a letter of that year written by
+Giacomo Malatesta to Federigo Gonzaga at Mantua. Should not this last
+picture be more properly identified with our own superb <i>Madonna and
+Child with St. John and St. Catherine</i>, No. 635 in the National
+Gallery,
+the style of which, notwithstanding the rather Giorgionesque type of
+the
+girlish Virgin, shows further advance in a more sweeping breadth and a
+larger generalisation? The latter, as has already been noted, is signed
+"Tician."</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42">[42]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> "Tizian und Alfons von Este," <i>Jahrbuch der K&ouml;niglich
+Preussischen Kunstsammlungen</i>, F&uuml;nfzehnter Band, II. Heft, 1894.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43">[43]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Crowe and Cavalcaselle, <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol.
+i. pp. 237-240.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44">[44]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> On the circular base of the column upon which the
+warrior-saint rests his foot is the signature "Ticianus faciebat
+MDXXII." This, taken in conjunction with the signature "Titianus" on
+the
+Ancona altar-piece painted in 1520, tends to show that the line of
+demarcation between the two signatures cannot be absolutely fixed.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45">[45]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Lord Wemyss possesses a repetition, probably from Titian's
+workshop, of the <i>St. Sebastian</i>, slightly smaller than the
+Brescia
+original. This cannot have been the picture catalogued by Vanderdoort
+as
+among Charles I.'s treasures, since the latter, like the earliest
+version of the <i>St. Sebastian</i>, preceding the definitive work,
+showed
+the saint tied not to a tree, but to a column, and in it the group of
+St. Roch and the Angel was replaced by the figures of two archers
+shooting.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46">[46]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Ridolfi, followed in this particular by Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, sees in the upturned face of the <i>St. Nicholas</i> a
+reflection of that of Laocoon in the Vatican group.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47">[47]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> It passed with the rest of the Mantua pictures into the
+collection of Charles I., and was after his execution sold by the
+Commonwealth to the banker and dealer Jabach for &pound;120. By the
+latter it
+was made over to Louis XIV., together with many other masterpieces
+acquired in the same way.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48">[48]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Crowe and Cavalcaselle, <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol.
+i. pp. 298, 299.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49">[49]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The victory over the Turks here commemorated was won by
+Baffo in the service of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI., some
+twenty-three years before. This gives a special significance to the
+position in the picture of St. Peter, who, with the keys at his feet,
+stands midway between the Bishop and the Virgin. We have seen Baffo in
+one of Titian's earliest works (<i>circa</i> 1503) recommended to St.
+Peter
+by Alexander VI. just before his departure for this same expedition.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50">[50]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> It has been impossible in the first section of these
+remarks upon the work of the master of Cadore to go into the very
+important question of the drawings rightly and wrongly ascribed to him.
+Some attempt will be made in the second section, to be entitled <i>The
+Later Work of Titian</i>, to deal summarily with this branch of the
+subject, which has been placed on a more solid basis since Giovanni
+Morelli disentangled the genuine landscape drawings of the master from
+those of Domenico Campagnola, and furnished a firm basis for further
+study.</p>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+<ul>
+  <li>"Alfonso d'Este and Laura Dianti" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_52">52</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_82">82</a>-<a href="#Page_84">84</a></li>
+  <li><a name="Altar_piece_at_Brescia"></a>Altar-piece at Brescia, <a
+ href="#Page_84">84</a>-<a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+  <li>"Annunciation, The" (Treviso), <a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+  <li>"Annunciation, The" (Venice), <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+  <li>"Aretino, Portrait of" (Florence), <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Ariosto, Portrait of" (Cobham Hall), <a href="#Page_27">27</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+  <li>"Assumption of the Virgin, The," <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_73">73</a>-<a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Bacchanal, A," <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a></li>
+  <li>"Bacchus and Ariadne" (National Gallery), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+  <li>"Baptism of Christ, The" (Rome), <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+  <li>"Battle of Cadore, The," <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+  <li>"Bella, La" (Florence), <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Bishop of Paphos recommended by Alexander VI. to St. Peter, The"
+(Antwerp), <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Christ at Emmaus," <a href="#Page_10">10</a></li>
+  <li>"Christ bearing the Cross" (Venice), <a href="#Page_26">26</a></li>
+  <li>"Christ between St. Andrew and St. Catherine" (Venice), <a
+ href="#Page_26">26</a></li>
+  <li>"Charles V. at M&uuml;hlberg" (Madrid), <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Concert, A" (Florence), <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+  <li>"Cornaro, Portrait of" (Castle Howard), <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+  <li>"<a name="Cristo_della_Moneta_Il"></a>Cristo della Moneta, Il"
+(Dresden), <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_55">55</a>-<a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Death of St. Peter Martyr, The," <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_96">96</a>-<a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+  <li>"Diana and Actaeon," <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+  <li>"Diana and Calisto," <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Entombment, The" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Feast of the Gods, The" (Alnwick Castle), <a href="#Page_66">66</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+  <li>"Flora" (Florence), <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+  <li>Fresco of St. Christopher in the Doge's Palace, <a
+ href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+  <li>Frescoes in the Scuola del Santo, Padua, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+  <li>Frescoes on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, Venice, <a href="#Page_28">28</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Herodias," <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+  <li>"Holy Family" (Bridgewater Gallery), <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+  <li>"Holy Family with St. Catherine" (National Gallery), <a
+ href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"<a name="Jupiter_and_Antiope"></a>Jupiter and Antiope" (Louvre),
+    <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Madonna di Casa Pesaro, The" (Venice), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+  <li>"Madonna di San Niccol&ograve;, The" (Rome), <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+  <li>"Man, Portrait of a" (Munich), <a href="#Page_27">27</a></li>
+  <li>"Man in Black, The" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Man of Sorrows, The" (Venice), <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+  <li>"Man with the Glove, The" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+  <li>"Medici, Portrait of Ippolito de'," <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Noli me tangere" (National Gallery), <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+  <li>"Nymph and Shepherd" (Vienna), <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Philip II., Portrait of," <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Piet&agrave;" (Milan), <a href="#Page_6">6</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Rape of Europa, The," <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Sacred and Profane Love" (Rome), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+  <li>"Sacred Conversation, A" (Chantilly), <a href="#Page_18">18</a></li>
+  <li>"Sacred Conversation, A" (Florence), <a href="#Page_6">6</a></li>
+  <li>"St. Mark enthroned, with four other Saints" (Venice), <a
+ href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+  <li>"St. Sebastian": see <i><a href="#Altar_piece_at_Brescia">Altar-piece
+at Brescia</a></i></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Tambourine-Player, The" (Vienna), <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+  <li>"Three Ages, The" (Bridgewater Gallery), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>-<a href="#Page_35">35</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+  <li>"Tobias and the Angel" (Venice), <a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+  <li>"Tribute-Money, The": see <i><a href="#Cristo_della_Moneta_Il">Cristo
+della Moneta</a></i></li>
+  <li>"Triumph of Faith, The," <a href="#Page_42">42</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_44">44</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Vanitas" (Munich), <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+  <li>"Venere del Pardo": see <i><a href="#Jupiter_and_Antiope">Jupiter
+and Antiope</a></i></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child" (Mr. R.H. Benson), <a href="#Page_25">25</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child" (Florence), <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child" (St. Petersburg), <a href="#Page_24">24</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child" (Vienna): see <i><a href="#Zingarella_La">Zingarella,
+La</a></i></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with Saints" (Captain Holford), <a
+ href="#Page_25">25</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with four Saints" (Dresden), <a href="#Page_20">20</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot"
+(Florence), <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd" (National
+Gallery), <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with Saints, Angels, and a Donor" (Ancona), <a
+ href="#Page_84">84</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with SS. Stephen, Ambrose, and Maurice"
+(Louvre), <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with SS. Ulphus and Bridget" (Madrid), <a
+ href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin with the Cherries, The" (Vienna), <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin with the Rabbit, The" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_82">82</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Worship of Venus, The" (Madrid), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>-<a href="#Page_72">72</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"<a name="Zingarella_La"></a>Zingarella, La" (Vienna), <a
+ href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<br />
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12626 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Earlier Work of Titian, by Claude Phillips
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Earlier Work of Titian
+
+Author: Claude Phillips
+
+Release Date: June 15, 2004  [eBook #12626]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: iso-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Wilelmina Malli�re, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 12626-h.htm or 12626-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/2/12626/12626-h/12626-h.htm)
+      or
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN
+
+By
+
+CLAUDE PHILLIPS
+
+Keeper of the Wallace Collection
+
+1897
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _Flora_]
+
+
+[Illustration: The Portfolio Artistic Monographs With many
+Illustrations]
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+PLATES
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+Flora. Uffizi Gallery, Florence .......................    Frontispiece
+
+Sacred and Profane Love. Borghese Gallery, Rome..................... 36
+
+Virgin and Child, with Saints. Louvre............................... 54
+
+Le Jeune Homme au Gant. Louvre...................................... 62
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS PRINTED IN COLOUR
+
+Design for a Holy Family. Chatsworth................................ 86
+
+Sketch for the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Albertina.................... 96
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
+
+The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice............... 23
+
+Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." Imperial Gallery, Vienna 25
+
+The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome................. 29
+
+The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery ................................ 35
+
+Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria Gallery, Rome..... 39
+
+Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.................................... 41
+
+St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak. Fresco in the
+Scuola del Santo, Padua............................................. 43
+
+"Noli me tangere." National Gallery................................. 45
+
+St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della Salute, Venice. 49
+
+The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna............. 51
+
+PAGE
+Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot. Uffizi Gallery,
+  Florence.........................................................  53
+
+St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the Stag. British
+Museum ............................................................  55
+
+The "Cristo della Moneta." Dresden Gallery.........................  57
+
+Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery...............  59
+
+A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence..............  63
+
+Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.........................  65
+
+Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court...................  67
+
+The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid........................  71
+
+The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice....................  75
+
+The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso.............................  79
+
+Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery..............................  81
+
+St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso,
+Brescia............................................................. 85
+
+La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre.........................................  87
+
+St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge's Palace,
+Venice ............................................................  89
+
+The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria dei Frari, Venice...  93
+
+Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican...............................  97
+
+Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice........................  99
+
+
+
+
+THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+There is no greater name in Italian art--therefore no greater in
+art--than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high
+as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so
+mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil
+them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect
+balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael
+an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is
+wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the
+poet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than any
+one of these. Titian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, nor
+the most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, even
+of his time and country. Yet is it possible, remembering the
+_Entombment_ of the Louvre, the _Assunta_, the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_,
+the _St. Peter Martyr_, to say that he has, take him all in all, been
+surpassed in this the highest branch of his art? Certainly nowhere else
+have the pomp and splendour of the painter's achievement at its apogee
+been so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly ever
+overstepping the bounds of nature. The sacred art of no other painter of
+the full sixteenth century--not even that of Raphael himself--has to an
+equal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of the
+world, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred passion
+must perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is not
+necessarily a distortion of truth.
+
+And then as a portraitist--we are dealing, be it remembered, with
+Italian art only--there must be conceded to him the first place, as a
+limner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner in
+his secret heart for some other master. One will remember the
+disquieting power, the fascination in the true sense of the word, of
+Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on
+occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the
+Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del
+Piombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic
+truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of
+Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective
+and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate the
+other. Yet another will cite the lofty melancholy, the aristocratic
+charm of the Brescian Moretto, or the marvellous power of the
+Bergamasque Moroni to present in their natural union, with no
+indiscretion of over-emphasis, the spiritual and physical elements which
+go to make up that mystery of mysteries, the human individuality. There
+is, however, no advocate of any of these great masters who, having
+vaunted the peculiar perfections in portraiture of his own favourite,
+will not end--with a sigh perhaps--by according the palm to Titian.
+
+In landscape his pre-eminence is even more absolute and unquestioned. He
+had great precursors here, but no equal; and until Claude Lorrain long
+afterwards arose, there appeared no successor capable, like himself, of
+expressing the quintessence of Nature's most significant beauties
+without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.
+Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had,
+unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, and
+the Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesque
+influence, the true gift of the landscape-painter. Atmospheric
+conditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions;
+and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity of
+the landscape in the great _Piet�_ of the Brera, the ominous sunset in
+our own _Agony in the Garden_ of the National Gallery, the cheerful
+all-pervading glow of the beautiful little _Sacred Conversation_ at the
+Uffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late _Baptism of Christ_ in
+the Church of S. Corona at Vicenza. To attempt a discussion of the
+landscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as well
+as the most fascinating of subjects--so various is it even in the few
+well-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument of
+expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of
+his personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione--judging it from
+such unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of
+Castelfranco, the so-called _Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the
+Soldier_[1] in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called _Three
+Philosophers_ in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--has in it still a
+slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection. It
+was reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullest
+development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the _Three Ages_ and
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_. Then all himself, and with hardly a rival
+in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of
+earth and sky which enframe the figures in the _Worship of Venus_, the
+_Bacchanal_, and, above all, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_; to give back his
+impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty
+which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred
+Conversations. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the _St.
+Peter Martyr_, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic
+amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.
+The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be
+said to exist in the late _Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo)_ of
+the Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose and
+Giorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late _Rape of Europa_, the
+bold sweep and the rainbow hues of the landscape in which recall the
+much earlier _Bacchus and Ariadne_. In the exquisite _Shepherd and
+Nymph_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--a masterpiece in monotone of
+quite the last period--the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque time
+reappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, as
+in the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by that
+solemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the final
+years of Titian's old age.
+
+Thus, though there cannot be claimed for Titian that universality in art
+and science which the lovers of Leonardo's painting must ever deplore,
+since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of scope
+of Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht D�rer;
+it must be seen that as a _painter_ he covered more ground than any
+first-rate master of the sixteenth century. While in more than one
+branch of the painter's art he stood forth supreme and without a rival,
+in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorial
+decorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his younger
+rivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves more
+practised and more successfully daring in this particular branch.
+
+To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, such
+parallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must go
+to Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or had
+been, the great merchant city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly be
+styled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian
+predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was during
+the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle of
+supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer period
+during the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation of
+those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned
+them; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as an
+accessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who,
+in his greatest efforts--those sumptuous and almost truculent _portraits
+d'apparat_ of princes, nobles, and splendid dames--knew no superior,
+though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and
+Velazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more
+demonstrative, a seemingly closer embrace, drawing from the contact a
+more exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness some
+of the stain of earth. Titian, though he was at least as genuine a
+realist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mere
+outsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which was
+everywhere--in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home of
+his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art had
+ever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine
+harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion, that
+distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art that
+is not Italian.
+
+The relation of the two masters--both of them in the first line of the
+world's painters--was much that of Venice to Antwerp. The apogee of each
+city in its different way represented the highest point that modern
+Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as
+distinguished from mental culture. But then Venice was wrapped in the
+transfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering above
+the rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains,
+the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region. Reality, with
+all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality. But
+it was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the method
+of presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could
+add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the
+splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the
+genuine naturalness of such a mode of life. Art itself could only add to
+it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the
+colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression to
+the beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charm
+of the people. This is what Titian, supreme among his contemporaries of
+the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which,
+in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek
+for a parallel.
+
+Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly enlist
+our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in some
+special branch of their art; yet, after all, we find ourselves
+invariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them--taking _him_ as
+the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries and
+successors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may be,
+combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his
+creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has
+never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then
+Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the
+poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a
+higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been
+able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so
+incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of
+a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme
+limits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great
+_Madonna del Carmelo_ at the Venice Academy and the magnificent
+_Trinity_ in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near Udine may
+be taken to prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms
+to the painter of the _Assunta_, the _Entombment_ and the _Christ at
+Emmaus_? Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of illumination,
+a Titanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit and
+placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not
+altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in art.
+All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between the
+two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, even
+though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive the
+supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred
+drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A not
+dissimilar comparison might be instituted between the portraits of
+Lorenzo Lotto and those of our master. No Venetian painter of the golden
+prime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him,
+while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individuality
+submitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his own
+tremulous sensitiveness and charm. In this way no portraits of the
+sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in
+deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar
+temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical and mental
+characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.[2]
+
+Yet where is the critic bold enough to place even the finest of these
+exquisite productions on the same level as _Le Jeune Homme au Gant_ and
+_L'Homme en Noir_ of the Louvre, the _Ippolito de' Medici_, the _Bella
+di Tiziano_, the _Aretino_ of the Pitti, the _Charles V. at the Battle
+of M�hlberg_ and the full-length _Philip II._ of the Prado Museum at
+Madrid?
+
+Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that Titian has
+serious rivals in those Veronese developed into Venetians, the two elder
+Bonifazi and Paolo Veronese; that is, there will be found lovers of
+painting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours in
+frank juxtaposition to a palette relatively restricted, used with an art
+more subtle, if less dazzling than theirs, and resulting in a deeper,
+graver richness, a more significant beauty, if in a less stimulating
+gaiety and variety of aspect. No less a critic than Morelli himself
+pronounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliant
+colourist of the Venetian school; and the _Dives and Lazarus_ of the
+Venice Academy, the _Finding of Moses_ at the Brera are at hand to give
+solid support to such an assertion.
+
+In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be the
+greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be
+found in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinal
+principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors--painters such
+as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri,
+Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci--Caliari
+dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as
+well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors,
+however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing the
+abruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing and
+tempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural masses of a vibrant
+grey and large depths of cool dark shadow--brown shot through with
+silver. No other Venetian master could have painted the _Mystic Marriage
+of St. Catherine_ in the church of that name at Venice, the _Allegory
+on the Victory of Lepanto_ in the Palazzo Ducale, or the vast _Nozze di
+Cana_ of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it is in one
+sense a step in advance even of Giorgione, Titian, Palma, and Paris
+Bordone--constituting as it does more particularly a further development
+of painting from the purely decorative standpoint--must appear just a
+little superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the nobler,
+graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods of
+Titian. With him, as with Giorgione, and, indeed, with Tintoretto,
+colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was to
+give a realisation, at once splendid and penetrating in its truth, of
+the subject presented; and colour in accordance with the true Venetian
+principle was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the very
+body and soul of painting--as what it is, indeed, in Nature.
+
+To put forward Paolo Veronese as merely the dazzling virtuoso would all
+the same be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art.
+He can rise as high in dramatic passion and pathos as the greatest of
+them all, when he is in the vein; but these are precisely the occasions
+on which he most resolutely subordinates his colour to his subject and
+makes the most poetic use of chiaroscuro; as in the great altar-piece
+_The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ in the church of that name, the too
+little known _St. Francis receiving the Stigmata_ on a ceiling
+compartment of the Academy of Arts at Vienna, and the wonderful
+_Crucifixion_ which not many years ago was brought down from the
+sky-line of the Long Gallery in the Louvre, and placed, where it
+deserves to be, among the masterpieces. And yet in this last piece the
+colour is not only in a singular degree interpretative of the subject,
+but at the same time technically astonishing--with certain subtleties of
+unusual juxtaposition and modulation, delightful to the craftsman, which
+are hardly seen again until we come to the latter half of the present
+century. So that here we have the great Veneto-Veronese master escaping
+altogether from our theory, and showing himself at one and the same time
+profoundly moving, intensely significant, and admirably decorative in
+colour. Still what was with him the splendid exception was with Titian,
+and those who have been grouped with Titian, the guiding rule of art.
+Though our master remains, take him all in all, the greatest of Venetian
+colourists, he never condescends to vaunt all that he knows, or to
+select his subjects as a groundwork for bravura, even the most
+legitimate. He is the greatest painter of the sixteenth century, just
+because, being the greatest colourist of the higher order, and in
+legitimate mastery of the brush second to none, he makes the worthiest
+use of his unrivalled accomplishment, not merely to call down the
+applause due to supreme pictorial skill and the victory over self-set
+difficulties, but, above all, to give the fullest and most legitimate
+expression to the subjects which he presents, and through them to
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Cadore and Venice--Early Giorgionesque works up to the date of the
+residence in Padua--New interpretations of Giorgione's and Titian's
+pictures.
+
+
+Tiziano Vecelli was born in or about the year 1477 at Pieve di Cadore, a
+district of the southern Tyrol then belonging to the Republic of Venice,
+and still within the Italian frontier. He was the son of Gregorio di
+Conte Vecelli by his wife Lucia, his father being descended from an
+ancient family of the name of Guecello (or Vecellio), established in the
+valley of Cadore. An ancestor, Ser Guecello di Tommasro da Pozzale, had
+been elected Podesta of Cadore as far back as 1321.[3] The name Tiziano
+would appear to have been a traditional one in the family. Among others
+we find a contemporary Tiziano Vecelli, who is a lawyer of note
+concerned in the administration of Cadore, keeping up a kind of
+obsequious friendship with his famous cousin at Venice. The Tizianello
+who, in 1622, dedicated to the Countess of Arundel an anonymous Life of
+Titian known as Tizianello's _Anonimo_, and died at Venice in 1650, was
+Titian's cousin thrice removed.
+
+Gregorio Vecelli was a valiant soldier, distinguished for his bravery in
+the field and his wisdom in the council of Cadore, but not, it may be
+assumed, possessed of wealth or, in a poor mountain district like
+Cadore, endowed with the means of obtaining it. The other offspring of
+the marriage with Lucia were Francesco,--supposed, though without
+substantial proof, to have been older than his brother,--Caterina, and
+Orsa. At the age of nine, according to Dolce in the _Dialogo della
+Pittura_, or of ten, according to Tizianello's _Anonimo_, Titian was
+taken from Cadore to Venice, there to enter upon the serious study of
+painting. Whether he had previously received some slight tuition in the
+rudiments of the art, or had only shown a natural inclination to become
+a painter, cannot be ascertained with any precision; nor is the point,
+indeed, one of any real importance. What is much more vital in our study
+of the master's life-work is to ascertain how far the scenery of his
+native Cadore left a permanent impress on his landscape art, and in what
+way his descent from a family of mountaineers and soldiers, hardy, yet
+of a certain birth and breeding, contributed to shape his individuality
+in its development to maturity. It has been almost universally assumed
+that Titian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery of
+Cadore in the backgrounds to his pictures; and yet, if we except the
+great _Battle of Cadore_ itself (now known only in Fontana's print, in a
+reduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Uffizi,
+and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in a
+modified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altar-pieces,
+Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawings
+of the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we find
+the jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. In the
+majority of instances, however, the middle distance and foreground to
+these is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts,
+its monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountain
+sides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring, but the richer
+vegetation of the Friulan mountains in their lower slopes, or of the
+beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian
+plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the
+play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of Venetian
+art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery
+of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for
+studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and
+back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland.
+How far Titian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needy
+mountaineers, may be taken to account for his excessive eagerness to
+reap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for his
+unresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to be
+got in, must be a matter for individual appreciation. Josiah
+Gilbert--quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle[4]--pertinently asks, "Might
+this mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewd
+Swiss?" In the getting, Titian was certainly all this, but in the
+spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and
+voluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of his
+career. Vasari relates that Titian was lodged at Venice with his uncle,
+an "honourable citizen," who, seeing his great inclination for painting,
+placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became a
+proficient. Dolce, apparently better instructed, gives, in his _Dialogo
+della Pittura_, Zuccato, best known as a mosaic worker, as his first
+master; next makes him pass into the studio of Gentile Bellini, and
+thence into that of the _caposcuola_ Giovanni Bellini; to take, however,
+the last and by far the most important step of his early career when he
+becomes the pupil and partner, or assistant, of Giorgione. Morelli[5]
+would prefer to leave Giovanni Bellini altogether out of Titian's
+artistic descent. However this may be, certain traces of Gentile's
+influence may be observed in the art of the Cadorine painter, especially
+in the earlier portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technical
+execution generally. On the other hand, no extant work of his beginnings
+suggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino's
+pupils--one of the _discipuli_, as some of these were fond of describing
+themselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the
+fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the
+influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his
+following or not. Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art of
+Venice and the _Veneto_ an influence not less strong of its kind than
+that which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regions
+during his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on the
+works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the
+painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and
+Borgognone--such men as Ambrogio de' Predis, Bernardino de' Conti, and,
+indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself. To the fashion for
+the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class, even Alvise Vivarini,
+the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocento
+development, bowed when he painted the Madonnas of the Redentore and S.
+Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the Vienna
+Gallery. Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr.
+Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under the
+paramount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the altar-piece
+of S. Cristina near Treviso, the _Madonna and Child with Saints_ in the
+Ellesmere collection, and the _Madonna and Child with St. Peter Martyr_
+in the Naples Gallery, while in the _Marriage of St. Catherine_ at
+Munich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regards
+exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour,
+essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise's
+death, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could,
+faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in his
+later years was transformed into something very like a satellite of
+Giovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather to
+the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent
+overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the point
+of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.
+
+What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both of
+Giorgione and Titian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is not
+so much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent lean
+on Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves. Neither of
+them is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutely
+dependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for a
+time held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliest
+manhood held towards Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent also
+of Lorenzo Lotto, who, in the earliest known examples--the so-called
+_Dana�_ of Sir Martin Conway's collection, and the _St. Jerome_ of the
+Louvre--is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art passes through
+successive developments, he will still show himself open to more or less
+enduring influences from the one side and the other. Sebastiano del
+Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly be
+accounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career out
+of leading-strings. First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling _Piet�_ in
+the Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authentic
+inscription, "Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus
+(sic)," is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece of
+documentary evidence, it would even now pass as such. Next, he becomes
+the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save perhaps
+Titian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in a
+quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque,
+that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, have
+acquired a world-wide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soul
+to Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of early
+training and association, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal itself,
+he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the
+very end of his career.
+
+Giorgione and Titian were as nearly as possible of the same age, being
+both of them born in or about 1477. Lorenzo Lotto's birth is to be
+placed about the year 1476--or, as others would have it, 1480. Palma saw
+the light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485. So
+that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier
+half of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eight
+years--between 1477 and 1485.
+
+In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Life and Times of Titian_ a revolutionary
+theory, foreshadowed in their _Painting in North Italy_, was for the
+first time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained. They
+sought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, that
+Palma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced and
+shaped the art of his contemporary Titian, instead of having been
+influenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artists
+would have induced the student to believe. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's
+theory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelli
+appears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to be
+found on a _Santa Conversazione_, once in the collection of M. Reiset,
+and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d'Aumale. This date now
+proves with the artist's signature to be a forgery, and the picture in
+question, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode of
+conception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more modern
+technique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma in
+the development of the full Renaissance types and the full Renaissance
+methods of execution. There can be small doubt that this particular
+theory of the indefatigable critics, to whom the history of Italian art
+owes so much, will little by little be allowed to die a natural death,
+if it be not, indeed, already defunct. More and more will the view so
+forcibly stated by Giovanni Morelli recommend itself, that Palma in many
+of those elements of his art most distinctively Palmesque leans upon the
+master of Cadore. The Bergamasque painter was not indeed a personality
+in art sufficiently strong and individual to dominate a Titian, or to
+leave upon his style and methods profound and enduring traces. As such,
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle themselves hesitate to put him forward, though
+they cling with great persistency to their pet theory of his influence.
+This exquisite artist, though by no means inventive genius, did, on the
+other hand, permanently shape the style of Cariani and the two elder
+Bonifazi; imparting, it may be, also some of his voluptuous charm in the
+rendering of female loveliness to Paris Bordone, though the latter must,
+in the main, be looked upon as the artistic offspring of Titian.
+
+It is by no means certain, all the same, that this question of influence
+imparted and submitted to can with advantage be argued with such
+absoluteness of statement as has been the rule up to the present time,
+both on the one side and the other. It should be remembered that we are
+dealing with three young painters of about the same age, working in the
+same art-centre, perhaps, even, for a time in the same studio--issuing,
+at any rate, all three from the flank of Giovanni Bellini. In a
+situation like this, it is not only the preponderance of age--two or
+three years at the most, one way or the other--that is to be taken into
+account, but the preponderance of genius and the magic gift of
+influence. It is easy to understand how the complete renewal, brought
+about by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini's teaching and example,
+operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open
+to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness of
+sensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible was
+the fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over his
+youthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influence
+widen, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellino
+himself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there could
+be no question of light received back from painters of his own
+generation in exchange for that diffused around him; but with Titian and
+Palma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell here
+in each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous
+plant of the same family, yet with all its Giorgionesque colour of a
+quite distinctive loveliness. Titian, we shall see, carried the style to
+its highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways a
+new thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in
+nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than
+Giorgione, Titian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to that
+element of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a way
+counteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interprets
+the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic
+attributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itself
+beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this
+frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this _terre �
+terre_ energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early work of
+Titian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was
+influenced?[6] There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the
+Giorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to the
+everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and
+this not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, in
+which, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular
+resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the
+important _Adam and Eve_ of his earlier time in the Brunswick
+Gallery--once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione--and
+the preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found in
+Titian's _Three Ages_ at Bridgewater House, in his so-called _Sacred and
+Profane Love (Medea and Venus)_ of the Borghese Gallery, in such sacred
+pieces as the _Madonna and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ at the Prado
+Gallery of Madrid, and the large _Madonna and Child with four Saints_ at
+Dresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception stripped
+of a little of its poetic glamour, but retaining unabashed its splendid
+sensuousness, which is thus made the more markedly to stand out. We
+notice, too, in Titian's works belonging to this particular group
+another characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only because
+Palma indulged in it in a great number of his Sacred Conversations and
+similar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin, the
+muscular form, of some male saint, or it may be some shepherd of the
+uplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddy
+gold, of a female saint, or a fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdess
+or a heroine of antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishing
+characteristics as these--and others that could easily be singled
+out--as wholly and solely Titianesque of the early time? If so, we ought
+to assume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palma
+came from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken to
+have transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the less
+subtle shape into which he had already transmuted it. But should not
+such an assumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main,
+be made with all the allowances which the situation demands?
+
+That, when a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to overturn
+barriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy to
+unravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lines
+everywhere, one or two modern examples much nearer to our own time may
+roughly serve to illustrate. Take, for instance, the friendship that
+developed itself between the youthful Bonington and the youthful
+Delacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre: the
+one communicating to the other something of the stimulating quality, the
+frankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished the
+English from the French school; the other contributing to shape, with
+the fire of his romantic temperament, the art of the young Englishman
+who was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of the
+P.R.B.--Millais, Rossetti, and Mr. Holman Hunt--who is to state _ex
+cathedra_ where influence was received, where transmitted; or whether
+the first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time of
+their complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, the
+third the conscience of the group? A similar puzzle would await him who
+should strive to unravel the delicate thread which winds itself round
+the artistic relation between Frederick Walker and the noted landscapist
+Mr. J.W. North. Though we at once recognise Walker as the dominant
+spirit, and see his influence even to-day, more than twenty years after
+his death, affirmed rather than weakened, there are certain
+characteristics of the style recognised and imitated as his, of which
+it would be unsafe to declare that he and not his companion originated
+them.
+
+In days of artistic upheaval and growth like the last years of the
+fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the _milieu_
+must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who most
+influence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeply
+rooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not be
+doubted that when in Giorgione's breast had been lighted the first
+sparks of the Promethean fire, which, with the soft intensity of its
+glow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire ran
+like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth, his
+contemporaries and juniors, just because their blood was of the stuff to
+ignite and flame like his own.
+
+The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question
+merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a
+brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that "they who were
+excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of
+life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of
+flesh, etc."[7] It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and
+style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the
+Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life
+aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just as
+the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of
+lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which, in
+Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first
+years of the Cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when--to take one
+instance only among many--the Ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble Venetian
+Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance
+with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was ever of love. In
+that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina's
+courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty,
+Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa
+illustrissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius,
+the leaflets which, under the title _Gli Asolani, ne' quali si ragiona
+d' amore_,[8] soon became a famous book in Italy.
+
+[Illustration: _The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice.
+From a Photograph by Naya_.]
+
+The most Bellinesque work of Titian's youth with which we are acquainted
+is the curious _Man of Sorrows_ of the Scuola di S. Rocco at Venice, a
+work so faded, so injured by restoration that to dogmatise as to its
+technique would be in the highest degree unsafe. The type approaches,
+among the numerous versions of the _Piet�_ by and ascribed to Giovanni
+Bellini, most nearly to that in the Palazzo del Commune at Rimini.
+Seeing that Titian was in 1500 twenty-three years old, and a student of
+painting of some thirteen years' standing, there may well exist, or at
+any rate there may well have existed, from his hand things in a yet
+earlier and more distinctively Quattrocento-style than anything with
+which we are at present acquainted. This _Man of Sorrows_ itself may
+well be a little earlier than 1500, but on this point it is not easy to
+form a definite conclusion. Perhaps it is reserved in the future to
+some student uniting the qualities of patience and keen insight to do
+for the youthful Titian what Morelli and his school have done for
+Correggio--that is, to restore to him a series of paintings earlier in
+date than those which criticism has, up to the present time, been
+content to accept as showing his first independent steps in art.
+Everything else that we can at present safely attribute to the youthful
+Vecelli is deeply coloured with the style and feeling of Giorgione,
+though never, as is the case with the inferior Giorgionesques, so
+entirely as to obliterate the strongly marked individuality of the
+painter himself. The _Virgin and Child_ in the Imperial Gallery of
+Vienna, popularly known as _La Zingarella_, which, by general consent,
+is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this class,
+is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception and
+arrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength, and richness of the
+colour-chord, in the atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the landscape
+background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already
+Giorgionesque. Nay, even here Titian, above all, asserts _himself_, and
+lays the foundation of his own manner. The type of the divine Bambino
+differs widely from that adopted by Giorgione in the altar-pieces of
+Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The virgin is a woman
+beautified only by youth and intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgione
+and Titian in their loveliest types of womanhood are sensuous as
+compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as
+Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. But
+Giorgione's sensuousness is that which may fitly characterise the
+goddess, while Titian's is that of the woman, much nearer to the
+everyday world in which both artists lived.
+
+In the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is a
+beautiful _Madonna and Child_ in a niche of coloured marble mosaic,
+which is catalogued as an early Titian under the influence of Giovanni
+Bellini. Judging only from the reproduction on a large scale done by
+Messrs. Braun and Co., the writer has ventured to suggest
+elsewhere[9]--prefacing his suggestions with the avowal that he is not
+acquainted with the picture itself--that we may have here, not an early
+Titian, but that rarer thing an early Giorgione. From the list of the
+former master's works it must at any rate be struck out, as even the
+most superficial comparison with, for instance, _La Zingarella_
+suffices to prove. In the notable display of Venetian art made at the
+New Gallery in the winter of 1895 were included two pictures (Nos. 1 and
+7 in the catalogue) ascribed to the early time of Titian and evidently
+from the same hand. These were a _Virgin and Child_ from the collection,
+so rich in Venetian works, of Mr. R.H. Benson (formerly among the
+Burghley House pictures), and a less well-preserved _Virgin and Child
+with Saints_ from the collection of Captain Holford at Dorchester House.
+The former is ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the early time of
+the master himself.[10] Both are, in their rich harmony of colour and
+their general conception, entirely Giorgionesque. They reveal the hand
+of some at present anonymous Venetian of the second order, standing
+midway between the young Giorgione and the young Titian--one who, while
+imitating the types and the landscape of these greater contemporaries
+of his, replaced their depth and glow by a weaker, a more superficial
+prettiness, which yet has its own suave charm.
+
+[Illustration: _Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." Imperial
+Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by L�wy_.]
+
+The famous _Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Chiesa di S. Rocco at
+Venice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed by
+Vasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to
+that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The
+biographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to be
+from the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in Venice,
+and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and
+Giorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life." This
+too great popularity of the work as a wonder-working picture is perhaps
+the cause that it is to-day in a state as unsatisfactory as is the _Man
+of Sorrows_ in the adjacent Scuola. The picture which presents "Christ
+dragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in the
+background," resembles most among Giorgione's authentic creations the
+_Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Casa Loschi at Vicenza. The
+resemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since this
+last--one of the earliest of Giorgiones--still recalls Giovanni Bellini,
+and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception.
+In both renderings of the divine countenance there is--or it may be the
+writer fancies that there is--underlying that expression of serenity and
+humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject, a sinister,
+disquieting look, almost a threat. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called
+attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as
+compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar
+disproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the _Christ
+between St. Andrew and St. Catherine_ in the Church of SS. Ermagora and
+Fortunato (commonly called S. Marcuola) at Venice. Here the head of the
+infant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the two
+saints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest.
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle had refused to accept this picture as a genuine
+Titian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful place
+among the early works.
+
+Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the _Three
+Ages_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_, the writer is inclined to place
+the _Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI. to St.
+Peter_, once in the collection of Charles I.[11] and now in the Antwerp
+Gallery. The main elements of Titian's art may be seen here, in
+imperfect fusion, as in very few even of his early productions. The not
+very dignified St. Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with a
+high relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again in
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or rather his
+immediate followers; the magnificently robed Alexander VI. (Rodrigo
+Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, gives back the style in portraiture
+of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio; while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro--an
+ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of
+fleets, as the background suggests--is one of the most characteristic
+portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos, its intensity,
+contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same
+_Baffo_ in the renowned _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, painted twenty-three
+years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It
+is the first in order of a great series, including the _Ariosto_ of
+Cobham, the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, the _Portrait of a Man_ in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous _Concert_ of the Pitti,
+ascribed to Giorgione. Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. Georges
+Lafenestre[12] have called attention to the fact that the detested
+Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot
+well have been executed after that time. He would have been a bold man
+who should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI.
+into a votive picture painted immediately after his death! How is it
+possible to assume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless assume, that
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art,
+was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at the
+latest, in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione
+himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted
+his Castelfranco altar-piece, his _Venus_, or his _Three Philosophers
+(Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas)_. Old Gian Bellino himself had not entered
+upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S.
+Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.[13]
+
+It is impossible on the present occasion to give any detailed account
+of the fresco decorations painted by Giorgione and Titian on the facades
+of the new Fondaco de' Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on
+the 28th of January 1505. Full particulars will be found in Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle's often-quoted work. Vasari's many manifest errors and
+disconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do not
+predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained
+relations between Giorgione and our painter, to which this particular
+business is supposed to have given rise. That they together decorated
+with a series of frescoes which acquired considerable celebrity the
+exterior of the Fondaco is all that is known for certain, Titian being
+apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Of
+these frescoes only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, and
+facing the Grand Canal, has been preserved, in a much-damaged
+condition--the few fragments that remained of those facing the side
+canal having been destroyed in 1884.[14] Vasari shows us a Giorgione
+angry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior beauty
+of some work on the "_facciata di verso la Merceria,_" which in reality
+belongs to Titian, and thereupon implacably cutting short their
+connection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, but
+refuted by the less contemporary authority of Tizianello's _Anonimo_. Of
+what great painters, standing in the relation of master and pupil, have
+not such stories been told, and--the worst of it is--told with a certain
+foundation of truth? Apocryphal is, no doubt, that which has evolved
+itself from the internal evidence supplied by the _Baptism of Christ_ of
+Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci; but a stronger substructure of fact
+supports the unpleasing anecdotes as to Titian and Tintoretto, as to
+Watteau and Pater, as to our own Hudson and Reynolds, and, alas! as to
+very many others. How touching, on the other hand, is that simple entry
+in Francesco Francia's day-book, made when his chief journeyman,
+Timoteo Viti, leaves him: "1495 a di 4 aprile � partito il mio caro
+Timoteo; chi Dio li dia ogni bene et fortuna!" ("On the 4th day of April
+1495 my dear Timoteo left me. May God grant him all happiness and good
+fortune!")
+
+[Illustration: _The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome.
+From a Photograph by Anderson._]
+
+There is one reason that makes it doubly difficult, relying on
+developments of style only, to make, even tentatively, a chronological
+arrangement of Titian's early works. This is that in those painted
+_poesie_ of the earlier Venetian art of which the germs are to be found
+in Giovanni Bellini and Cima, but the flower is identified with
+Giorgione, Titian surrendered himself to the overmastering influence of
+the latter with less reservation of his own individuality than in his
+sacred works. In the earlier imaginative subjects the vivifying glow of
+Giorgionesque poetry moulds, colours, and expands the genius of Titian,
+but so naturally as neither to obliterate nor to constrain it. Indeed,
+even in the late time of our master--checking an unveiled sensuousness
+which sometimes approaches dangerously near to a downright
+sensuality--the influence of the master and companion who vanished half
+a century before victoriously reasserts itself. It is this _renouveau_
+of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives so
+exquisite a charm to the _Venere del Pardo_, so strange a pathos to that
+still later _Nymph and Shepherd,_ which was a few years ago brought out
+of its obscurity and added to the treasures of the Imperial Gallery at
+Vienna.
+
+The sacred works of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with a
+difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a
+majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation,
+very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness and
+reserve which informs such creations as the _Madonna of Castelfranco_
+and the _Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch_ of the Prado Museum.
+Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque
+ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of the _Assunta_, the true
+passion going hand-in-hand with beauty of the Louvre _Entombment_, the
+rhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the _St. Peter Martyr_.
+
+The _Baptism of Christ_, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the Gallery of
+the Capitol at Rome, had been by Crowe and Cavalcaselle taken away from
+Titian and given to Paris Bordone, but the keen insight of Morelli led
+him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to Titian. Internal
+evidence is indeed conclusive in this case that the picture must be
+assigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.[15]
+Here Titian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christ
+more in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemn
+hieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries.
+The luxuriant landscape is in the main Giorgionesque, save that here and
+there a naked branch among the leafage--and on one of them the
+woodpecker--strongly recalls Giovanni Bellini. The same robust,
+round-limbed young Venetian, with the inexpressive face, does duty here
+as St. John the Baptist, who in the _Three Ages_, presently to be
+discussed, appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd. The
+Christ, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxuriant
+hair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine
+_Cristo della Moneta_. The question at once arises here, Did Titian in
+the type of this figure derive inspiration from Giovanni Bellini's
+splendid _Baptism of Christ_, finished in 1510 for the Church of S.
+Corona at Vicenza, but which the younger artist might well have seen a
+year or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in the
+workshop of the venerable master? Apart from its fresh na�vet�, and its
+rare pictorial charm, how trivial and merely anecdotic does the
+conception of Titian appear by the side of that of Bellini, so lofty, so
+consoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunset
+colour![16] Alone in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram,
+placed in the picture with an awkwardness attractive in its na�vete,
+but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standing
+alone.
+
+The beautiful _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida,_ placed in
+the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now at last officially
+restored to Titian, after having been for years innumerable ascribed to
+Giorgione, whose style it not more than generally recalls. Here at any
+rate all the rival wise men are agreed, and it only remains for the
+student of the old masters, working to-day on the solid substructure
+provided for him by his predecessors, to wonder how any other
+attribution could have been accepted. But then the critic of the present
+day is a little too prone to be wise and scornful _� ban march�_,
+forgetting that he has been spared three parts of the road, and that he
+starts for conquest at the high point, to reach which the pioneers of
+scientific criticism in art have devoted a lifetime of noble toil. It is
+in this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early art
+of the Cadorine which Crowe and Cavalcaselle have defined as
+"Palmesque." The _St. Bridget_ and the _St. Ulphus_ are both types
+frequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamasque painter, and
+it has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model with
+hair of wavy gold must have sat to Giorgione, Titian, and Palma. This
+can only be true, however, in a modified sense, seeing that Giorgione
+did not, so much as his contemporaries and followers, affect the type of
+the beautiful Venetian blond, "large, languishing, and lazy." The hair
+of his women--both the sacred personages and the divinities nominally
+classic or wholly Venetian--is, as a rule, of a rich chestnut, or at the
+most dusky fair, and in them the Giorgionesque oval of the face tempers
+with its spirituality the strength of physical passion that the general
+physique denotes. The polished surface of this panel at Madrid, the
+execution, sound and finished without being finicking, the high
+yellowish lights on the crimson draperies, are all very characteristic
+of this, the first manner of Vecelli. The green hangings at the back of
+the picture are such as are very generally associated with the
+colour-schemes of Palma. An old repetition, with a slight variation in
+the Bambino, is in the royal collection at Hampton Court, where it long
+bore--indeed it does so still on the frame--the name of Palma Vecchio.
+
+It will be remembered that Vasari assigns to the _Tobias and the Angel_
+in the Church of S. Marciliano at Venice the exact date 1507, describing
+it, moreover, with greater accuracy than he does any other work by
+Titian. He mentions even "the thicket, in which is a St. John the
+Baptist kneeling as he prays to heaven, whence comes a splendour of
+light." The Aretine biographer is followed in this particular by
+Morelli, usually so eagle-eyed, so little bound by tradition in tracing
+the beginnings of a great painter. The gifted modern critic places the
+picture among the quite early works of our master. Notwithstanding this
+weight of authority, the writer feels bound to dissent from the view
+just now indicated, and in this instance to follow Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, who assign to the _Tobias and the Angel_ a place much
+later on in Titian's long career. The picture, though it hangs high in
+the little church for which it was painted, will speak for itself to
+those who interrogate it without _parti pris_. Neither in the
+figures--the magnificently classic yet living archangel Raphael and the
+more na�ve and realistic Tobias--nor in the rich landscape with St. John
+the Baptist praying is there anything left of the early Giorgionesque
+manner. In the sweeping breadth of the execution, the summarising power
+of the brush, the glow from within of the colour, we have so many
+evidences of a style in its fullest maturity. It will be safe,
+therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian's middle period.[17]
+
+The _Three Ages_ in the Bridgewater Gallery and the so-called _Sacred
+and Profane Love_ in the Borghese Gallery represent the apogee of
+Titian's Giorgionesque style. Glowing through and through with the
+spirit of the master-poet among Venetian painters, yet falling short a
+little, it may be, of that subtle charm of his, compounded indefinably
+of sensuous delight and spiritual yearning, these two masterpieces carry
+the Giorgionesque technically a pretty wide step farther than the
+inventor of the style took it. Barbarelli never absolutely threw off the
+trammels of the Quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained to
+the last--not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm--the na�vet�,
+the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely
+full-fledged.
+
+The _Three Ages_, from its analogies of type and manner with the
+_Baptism_ of the Capitol, would appear to be the earlier of the two
+imaginative works here grouped together, but to date later than that
+picture.[18] The tonality of the picture is of an exquisite
+silveriness--that of clear, moderate daylight, though this relative
+paleness may have been somewhat increased by time. It may a little
+disconcert at first sight those who have known the lovely pastoral only
+from hot, brown copies, such as the one which, under the name of
+Giorgione, was formerly in the Dudley House Collection, and now belongs
+to Sir William Farrer. It is still so difficult to battle with the
+deeply-rooted notion that there can be no Giorgione, no painting of his
+school, without the accompaniment of a rich brown sauce! The shepherdess
+has a robe of fairest crimson, and her flower-crowned locks in tint more
+nearly approach to the _blond cendr�_ which distinguishes so many of
+Palma's _donne_ than to the ruddier gold that Titian himself generally
+affects. The more passionate of the two, she gazes straight into the
+eyes of her strong-limbed rustic lover, who half-reclining rests his
+hand upon her shoulder. On the twin reed-pipes, which she still holds in
+her hands, she has just breathed forth a strain of music, and to it, as
+it still lingers in their ears, they yield themselves entranced. Here
+the youth is naked, the maid clothed and adorned--a reversal, this, of
+Giorgione's _F�te Champ�tre_ in the Salon Carr� of the Louvre, where the
+women are undraped, and the amorous young cavaliers appear in complete
+and rich attire. To the right are a group of thoroughly Titianesque
+amorini--the winged one, dominating the others, being perhaps Amor
+himself; while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls ranged
+round him on the ground--obvious reminders of the last stage of all, at
+which he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity between
+the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of
+the personages--the one aiding the other to express the moment of pause
+in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all
+that the very whirlwind of passion can give. Near at hand may be
+pitfalls, the smiling love-god may prove less innocent than he looks,
+and in the distance Fate may be foreshadowed by the figure of weary Age
+awaiting Death. Yet this one moment is all the lovers' own, and they
+profane it not by speech, but stir their happy languor only with faint
+notes of music borne on the still, warm air.
+
+[Illustration: _The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery. From the Plate in
+Lafenestre's "Vie et Oeuvre du Titien" (May, Paris.)_]
+
+The _Sacred and Profane Love_ of the Borghese Gallery is one of the
+world's pictures, and beyond doubt the masterpiece of the early or
+Giorgionesque period. To-day surely no one will be found to gainsay
+Morelli when he places it at the end of that period, which it so
+incomparably sums up--not at the beginning, when its perfection would be
+as incomprehensible as the less absolute achievement displayed in other
+early pieces which such a classification as this would place after the
+Borghese picture. The accompanying reproduction obviates all necessity
+for a detailed description. Titian painted afterwards perhaps more
+wonderfully still--with a more sweeping vigour of brush, with a higher
+authority, and a play of light as brilliant and diversified. He never
+attained to a higher finish and perfection of its kind, or more
+admirably suited the technical means to the thing to be achieved. He
+never so completely gave back, coloured with the splendour of his own
+genius, the rays received from Giorgione. The delicious sunset landscape
+has all the Giorgionesque elements, with more spaciousness, and lines of
+a still more suave harmony. The grand Venetian _donna_ who sits
+sumptuously robed, flower-crowned, and even gloved, at the sculptured
+classic fount is the noblest in her pride of loveliness, as she is one
+of the first, of the long line of voluptuous beauties who will occupy
+the greatest brushes of the Cinquecento. The little love-god who,
+insidiously intervening, paddles in the water of the fountain and
+troubles its surface, is Titian's very own, owing nothing to any
+forerunner. The divinely beautiful _Profane Love_--or, as we shall
+presently see, _Venus_--is the most flawless presentment of female
+loveliness unveiled that modern art has known up to this date, save only
+the _Venus_ of Giorgione himself (in the Dresden Gallery), to which it
+can be but little posterior. The radiant freshness of the face, with its
+glory of half-unbound hair, does not, indeed, equal the sovereign
+loveliness of the Dresden _Venus_ or the disquieting charm of the
+Giovanelli _Zingarella_ (properly Hypsipyle). Its beauty is all on the
+surface, while theirs stimulates the imagination of the beholder. The
+body with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and
+movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true
+Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous
+drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high
+lights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that Titian
+ever achieved. Only in the late _Venere del Pardo_, which so closely
+follows the chief motive of Giorgione's _Venus_, does he approach it in
+frankness and purity. Far more genuinely classic is it in spirit,
+because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, than
+anything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous in
+their study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.[19]
+
+[Illustration: _Sacred and Profane Love._]
+
+It is impossible to discuss here in detail all the conjectural
+explanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popular
+of all Venetian pictures--least of all that strange one brought forward
+by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the _Artless and Sated Love_, for which they
+have found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves in
+an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show but a languid desire to
+solve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the pictures
+described by Marcantonio Michiel (the _Anonimo_ of Jacopo Morelli), in
+the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the _Inferno with
+Aeneas and Anchises_ and _Landscape with the Birth of Paris_, Herr Franz
+Wickhoff[20] has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring
+crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of
+Barbarelli's best known works. The _Three Philosophers_ he calls
+_Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas_, the Giovanelli _Tempest with the Gipsy
+and the Soldier_ he explains anew as _Admetus and Hypsipyle_.[21] The
+subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and
+popularly called, or rather miscalled, the _Dream of Raphael_, is
+recognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione.
+He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the
+commentator of Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping
+side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it),
+the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in
+peaceful sleep.
+
+Passing over to the Giorgionesque period of Titian, he boldly sets to
+work on the world-famous _Sacred and Profane Love_, and shows us the
+Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned
+humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the
+_Argonautica_ of Valerius Flaccus--that wearisome imitation of the
+similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea--the sumptuously
+attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)--sits at the fountain in
+unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and
+holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not
+yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love
+is the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comes
+Venus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea's father,
+irresistibly pleading that she shall go to the alien lover, who waits in
+the wood. It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in the
+toils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is the
+subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible--in Titian's realisation
+of the legend--to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main theme
+upon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing[22] had
+already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when he
+described the Borghese picture as _The Maiden with Venus and Amor at the
+Well_. The _vraisemblance_ of Herr Wickhoff's brilliant interpretation
+becomes the greater when we reflect that Titian at least twice
+afterwards borrowed subjects from classical antiquity, taking his
+_Worship of Venus_, now at Madrid, from the _Erotes_ of Philostratus,
+and our own wonderful _Bacchus and Ariadne_ at the National Gallery from
+the _Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ of Catullus. In the future it is
+quite possible that the Austrian savant may propose new and precise
+interpretations for the _Three Ages_ and for Giorgione's _Concert
+Champ�tre_ at the Louvre.
+
+[Illustration: _Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria
+Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq._]
+
+It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student of
+Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him
+at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young
+poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly
+allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have hard,
+clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours.
+It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere of pause and
+quiet that they bring with them, the way in which they indefinably take
+possession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond their
+radiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet we
+need not mourn overmuch, or too painfully set to work to revise our
+whole conception of Venetian idyllic art as matured in the first years
+of the Cinquecento. True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo, not
+less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian and
+Giorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the
+lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they
+have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no
+doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more
+fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular
+to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic
+legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of
+the golden prime disdained to represent--or it may be unconsciously
+shrank from representing--the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic
+and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. Giorgione
+embodies in such a picture as the _Adrastus and Hypsipyle_, or the
+_Aeneas and Evander_, not so much what has been related to him of those
+ancient legends as his own mood when he is brought into contact with
+them; he transposes his motive from a dramatic into a lyrical
+atmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something "rich
+and strange," coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmly
+human fantasy. Titian, in the _Sacred and Profane Love_, as for
+identification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep close
+to the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. But
+for all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, for
+the splendour of female loveliness unveiled, for the piquant contrast of
+female loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He has
+presented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such a
+delightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries to
+decipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian in these exquisite
+idylls--for so we may still dare to call them--have consciously or
+unconsciously achieved, is the indissoluble union of humanity outwardly
+quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion, to the
+environing nature. It is Nature herself that in these true painted poems
+mysteriously responds, that interprets to the beholder the moods of man,
+much as a mighty orchestra--Nature ordered and controlled--may by its
+undercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the very
+personages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so we
+may be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his new interpretations,
+not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first
+acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old
+ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from
+another and a more prosaic, because a more precise and literal,
+standpoint.
+
+[Illustration: _Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by
+Hanfst�ngl_.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Frescoes of the Scuola del Santo--The "Herodias" type of picture--Holy
+Families and Sacred Conversations--Date of the "Cristo della Moneta" Is
+the "Concert" of the Pitti by Titian?--The "Bacchanal" of Alnwick
+Castle.
+
+
+
+It has been pointed out by Titian's biographers that the wars which
+followed upon the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing all
+over North Italy the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation.
+It was not long after this--on the death of his master Giorgione--that
+Sebastiano Luciani migrated to Rome and, so far as he could, shook off
+his allegiance to the new Venetian art; it was then that Titian
+temporarily left the city of his adoption to do work in fresco at Padua
+and Vicenza. If the date 1508, given by Vasari for the great frieze-like
+wood-engraving, _The Triumph of Faith_, be accepted, it must be held
+that it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi[23] cites
+painted compositions of the _Triumph_ as either the originals or the
+repetitions of the wood-engravings, for which Titian himself drew the
+blocks. The frescoes themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out on
+the walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished;
+but that they ever came into existence there would not appear to be any
+direct evidence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in the
+process of translation into wood-engraving, are not materially at
+variance with those in the frescoes of the Scuola del Santo. But the
+movement, the spirit of the whole is essentially different. This mighty,
+onward-sweeping procession, with Adam and Eve, the Patriarchs, the
+Prophets and Sibyls, the martyred Innocents, the great chariot with
+Christ enthroned, drawn by the four Doctors of the Church and impelled
+forward by the Emblems of the four Evangelists, with a great company of
+Apostles and Martyrs following, has all the vigour and elasticity, all
+the decorative amplitude that is wanting in the frescoes of the Santo.
+It is obvious that inspiration was derived from the _Triumphs_ of
+Mantegna, then already so widely popularised by numerous engravings.
+Titian and those under whose inspiration he worked here obviously
+intended an antithesis to the great series of canvases presenting the
+apotheosis of Julius Caesar, which were then to be seen in the not far
+distant Mantua. Have we here another pictorial commentary, like the
+famous _Cristo detta Moneta,_ with which we shall have to deal
+presently, on the "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo," which
+was the favourite device of Alfonso of Ferrara and the legend round his
+gold coins? The whole question is interesting, and deserves more careful
+consideration than can be accorded to it on the present occasion. Hardly
+again, until he reached extreme old age, did such an impulse of sacred
+passion colour the art of the painter of Cadore as here. In the earlier
+section of his life-work the _Triumph of Faith_ constitutes a striking
+exception.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak.
+Fresco in the Scuola del Santo, Padua. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Passing over, as relatively unimportant, Titian's share in the
+much-defaced fresco decorations of the Scuola del Carmine, we come now
+to those more celebrated ones in the Scuola del Santo. Out of the
+sixteen frescoes executed in 1510-11 by Titian, in concert with Domenico
+Campagnola and other assistants of less fame, the following three are
+from the brush of the master himself:--_St. Anthony causes a new-born
+Infant to speak, testifying to the innocence of its Mother; St. Anthony
+heals the leg of a Youth; A jealous Husband puts to death his Wife, whom
+the Saint afterwards restores to life._ Here the figures, the
+composition, the beautiful landscape backgrounds bear unmistakably the
+trace of Giorgione's influence. The composition has just the timidity,
+the lack of rhythm and variety, that to the last marks that of
+Barbarelli. The figures have his na�ve truth, his warmth and splendour
+of life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift the
+uninspiring subjects a little above the actual. The _Nobleman putting to
+death his Wife_ is dramatic, almost terrible in its fierce, awkward
+realism, yet it does not rise much higher in interpretation than what
+our neighbours would to-day call the _drame passionel._ The interest is
+much the same that is aroused in a student of Elizabethan literature by
+that study of murder, _Arden of Feversham_, not that higher attraction
+that he feels--horrors notwithstanding--for _The Maid's Tragedy_ of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, or _The Duchess of Malfi_ of Webster.[24]
+
+[Illustration: _"Noli me tangere." National Gallery. From a Photograph
+published by the Autotype Company._]
+
+A convenient date for the magnificent _St. Mark enthroned, with SS.
+Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas, and Damianus_, is 1512, when Titian, having
+completed his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned to
+Venice. True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in the
+truculent _St. Mark_; but, then, as essentially so were the frescoes
+just terminated. The noble altar-piece[25] symbolises, or rather
+commemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with the
+terrors of the League of Cambrai:--on the one side St. Sebastian,
+standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, St. Roch for
+plague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, SS. Cosmas and
+Damianus, suggesting the healing of these evils. The colour is
+Giorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli's own is so to be
+described. Especially does it show points of contact with that of the
+so-called _Three Philosophers_, which, on the authority of Marcantonio
+Michiel (the _Anonimo_), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of the
+last works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is both
+sumptuous and boldly contrasted in the local hues, the sovereign unity
+of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, by
+any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate Giorgionesques.
+Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione
+successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a
+more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These last
+are among the most admirable portrait-figures in the life-work of
+Titian. In them a simplicity, a concentration akin to that of Giovanni
+Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and
+flexibility of Barbarelli. The St. Sebastian is the most beautiful among
+the youthful male figures, as the _Venus_ of Giorgione and the Venus of
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_ are the most beautiful among the female
+figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such
+presentments of youth in its flower abounded. There is something
+androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the strength
+and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its
+suavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that a
+delight in portraying the fresh comeliness, the elastic beauty of form
+proper to the youth just passing into the man was common to many
+Venetian painters at this stage, and coloured their art as it had
+coloured the whole art of Greece.
+
+Hereabouts the writer would like to place the singularly attractive, yet
+a little puzzling, _Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd_,
+which is No. 4 in the National Gallery. The type of the landscape is
+early, and even for that time the execution in this particular is, for
+Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially the
+projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against
+the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. The
+noble type and the stilted attitude of the _St. Joseph_ suggest the _St.
+Mark_ of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of
+the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of
+Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the
+Salute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, by
+a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no
+means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly
+in the _St. Anthony causing a new-born Infant to speak_, of the Scuola.
+Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of
+the early time before complete freedom of design was attained.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della
+Salute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson_.]
+
+[Illustration: _The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
+From a Photograph by L�wy_.]
+
+The splendidly beautiful _Herodias with the head of St. John the
+Baptist_, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but by
+Morelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian,
+belongs to about the same time as the _Sacred and Profane Love_, and
+would therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Padua
+and Vicenza. The intention has been not so much to emphasise the tragic
+character of the motive as to exhibit to the highest advantage the
+voluptuous charm, the languid indifference of a Venetian beauty posing
+for Herod's baleful consort. Repetitions of this _Herodias_ exist in the
+Northbrook Collection and in that of Mr. R.H. Benson. The latter, which
+is presumably from the workshop of the master, and shows variations in
+one or two unimportant particulars from the Doria picture, is here,
+failing the original, reproduced with the kind permission of the owner.
+A conception traceable back to Giorgione would appear to underlie, not
+only this Doria picture, but that _Herodias_ which at Dorchester House
+is, for not obvious reasons, attributed to Pordenone, and another
+similar one by Palma Vecchio, of which a late copy exists in the
+collection of the Earl of Chichester. Especially is this community of
+origin noticeable in the head of St. John on the charger, as it appears
+in each of these works. All of them again show a family resemblance in
+this particular respect to the interesting full-length _Judith_ at the
+Hermitage, now ascribed to Giorgione, to the over-painted half-length
+_Judith_ in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice, and to Hollar's
+print after a picture supposed by the engraver to give the portrait of
+Giorgione himself in the character of David, the slayer of Goliath.[26]
+The sumptuous but much-injured _Vanitas_, which is No. 1110 in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich--a beautiful woman of the same opulent type as the
+_Herodias_, holding a mirror which reflects jewels and other symbols of
+earthly vanity--may be classed with the last-named work. Again we owe it
+to Morelli[27] that this painting, ascribed by Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle--as the _Herodias_ was ascribed--to Pordenone, has been
+with general acceptance classed among the early works of Titian. The
+popular _Flora_ of the Uffizi, a beautiful thing still, though all the
+bloom of its beauty has been effaced, must be placed rather later in
+this section of Titian's life-work, displaying as it does a technique
+more facile and accomplished, and a conception of a somewhat higher
+individuality. The model is surely the same as that which has served for
+the Venus of the _Sacred and Profane Love_, though the picture comes
+some years after that piece. Later still comes the so-called _Alfonso
+d'Este and Laura Dianti_, as to which something will be said farther on.
+Another puzzle is provided by the beautiful "_Noli me tangere_" of the
+National Gallery, which must necessarily have its place somewhere here
+among the early works. Giorgionesque the picture still is, and most
+markedly so in the character of the beautiful landscape; yet the
+execution shows an altogether unusual freedom and mastery for that
+period. The _Magdalen_ is, appropriately enough, of the same type as the
+exquisite, golden blond courtezans--or, if you will, models--who
+constantly appear and reappear in this period of Venetian art. Hardly
+anywhere has the painter exhibited a more wonderful freedom and subtlety
+of brush than in the figure of the Christ, in which glowing flesh is so
+finely set off by the white of fluttering, half-transparent draperies.
+The canvas has exquisite colour, almost without colours; the only local
+tint of any very defined character being the dark red of the Magdalen's
+robe. Yet a certain affectation, a certain exaggeration of fluttering
+movement and strained attitude repel the beholder a little at first, and
+neutralise for him the rare beauties of the canvas. It is as if a wave
+of some strange transient influence had passed over Titian at this
+moment, then again to be dissipated.
+
+[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot.
+Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by Brogi._]
+
+But to turn now once more to the series of our master's Holy Families
+and Sacred Conversations which began with _La Zingarella_, and was
+continued with the _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ of
+Madrid. The most popular of all those belonging to this still early time
+is the _Virgin with the Cherries_ in the Vienna Gallery. Here the
+painter is already completely himself. He will go much farther in
+breadth if not in polish, in transparency, in forcefulness, if not in
+attractiveness of colour; but he is now, in sacred art at any rate,
+practically free from outside influences. For the pensive girl-Madonna
+of Giorgione we now have the radiant young matron of Titian, joyous yet
+calm in her play with the infant Christ, while the Madonna of his master
+and friend was unrestful and full of tender foreboding even in seeming
+repose. Pretty close on this must have followed the _Madonna and Child
+with St. Stephen, St. Ambrose and St. Maurice_, No 439 in the Louvre, in
+which the rich colour-harmonies strike a somewhat deeper note. An
+atelier repetition of this fine original is No. 166 in the Vienna
+Gallery; the only material variation traceable in this last-named
+example being that in lieu of St. Ambrose, wearing a kind of biretta, we
+have St. Jerome bareheaded.
+
+Very near in time and style to this particular series, with which it may
+safely be grouped, is the beautiful and finely preserved _Holy Family_
+in the Bridgewater Gallery, where it is still erroneously attributed to
+Palma Vecchio. It is to be found in the same private apartment on the
+groundfloor of Bridgewater House, that contains the _Three Ages_. Deep
+glowing richness of colour and smooth perfection without smallness of
+finish make this picture remarkable, notwithstanding its lack of any
+deeper significance. Nor must there be forgotten in an enumeration of
+the early Holy Families, one of the loveliest of all, the _Madonna and
+Child with the infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot_, which adorns the
+Venetian section of the Uffizi Gallery. Here the relationship to
+Giorgione is more clearly shown than in any of these Holy Families of
+the first period, and in so far the painting, which cannot be placed
+very early among them, constitutes a partial exception in the series.
+The Virgin is of a more refined and pensive type than in the _Madonna
+with the Cherries_ of Vienna, or the _Madonna with Saints_, No. 439 in
+the Louvre, and the divine Bambino less robust in build and aspect. The
+magnificent St. Anthony is quite Giorgionesque in the serenity tinged
+with sadness of his contemplative mood.
+
+[Illustration: From a photograph by Bra�n-Clement & Cie. Virgin and
+Child with Saints.]
+
+Last of all in this particular group--another work in respect of which
+Morelli has played the rescuer--is the _Madonna and Child with four
+Saints_, No. 168 in the Dresden Gallery, a much-injured but eminently
+Titianesque work, which may be said to bring this particular series to
+within a couple of years or so of the _Assunta_--that great landmark of
+the first period of maturity. The type of the Madonna here is still very
+similar to that in the _Madonna with the Cherries_.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the
+Stag. From a Drawing by Titian in the British Museum._]
+
+Apart from all these sacred works, and in every respect an exceptional
+production, is the world-famous _Cristo della Moneta_ of the Dresden
+Gallery. As to the exact date to be assigned to this panel among the
+early works of Titian considerable difficulty exists. For once agreeing
+with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Morelli is inclined to disregard the
+testimony of Vasari, from whose text it would result that it was painted
+in or after the year 1514, and to place it as far back as 1508.
+Notwithstanding this weight of authority the writer is strongly
+inclined, following Vasari in this instance, and trusting to certain
+indications furnished by the picture itself, to return to the date 1514
+or thereabouts. There is no valid reason to doubt that the _Christ of
+the Tribute-Money_ was painted for Alfonso I. of Ferrara, and the less
+so, seeing that it so aptly illustrates the already quoted legend on his
+coins: "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo." According to
+Vasari, it was painted _nella porta d'un armario_--that is to say, in
+the door of a press or wardrobe. But this statement need not be taken in
+its most literal sense. If it were to be assumed from this passage that
+the picture was painted on the spot, its date must be advanced to 1516,
+since Titian did not pay his first visit to Ferrara before that year.
+There is no sufficient ground, however, for assuming that he did not
+execute his wonderful panel in the usual fashion--that is to say, at
+home in Venice. The last finishing touches might, perhaps, have been
+given to it _in situ_, as they were to Bellini's _Bacchanal_, done also
+for the Duke of Ferrara. The extraordinary finish of the painting, which
+is hardly to be paralleled in this respect in the life-work of the
+artist, may have been due to his desire to "show his hand" to his new
+patron in a subject which touched him so nearly. And then the finish is
+not of the Quattrocento type, not such as we find, for instance, in the
+_Leonardo Loredano_ of Giovanni Bellini, the finest panels of Cima, or
+the early _Christ bearing the Cross_ of Giorgione. In it exquisite
+polish of surface and consummate rendering of detail are combined with
+the utmost breadth and majesty of composition, with a now perfect
+freedom in the casting of the draperies. It is difficult, indeed, to
+imagine that this masterpiece--so eminently a work of the Cinquecento,
+and one, too, in which the master of Cadore rose superior to all
+influences, even to that of Giorgione--could have been painted in 1508,
+that is some two years before Bellini's _Baptism of Christ_ in S.
+Corona, and in all probability before the _Three Philosophers_ of
+Giorgione himself. The one of Titian's own early pictures with which it
+appears to the writer to have most in common--not so much in technique,
+indeed, as in general style--is the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and than
+this it is very much less Giorgionesque. To praise the _Cristo della
+Moneta_ anew after it has been so incomparably well praised seems almost
+an impertinence. The soft radiance of the colour so well matches the
+tempered majesty, the infinite mansuetude of the conception; the
+spirituality, which is of the essence of the august subject, is so
+happily expressed, without any sensible diminution of the splendour of
+Renaissance art approaching its highest. And yet nothing could well be
+simpler than the scheme of colour as compared with the complex harmonies
+which Venetian art in a somewhat later phase affected. Frank contrasts
+are established between the tender, glowing flesh of the Christ, seen in
+all the glory of achieved manhood, and the coarse, brown skin of the son
+of the people who appears as the Pharisee; between the bright yet
+tempered red of His robe and the deep blue of His mantle. But the golden
+glow, which is Titian's own, envelops the contrasting figures and the
+contrasting hues in its harmonising atmosphere, and gives unity to the
+whole.[28]
+
+[Illustration: _The "Cristo della Moneta." Dresden Gallery. From a
+Photograph by Hanfst�ngl._]
+
+A small group of early portraits--all of them somewhat difficult to
+place--call for attention before we proceed. Probably the earliest
+portrait among those as yet recognised as from the hand of our
+painter--leaving out of the question the _Baffo_ and the
+portrait-figures in the great _St. Mark_ of the Salute--is the
+magnificent _Ariosto_ in the Earl of Darnley's Collection at Cobham
+Hall.[29] There is very considerable doubt, to say the least, as to
+whether this half-length really represents the court poet of Ferrara,
+but the point requires more elaborate discussion than can be here
+conceded to it. Thoroughly Giorgionesque is the soberly tinted yet
+sumptuous picture in its general arrangement, as in its general tone,
+and in this respect it is the fitting companion and the descendant of
+Giorgione's _Antonio Broccardo_ at Buda-Pesth, of his _Knight of Malta_
+at the Uffizi. Its resemblance, moreover, is, as regards the general
+lines of the composition, a very striking one to the celebrated Sciarra
+_Violin-Player_ by Sebastiano del Piombo, now in the gallery of Baron
+Alphonse Rothschild at Paris, where it is as heretofore given to
+Raphael.[30] The handsome, manly head has lost both subtlety and
+character through some too severe process of cleaning, but Venetian art
+has hardly anything more magnificent to show than the costume, with the
+quilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin which occupies so prominent a
+place in the picture.
+
+[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery.
+From a Photograph by Hanfst�ngl_.]
+
+The so-called _Concert_ of the Pitti Palace, which depicts a young
+Augustinian monk as he plays on a keyed instrument, having on one side
+of him a youthful cavalier in a plumed hat, on the other a bareheaded
+clerk holding a bass-viol, was, until Morelli arose, almost universally
+looked upon as one of the most typical Giorgiones.[31] The most gifted
+of the purely aesthetic critics who have approached the Italian
+Renaissance, Walter Pater, actually built round this _Concert_ his
+exquisite study on the School of Giorgione. There can be little doubt,
+notwithstanding, that Morelli was right in denying the authorship of
+Barbarelli, and tentatively, for he does no more, assigning the so
+subtly attractive and pathetic _Concert_ to the early time of Titian. To
+express a definitive opinion on the latter point in the present state of
+the picture would be somewhat hazardous. The portrait of the modish
+young cavalier and that of the staid elderly clerk, whose baldness
+renders tonsure impossible--that is just those portions of the canvas
+which are least well preserved--are also those that least conclusively
+suggest our master. The passion-worn, ultra-sensitive physiognomy of the
+young Augustinian is, undoubtedly, in its very essence a Giorgionesque
+creation, for the fellows of which we must turn to the Castelfranco
+master's just now cited _Antonio Broccardo_, to his male portraits in
+Berlin and at the Uffizi, to his figure of the youthful Pallas, son of
+Evander, in the _Three Philosophers_. Closer to it, all the same, are
+the _Raffo_ and the two portraits in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and
+closer still is the supremely fine _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the Salon
+Carr�, that later production of Vecelli's early time. The _Concert_ of
+the Pitti, so far as it can be judged through the retouches that cover
+it, displays an art certainly not finer or more delicate, but yet in its
+technical processes broader, swifter, and more synthetic than anything
+that we can with certainty point to in the life-work of Barbarelli. The
+large but handsome and flexible hands of the player are much nearer in
+type and treatment to Titian than they are to his master. The beautiful
+motive--music for one happy moment uniting by invisible bonds of
+sympathy three human beings--is akin to that in the _Three Ages_, though
+there love steps in as the beautifier of rustic harmony. It is to be
+found also in Giorgione's _Concert Champ�tre_, in the Louvre, in which
+the thrumming of the lute is, however, one among many delights appealing
+to the senses. This smouldering heat, this tragic passion in which youth
+revels, looking back already with discontent, yet forward also with
+unquenchable yearning, is the keynote of the Giorgionesque and the early
+Titianesque male portraiture. It is summed up by the _Antonio Broccardo_
+of the first, by the _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the second. Altogether
+other, and less due to a reaction from physical ardour, is the exquisite
+sensitiveness of Lorenzo Lotto, who sees most willingly in his sitters
+those qualities that are in the closest sympathy with his own
+highly-strung nature, and loves to present them as some secret,
+indefinable woe tears at their heart-strings. A strong element of the
+Giorgionesque pathos informs still and gives charm to the Sciarra
+_Violin-Player_ of Sebastiano del Piombo; only that there it is already
+tempered by the haughty self-restraint more proper to Florentine and
+Roman portraiture. There is little or nothing to add after this as to
+the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, except that as a representation of
+aristocratic youth it has hardly a parallel among the master's works
+except, perhaps, a later and equally admirable, though less
+distinguished, portrait in the Pitti.
+
+[Illustration: From a Photograph by Bra�n Clement & Cie. Walter L.
+Colls. ph. sc.
+
+Jeune Homme au gant]
+
+[Illustration: _A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence.
+From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of the
+Venetians, painted in the _pensieroso_ mood his portraits of high-bred
+English cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest manhood,
+was this particular aspect of youth in its flower again depicted with
+the same felicity.[32]
+
+To Crowe and Cavalcaselle's pages the reader must be referred for a
+detailed and interesting account of Titian's intrigues against the
+venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office of
+broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. We see there how,
+on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo
+proposed to Titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the
+Tenth (Giovanni de' Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such a
+step. Titian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds to
+petition the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker's patent for
+life, on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions as
+are conceded to Giovanni Bellini. The petition is presented on the 31st
+of May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that day moves and carries a
+resolution accepting Titian's offer with all the conditions attached.
+Though he has arrived at the extreme limit of his splendid career, old
+Gian Bellino, who has just given new proof of his still transcendent
+power in the great altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), which
+is in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit still
+under the encroachments of his dangerous competitor, younger than
+himself by half a century. On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Ten
+revokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares that
+Titian is not to receive his broker's patent on the first vacancy, but
+must wait his turn. Seemingly nothing daunted, Titian petitions again,
+asking for the reversion of the particular broker's patent which will
+become vacant on the death of Giovanni Bellini; and this new offer,
+which stipulates for certain special payments and provisions, is
+accepted by the Council. Titian, like most other holders of the
+much-coveted office, shows himself subsequently much more eager to
+receive its not inconsiderable emoluments than to finish the pictures,
+the painting of which is the one essential duty attached to the office.
+Some further bargaining takes place with the Council on the 18th of
+January 1516, but, a few days after the death of Giovanni Bellini at the
+end of November in the same year, fresh resolutions are passed
+postponing the grant to Titian of Bellini's patent; notwithstanding
+which, there is conclusive evidence of a later date to show that he is
+allowed the full enjoyment of his "Senseria in Fontego di Tedeschi"
+(_sic_), with all its privileges and immunities, before the close of
+this same year, 1516.
+
+[Illustration: _Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a
+Photograph by Hanfst�ngl_.]
+
+It is in this year that Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, and
+entered into relations with Alfonso I., which were to become more
+intimate as the position of the master became greater and more
+universally recognised in Italy. It was here, as we may safely assume,
+that he completed, or, it may be, repaired, Giovanni Bellini's last
+picture, the great _Bacchanal_ or _Feast of the Gods on Earth_, now at
+Alnwick Castle. It is there that he obtained the commission for two
+famous works, the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, designed, in
+continuation of the series commenced with Bellini's _Feast of the Gods_,
+to adorn a favourite apartment in Alfonso's castle of Ferrara; the
+series being completed a little later on by that crown and climax of the
+whole set, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the National Gallery.
+
+Bellini appears in an unfamiliar phase in this final production of his
+magnificent old age, on which the signature, together with the date,
+1514, so carefully noted by Vasari, is still most distinctly to be read.
+Much less Giorgionesque--if the term be in this case permissible--and
+more Quattrocentist in style than in the immediately preceding
+altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, he is here hardly less
+interesting. All admirers of his art are familiar with the four
+beautiful _Allegories_ of the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Venice,
+which constitute, besides the present picture, almost his sole excursion
+into the regions of pagan mythology and symbolism. These belong,
+however, to a considerably earlier period of his maturity, and show a
+fire which in the _Bacchanal_ has died out.[33] Vasari describes this
+_Bacchanal_ as "one of the most beautiful works ever executed by Gian
+Bellino," and goes on to remark that it has in the draperies "a certain
+angular (or cutting) quality in accordance with the German style." He
+strangely attributes this to an imitation of D�rer's _Rosenkranzfest_,
+painted some eight years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo,
+adjacent to the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. This particularity, noted by the
+author of the _Vite_, and, in some passages, a certain hardness and
+opacity of colour, give rise to the surmise that, even in the parts of
+the picture which belong to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti may be
+traced. It was he who most probably painted the background and the
+figure of St. Jerome in the master's altar-piece finished in the
+preceding year for S. Giovanni Crisostomo; it was he, too, who to a
+great extent executed, though he cannot have wholly devised, the
+Bellinesque _Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints_ in the Church of San
+Pietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period. Even in
+the _Madonna_ of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian Bellino's
+finest landscape of the late time, certain hardnesses of colour in the
+main group suggest the possibility of a minor co-operation by Basaiti.
+Some passages of the _Bacchanal_, however--especially the figures of the
+two blond, fair-breasted goddesses or nymphs who, in a break in the
+trees, stand relieved against the yellow bands of a sunset sky--are as
+beautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase has
+produced up to the date of the picture's appearance. Very suggestive of
+Bellini is the way in which the hair of some of the personages is
+dressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced by
+artificial means. These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in his
+earliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid.
+Still this coiffure--for as such it must be designated--is to be found
+more or less throughout the master's career. It is very noticeable in
+the _Allegories_ just mentioned.
+
+[Illustration: _Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a
+Photograph by Spooner & Co._]
+
+Infinitely pathetic is the old master's vain attempt to infuse into the
+chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires. An
+atmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously betraying
+life-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like fire
+through the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and Titian. The
+audacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rustic
+festival, in which the gods unbend and, after the homelier fashion of
+mortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, it
+would seem, only _pour la forme_. A careful examination of the picture
+substantially confirms Vasari's story that the _Feast of the Gods_ was
+painted upon by Titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in many
+passages a Titianesque hand. It may well be, at the same time, that
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what the
+younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the
+elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left
+unfinished by him. The whole conception, the _charpente_, the contours
+of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are the
+carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the
+branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of the
+picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground with
+its small pebbles.[34] Even the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a
+castle sunset-lit--so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and
+its castle--is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution. By
+Titian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that might be taken to
+betray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, the
+cloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, the
+upper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to the
+right. If it is Titian that we have here, as certainly appears most
+probable, he cannot be deemed to have exerted his full powers in
+completing or developing the Bellinesque landscape. The task may well,
+indeed, have presented itself to him as an uninviting one. There is
+nothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the
+exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacred
+and Profane Love_, while the broader handling suggests rather the
+technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which
+opens out in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The "Worship of Venus" and "Bacchanal" Place in Art of the
+"Assunta"--The "Bacchus and Ariadne"--So-called Portraits of Alfonso of
+Ferrara and Laura Dianti--The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia--Altar-pieces
+at Ancona and in the Vatican--The "Entombment" of the Louvre--The
+"Madonna di Casa Pesaro"--Place among Titian's works of "St. Peter
+Martyr."
+
+
+In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosto
+brought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_.[35] A
+greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters
+been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's career,
+when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being
+as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that
+in the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, we
+have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who
+infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian
+Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in
+their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very
+pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process
+of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from a
+broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and
+unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation
+to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous
+eccentricity.
+
+[Illustration: _The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a
+Photograph by Braun, Cl�ment, & Cie_.]
+
+In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behind
+already the fresh morning of Titian's genius, represented by the
+Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its
+bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some
+evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more
+delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_
+might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of
+Venus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, a
+renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman
+Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the
+Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of
+paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but
+by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the
+author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the
+Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named
+the "Townley Venus" and the "V�nus d'Arles"--myriads of Loves sport,
+kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them
+shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer
+is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the
+life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the
+splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner)
+dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of the
+angelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the
+Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly
+beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North,
+in touch with the South, as Albrecht D�rer, Mabuse, and Jacob
+Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred
+works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier
+and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To
+say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish
+sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at
+their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in
+similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.[37]
+
+The sumptuous _Bacchanal_, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave the
+commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a less
+delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From
+certain points of analogy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus,
+it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation of
+the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus,
+whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus is,
+however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honour
+to the god, Ariadne's new lover. The revel in a certain audacious
+abandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists have
+retired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certain
+agreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of the
+Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic statues
+then, and until lately, entitled _The Sleeping Ariadne_, does not lead
+the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so
+lately won back from despair. The undraped figure,[38] both in its
+attitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped
+Bacchante, or goddess, in Bellini's _Bacchanal_ at Alnwick. Titian's
+lovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio's
+dazzling _Antiope_ in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's _Venus_ or
+Titian's own _Antiope_, in which a certain feminine dignity
+spiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise
+defenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively Titianesque
+colour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbed
+dancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to the
+spectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we find
+again in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture,
+and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the _Entombment_.
+
+The charming little _Tambourine Player_, which is No. 181 in the Vienna
+Gallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works just
+now described, but rather before than after them.
+
+What that is new remains to be said about the _Assunta_, or _Assumption
+of the Virgin_, which was ordered of Titian as early as 1516, but not
+shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until the
+20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetian
+altar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had and
+what had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the world.
+Thus Raphael had produced the _Stanze_, the _Cartoons_, the _Madonnas of
+Foligno_ and _San Sisto_, but not yet the _Transfiguration;_
+Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his _magnum opus_, the
+Ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four years
+earlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata in
+Florence. Among painters whom, origin notwithstanding, we must group as
+Venetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri at
+S. Maria Formosa his famous _Santa Barbara_; Lorenzo Lotto in the
+following year had produced his characteristic and, in its charm of
+fluttering movement, strangely unconventional altar-piece for S.
+Bartolommeo at Bergamo, the _Madonna with Ten Saints_. In none of these
+masterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen by
+Titian, which was far from being the case, was there any help to be
+derived in the elaboration of a work which cannot be said to have had
+any precursor in the art of Venice. There was in existence one
+altar-piece dealing with the same subject from which Titian might
+possibly have obtained a hint. This was the _Assumption of the Virgin_
+painted by D�rer in 1509 for Jacob Heller, and now only known by Paul
+Juvenel's copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort. The group of the
+Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and
+the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its
+fine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art. Without exercising a
+too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact
+between this group and the corresponding one in the _Assunta_. But
+Titian could not at that time have seen the original of the Heller
+altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it
+remained for a century.[39] He no doubt did see the _Assumption_ in the
+_Marienleben_ completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands in a
+definite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more
+formal--much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The
+_Assunta_ was already in Vasari's time much dimmed, and thus difficult
+to see in its position on the high altar. Joshua Reynolds, when he
+visited the Frari in 1752, says that "he saw it near; it was most
+terribly dark but nobly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle Belle
+Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, but sufficiently
+restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the
+greatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre,
+passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well
+adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly
+contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is
+triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and
+awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of
+which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the
+Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling
+of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with
+awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in
+her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and
+not without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which
+her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the
+climax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous,
+more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure
+in the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual
+character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.
+
+[Illustration: _The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice_.]
+
+Placed as the _Assunta_ now is in the immediate neighbourhood of one of
+Tintoretto's best-preserved masterpieces, the _Miracolo del Schiavo_, it
+undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern
+connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely
+triumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual,
+more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that
+unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its
+agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right
+to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his
+subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above
+the earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, in
+unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in
+poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian
+stands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it were
+necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the
+life-work of the other--making the world the poorer by the loss of
+Titian or Tintoretto--can it be doubted for a moment what the choice
+would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face
+with the mighty genius of the latter?
+
+But to return for a moment to the _Assunta_. The enlargement of
+dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group
+of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It
+carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable,
+without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime
+beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank
+with the finest of those in Raphael's _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in a
+higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of
+vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is
+the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not
+always the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhere
+adhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overrated
+last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. Titian himself
+in the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia, and above all in the much-vaunted
+masterpiece, _The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_, sins in the
+same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his
+better self.
+
+Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, and
+only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possession
+of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.[40]
+What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer
+opposition at the outset. In this case the public, admitted on the high
+festival of St. Bernardino's Day in the year 1518 to see the vast panel,
+showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than
+the friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de' Frari,
+and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology to
+the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against
+the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian's wonderful
+achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.
+
+To the year 1519 belongs the _Annunciation_ in the Cathedral of Treviso,
+the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly
+overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits
+the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the
+foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely
+ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the
+beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to
+the Florentines and the Sienese--both sculptors and painters--south of
+the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of
+the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in the
+Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto's pathetic
+_Annunciation_ at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appear
+dignified by comparison. Titian's own _Annunciation_, bequeathed to the
+Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up
+on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and
+appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better
+known picture.
+
+[Illustration: _The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a
+Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso's Duchess,--the
+passive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character
+has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,--our
+master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we
+are told, the finished _Bacchanal_, already described above. He appears
+to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early part
+of 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed at
+Ferrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our _Bacchus and
+Ariadne_, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture too
+late in the earlier section of Vecelli's work, though, with all its
+freshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a further
+advance on the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, and must be
+deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the _Feast of the Gods_
+of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of Titian already described
+our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time has
+not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of the
+golden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the
+_Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ the allegiance to Giorgiono has
+been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the na�vet� remains, but not the
+infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the _Bacchus and
+Ariadne_ Titian's genius flames up with an intensity of passion such as
+will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of
+this class. Certainly, with all the beauties of the _Venuses_, of the
+_Diana and Actaeon_, the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, we
+descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance,
+though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its
+power to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the
+_Venere del Pardo_ of the Louvre and the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna,
+is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier
+times, with its exquisite na�vet� and mitigated sensuousness.
+
+[Illustration: _Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph
+published by the Autotype Company._]
+
+The _Bacchus and Ariadne_ is a Titian which even the Louvre, the Museum
+of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in our master's
+works, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most
+readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are interested
+in Italian art. This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or
+subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose
+_Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ he followed with a closeness which did
+not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of
+the subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that had
+animated the original. How is it possible to better express the _At
+parte ex ali� florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoque
+incensus amore_ of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager
+movement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian? Or to
+paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines: _Horum pars
+tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra
+iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant_? Ariadne's crown of
+stars--the _Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona_ of the
+poem--shines in Titian's sky with a sublime radiance which corresponds
+perfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, of
+Catullus. The splendour of the colour in this piece--hardly equalled in
+its happy audacity, save by the _Madonna del Coniglio_ or _Vierge au
+Lapin_ of the Louvre,[41] would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, did
+the prescribed limits of space admit of such an indulgence. Even here,
+however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the delights
+of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his
+imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic
+harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the
+sake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those
+Veronese transformed into Venetians--Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari;
+or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the
+more violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the
+mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With Titian the
+highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment,
+are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in
+the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be
+considered the supreme exponent.
+
+The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carr� of the Louvre now known as
+_Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti_, but in the collection of
+Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, _Titian's
+Mistress after the Life_, comes in very well at this stage. The
+exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound
+hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities
+inspired by Giorgione--the loveliest of all in some respects, the most
+consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still
+to the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue,
+myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole
+enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here
+and there with gleams of light. Vasari described how Titian painted,
+_ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d' artiglieria_, the
+Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who
+afterwards became the wife of the duke, _che � opera stupenda_. It is
+upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between
+the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid
+_donna_ and the _Alfonso of Ferrara_ of the Museo del Prado, that the
+popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably,
+like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a
+lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, the
+accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,[42] comes forward
+with convincing arguments to show that the handsome _insouciant_
+personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in Titian's
+picture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has hitherto been almost
+universally assumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be his
+son, Ercole II. This alone invalidates the favourite designation of the
+Louvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the
+"stupendous" portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari. A
+comparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_
+of Castle Howard--a famous portrait by Titian of a gentleman holding a
+hawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at the
+recent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery--results in something like
+certainty that in both is the same personage portrayed. It is not only
+that the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are the
+same in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree exceedingly
+well; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same impression
+of splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused. This
+means that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the gracious
+Ercole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the Castle
+Howard picture is Alfonso's son and successor portrayed. In the latter
+canvas, which bears, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the later
+signature "Titianus F.," the personage is, it may be, a year or two
+older. Let it be borne in mind that only on the _back_ of the canvas is,
+or rather was, to be found the inscription: "Georgius Cornelius, frater
+Catterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (_sic_)," upon the authority of
+which it bears its present designation.
+
+The altar-piece, _The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St.
+Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor_, now in San Domenico, but formerly in
+San Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature "Titianus
+Cadorinus pinsit," this being about the first instance in which the
+later spelling "Titianus" appears. If as a pictorial achievement it
+cannot rank with the San Niccol� and the Pesaro altar-pieces, it
+presents some special points of interest which make it easily
+distinguishable from these. The conception is marked by a peculiar
+intensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, and
+hardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type. It reveals a
+passionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which one
+expects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in Titian, whose dramatic
+force is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well under
+control. The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter was
+acquainted with Raphael's _Madonna di Foligno_; but it is dramatic and
+real where the Urbinate's masterpiece was lofty and symbolical. Still
+Titian's St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in steadfastness
+and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the
+humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento
+altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a
+master of the full Renaissance. An improved version of the upper portion
+of the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in the
+clouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccol� altar-piece.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS.
+Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the Papal
+Legate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Church
+of SS. Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style and
+sentiment. The _St. Sebastian_ presently to be referred to, constituting
+the right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,[43]
+and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent of
+Duke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure the
+much-talked-of piece for his master. Titian succumbed to an offer of
+sixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first nor
+the last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side of
+his character. But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemy
+of the Legate, drew back and left to Titian the discredit without the
+profit of the transaction. The central compartment of the Brescia
+altar-piece presents _The Resurrection_, the upper panels on the left
+and right show together the _Annunciation_, the lower left panel depicts
+the patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor,
+Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous _St. Sebastian_[44] in
+the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch.
+The _St. Sebastian_ is neither more nor less than the magnificent
+academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to
+bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his
+splendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in the
+beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting
+the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide gulf indeed separates the
+mood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposeful
+charm of the Giorgionesque saint in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, or the
+healthy realism of the unconcerned _St. Sebastian_ in the S. Niccol�
+altar-piece. Here, as later on with the _St. Peter Martyr_, those who
+admire in Venetian art in general, and in that of Titian in particular,
+its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature,
+must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by a
+conception in its very essence artificial. Yet, brought face to face
+with the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, and
+against their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth and
+richness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling and
+painting.[45] Analogies have been drawn between the _Medicean Faun_ and
+the _St. Sebastian_, chiefly on account of the strained position of
+the arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue and
+the painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance,
+notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laocoon
+in the world-famous group of the Vatican. Of this a model had been made
+by Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast was
+kept in Titian's workshop, from which he is said to have studied.
+
+[Illustration: DESIGN FOR A HOLY FAMILY. CHATSWORTH. _From a photograph
+by Braun, Cl�ment & Cie_.]
+
+[Illustration: _La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by
+Neurdein._]
+
+In the _Madonna di S. Niccol�_, which was painted or rather finished in
+the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccol� de'
+Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is
+suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not extravagance
+of technique. The composition must have had much greater unity before
+the barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of the
+circular top which it had in common with the _Assunta_, the Ancona, and
+the Pesaro altar-pieces. Technically superior to the second of these
+great works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action and
+sentiment, by no such passionate identification of the artist with his
+subject. It is only in passing from one of its beauties to another that
+its artistic worth can be fully appreciated. Then we admire the rapt
+expression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the _St.
+Nicholas_,[46] the mansuetude of the _St. Francis_, the Venetian
+loveliness of the _St. Catherine_, the palpitating life of the _St.
+Sebastian_. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump
+young gondolier stripped and painted as he was--contemplating, if
+anything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, _ritratto
+dal' vivo e senza artificio niuno_. The royal saint of Alexandria is a
+sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning
+elaboration of coiffure, to the _St. Catherine_ of the _Madonna del
+Coniglio_, and the not dissimilar figure in our own _Holy Family with
+St. Catherine_ at the National Gallery.
+
+The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with the
+infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in the
+Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge's private apartments to the Senate
+Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as we
+know, Titian's first performance as a _frescante_ since the completion,
+twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of Padua.
+As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and
+brilliant in colour for a fresco, very fairly preserved--deserving, in
+fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, the
+rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the subject
+is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of
+personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly
+transforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is
+greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened
+with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.
+Even the colossal, half-effaced _St. Christopher with the Infant
+Christ_, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the Town
+Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the
+Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the
+_Entombment_ of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other than
+altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded
+which belongs to the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ among purely secular
+subjects? It was in 1523 that Titian acquired a new and illustrious
+patron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son of
+that most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d'Este
+Gonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara. The _Entombment_ being a
+"Mantua piece,"[47] Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally assumed
+that it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as some
+correspondence published by them goes to show, it must have been painted
+at, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523. Judging entirely by the
+style and technical execution of the canvas itself, the writer feels
+strongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years or
+thereabouts--that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closely
+following upon that in which the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_
+were painted. Mature as Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for the
+last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were
+saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type
+and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea
+has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the _Assunta_,
+the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such
+as we meet with in the _Bacchanal_. The Magdalen, with her features
+distorted by grief, resembles--allowing for the necessary differences
+imposed by the situation--the women making offering to the love-goddess
+in the _Worship of Venus_. The figure of the Virgin, on the other hand,
+enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a type
+which would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and his
+school. To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the
+_Entombment_, without by dissection killing it, is a task of difficulty.
+What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye and
+enthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, is
+perhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, of
+informing sentiment. Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection of
+the two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace--the
+well-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to accentuate
+the mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, bound
+together by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from them
+communicates itself, as it were, to the beholder. In the colouring,
+while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a whole,
+each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily asserting, its own
+splendour and its own special significance. And yet the yellow of the
+Magdalen's dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier the
+embrowned flesh of sturdy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson of
+Nicodemus's garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling white
+of the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of the
+Virgin's robe, combine less to produce the impression of great pictorial
+magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous
+tragedy.
+
+Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge's
+chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about
+the altar,[48] with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the
+kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the
+altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.
+
+[Illustration: _The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de'
+Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya_.]
+
+The _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, which Titian finished in 1526, after
+having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the
+masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of
+exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at the
+Frari, the _Assunta_. For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pomp
+and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite
+sufficient _vraisemblance_, of divine and sacred with real personages,
+it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its class. And yet,
+apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties
+overcome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole,
+many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than we
+should care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a more
+splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand.
+It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and less
+interesting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virgin
+and Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by an
+invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed
+crowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's
+_Castelfranco Madonna_, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud in
+their humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of
+Paphos (Baffo), at their head. The natural tie that should unite the
+sacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power to
+impress, is thus greatly diminished, and we are dangerously near to a
+condition in which they become merely grand conventional figures in a
+decorative ensemble of the higher order. To analyse the general scheme
+or the details of the glorious colour-harmony, which has survived so
+many drastic renovations and cleanings, is not possible on this
+occasion, or indeed necessary. The magic of bold and subtle chiaroscuro
+is obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two gigantic
+pillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in the
+main, but illuminated above and below by the light emanating from the
+divine putti; the boldest feature in the scheme is the striking
+cinnamon-yellow mantle of St. Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, the
+two boldly contrasting with the magnificent dark-red and gold banner of
+the Borgias crowned with the olive branch Peace.[49] This is an
+unexpected note of the most stimulating effect, which braces the
+spectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness. Thus, too, Titian
+went to work in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_--giving forth a single clarion
+note in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos. The writer
+is unable to accept as from the master's own hand the unfinished _Virgin
+and Child_ which, at the Uffizi, generally passes for the preliminary
+sketch of the central group in the Pesaro altar-piece. The original
+sketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in the
+Albertina at Vienna. The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds a
+like original study for the kneeling Baffo.
+
+[Illustration: SKETCH FOR THE MADONNA DI CASA PESARO. ALBERTINA, VIENNA.
+_From a photograph by Braun, Cl�ment & Cie_.]
+
+[Illustration: Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving
+by Henri Laurent.]
+
+By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the placing
+of Titian's world-renowned _Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_ on the
+altar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one of
+the most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity. On
+the 16th of August 1867--one of the blackest of days in the calendar for
+the lover of Venetian art--the _St. Peter Martyr_ was burnt in the
+Cappella del Rosario of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of
+Giovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the _Virgin and Child with
+Saints and Angels_, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had caused
+the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during
+the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Now
+the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their
+estimate of the _St. Peter Martyr_ from the numerous existing copies and
+prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the
+picture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impression
+may, under the circumstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well be
+more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist by
+a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has
+conceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had the
+good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the
+marvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselle
+minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by
+the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape,
+in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance
+falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above--with its single
+startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore,
+with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the
+composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing,
+notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the
+overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and
+unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its
+Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing
+influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months
+at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who,
+returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had
+remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the
+exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of
+passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it
+culminated in the _Transfiguration_? All through the wonderful career of
+the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entombment_, and going on
+through the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency to
+consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a
+pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Much
+less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the _Stanze_
+and the _Cartoons_, in which true dramatic significance and the
+sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The
+_Transfiguration_ itself is, however, the most crying example of the
+reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In it
+are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if we
+take them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two
+failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same frame.
+Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here
+stifled. In the _St. Peter Martyr_ the tremendous figure of the
+attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all
+fluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based on
+nothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied
+attitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In the
+same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in
+the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and
+conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for
+the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all
+the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the _dramatis personae_
+of the gruesome scene--extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense
+effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that
+can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must
+ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come face
+to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the _St.
+Sebastian_ of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the magic
+of the painter _par excellence_ would assert itself. Very curiously it
+is not any more less contemporary copy--least of all that by Ludovico
+Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo--that gives this impression that Titian in the original
+would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work. The
+best notion of the _St. Peter Martyr_ is, so far as the writer is aware,
+to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which
+hangs in the great hall of the �cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Even
+through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties, especially
+in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without
+further carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and, criticism
+notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who,
+perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower
+rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be
+discovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la pi� compiuta, la
+pi� celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, la
+quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor mai_.
+
+[Illustration: _Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a
+Photograph by Anderson_.]
+
+It was after a public competition between Titian, Palma, and Pordenone,
+instituted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the great
+commission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at the
+end of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. Of
+Pordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finished
+drawing of the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_ in the Uffizi, which is either
+by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any
+rate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem in
+some respects, as compared with Titian's astonishing performance, it
+represents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime in
+its gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitely
+touching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, still
+asserts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to be
+preliminary sketches for the _St. Peter Martyr_ are: a pen-and-ink
+sketch in the Louvre showing the assassin chasing the companion of the
+victim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at the
+saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet
+thumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actual
+massacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is the
+drawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives the
+impression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by Titian
+for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, _A Nobleman murdering his Wife_,
+which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the �cole des Beaux-Arts
+of Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writer
+feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of Titian
+himself.[50]
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's Bilder zu
+R�mischen Heldengedichten" (_Jahrbuch der K�niglich Preussischen
+Kunstsammlungen_: Sechzehnter Band, I. Heft) has most ingeniously, and
+upon what may be deemed solid grounds, renamed this most Giorgionesque
+of all Giorgiones after an incident in the _Thebaid_ of Statius,
+_Adrastus and Hypsipyle_. He gives reasons which may be accepted as
+convincing for entitling the _Three Philosophers_, after a familiar
+incident in Book viii. of the _Aeneid_, "Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas
+contemplating the Rock of the Capitol." His not less ingenious
+explanation of Titian's _Sacred and Profane Love_ will be dealt with a
+little later on. These identifications are all-important, not only in
+connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first
+time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of
+Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of
+the Venetian idyll generally.
+
+[2] For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto's portraits and a
+sustained analysis of his art generally, Mr. Bernard Berenson's _Lorenzo
+Lotto_ should be consulted. See also M. Emile Michel's article, "Les
+Portraits de Lorenzo Lotto," in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, 1896, vol.
+i.
+
+[3] For these and other particulars of the childhood of Titian, see
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate _Life and Times of Titian_ (second
+edition, 1881), in which are carefully summarised all the general and
+local authorities on the subject.
+
+[4] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 29.
+
+[5] _Die Galerien zu M�nchen und Dresden_, p. 75.
+
+[6] Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian school of
+art than as a Venetian painter of the late time) expressly states that
+Palma came young to Venice and learnt much from Titan: "_C' egli apprese
+certa dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere prime dello stesso
+Tiziano_" (Lermolieff: _Die Galerien zu M�nchen und Dresden_).
+
+[7] Vasari, _Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco_.
+
+[8] One of these is a description of wedding festivities presided over
+by the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other guests from the
+capital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and three ladies. This
+gentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell upon, and embroider
+in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the love of man for woman.
+A subject this which, transposed into an atmosphere at once more frankly
+sensuous and of a higher spirituality, might well have served as the
+basis for such a picture as Giorgione's _F�te Champ�tre_ in the Salon
+Carr� of the Louvre!
+
+[9] _Magazine of Art_, July 1895.
+
+[10] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 111.
+
+[11] Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects, taken
+after his execution, as _Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo (Borgia) his
+son_.
+
+[12] _La Vie et l'Oeuvre du Titien_, 1887.
+
+[13] The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the picture,
+"Ritratto di uno di Casa Pesaro in Venetia che fu fatto generale di Sta
+chiesa. Titiano fecit," is unquestionably of much later date than the
+work itself. The cartellino is entirely out of perspective with the
+marble floor to which it is supposed to adhere. The part of the
+background showing the galleys of Pesaro's fleet is so coarsely
+repainted that the original touch cannot be distinguished. The form
+"Titiano" is not to be found in any authentic picture by Vecelli.
+"Ticianus," and much more rarely "Tician," are the forms for the earlier
+time; "Titianus" is, as a rule, that of the later time. The two forms
+overlap in certain instances to be presently mentioned.
+
+[14] Kugler's _Italian Schools of Painting_, re-edited by Sir Henry
+Layard.
+
+[15] Marcantonio Michiel, who saw this _Baptism_ in the year 1531 in the
+house of M. Zuanne Ram at S. Stefano in Venice, thus describes it: "La
+tavola del S. Zuane che battezza Cristo nel Giordano, che � nel fiume
+insino alle ginocchia, con el bel paese, ed esso M. Zuanne Ram ritratto
+sino al cinto, e con la schena contro li spettatori, fu de man de
+Tiziano" (_Notizia d' Opere di Disegno_, pubblicata da J. Jacopo
+Morelli, Ed. Frizzoni, 1884).
+
+[16] This picture having been brought to completion in 1510, and Cima's
+great altar-piece with the same subject, behind the high-altar in the
+Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being dated 1494, the
+inference is irresistible that in this case the head of the school
+borrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has always been
+looked upon as one of his close followers. In size, in distribution, in
+the arrangement and characterisation of the chief groups, the two
+altar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a merely accidental
+and family resemblance must be dismissed. This type of Christ, then, of
+a perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness tempering majesty, dates
+back, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred type of the elder
+master is more passionate, more human. Our own _Incredulity of St.
+Thomas_, by Cima, in the National Gallery, shows, in a much more
+perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the beautiful
+_Man of Sorrows_ in the same collection, still nominally ascribed to
+Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any rate from that
+of an artist dominated by his influence. When the life-work of the
+Conegliano master has been more closely studied in connection with that
+of his contemporaries, it will probably appear that he owes very much
+less to Bellini than it has been the fashion to assume. The idea of an
+actual subordinate co-operation with the _caposcuola_, like that of
+Bissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so many others, must be excluded. The
+earlier and more masculine work of Cima bears a definite relation to
+that of Bartolommeo Montagna.
+
+[17] The _Tobias and the Angel_ shows some curious points of contact
+with the large _Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John_ by
+Titian, in the Louvre--a work which is far from equalling the S.
+Marciliano picture throughout in quality. The beautiful head of the St.
+Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John,
+though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type and
+movement of the head. There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice a
+kind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano Titian,
+assigned by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini to
+Santo Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432). Here the adapter
+has ruined Titian's great conception by substituting his own trivial
+archangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copy
+of this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich). A reproduction of
+the Titian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of the
+present monograph (p. 99).
+
+[18] Vasari places the _Three Ages_ after the first visit to Ferrara,
+that is almost as much too late as he places the _Tobias_ of S.
+Marciliano too early. He describes its subject as "un pastore ignudo ed
+una forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni."
+
+[19] From an often-cited passage in the _Anonimo_, describing
+Giorgione's great _Venus_ now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year 1525,
+when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn that
+it was finished by Titian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda,
+che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo da
+Castelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." The
+Cupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but the
+landscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance to
+those which enframe the figures in the _Three Ages, Sacred and Profane
+Love_, and the "_Noli me tangere_" of the National Gallery. The same
+_Anonimo_ in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice a
+_Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, from the hand of Giorgone, which,
+according to him, had been retouched by Titian. It need hardly be
+pointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing in
+common with the coarse and thoroughly second-rate _Dead Christ supported
+by Child-Angels,_ still to be seen at the Monte di Piet� of Treviso. The
+engraving of a _Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, reproduced in M.
+Lafenestre's _Vie et Oeuvre du Titien_ as having possibly been derived
+from Giorgione's original, is about as unlike his work or that of Titian
+as anything in sixteenth-century Italian art could possibly be. In the
+extravagance of its mannerism it comes much nearer to the late style of
+Pordenone or to that of his imitators.
+
+[20] _Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen_, Heft I. 1895.
+
+[21] See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the _Notizia d' Opere
+di Disegno_, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione Frizzoni, 1884.
+
+[22] M. Thausing, _Wiener Kunstbriefe_, 1884.
+
+[23] _Le Meraviglie dell' Arte_.
+
+[24] The original drawing by Titian for the subject of this fresco is to
+be found among those publicly exhibited at the �cole des Beaux Arts of
+Paris. It is in error given by Morelli as in the Malcolm Collection, and
+curiously enough M. Georges Lafenestre repeats this error in his _Vie et
+Oeuvre du Titien._ The drawing differs so essentially from the fresco
+that it can only be considered as a discarded design for it. It is in
+the style which Domenico Campagnola, in his Giorgionesque-Titianesque
+phase, so assiduously imitates.
+
+[25] One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of Titian
+is to speak of the _St. Mark_ as "una piccola tavoletta, un S. Marco a
+sedere in mezzo a certi santi."
+
+[26] In connection with this group of works, all of them belonging to
+the quite early years of the sixteenth century, there should also be
+mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet little known
+_Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist_ by Sebastiano Luciani,
+bearing the date 1510. This has recently passed into the rich collection
+of Mr. George Salting. It shows the painter admirably in his purely
+Giorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing witness that it was
+painted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco master. It groups
+therefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at S. Giovanni
+Crisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook's injured but still lovely
+_Venetian Lady as the Magdalen_ (the same ruddy blond model), and with
+the four Giorgionesque _Saints_ in the Church of S. Bartolommeo al
+Rialto.
+
+[27] _Die Galerien zu M�nchen und Dresden_, p. 74.
+
+[28] The _Christ_ of the Pitti Gallery--a bust-figure of the Saviour,
+relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most solemn
+beauty--must date a good many years after the _Cristo della Moneta_. In
+both works the beauty of the hand is especially remarkable. The head of
+the Pitti _Christ_ in its present state might not conclusively proclaim
+its origin; but the pathetic and intensely significant landscape is one
+of Titian's loveliest.
+
+[29] Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the Royal
+Academy in 1895.
+
+[30] An ingenious suggestion was made, when the _Ariosto_ was last
+publicly exhibited, that it might be that _Portrait of a Gentleman of
+the House of Barbarigo_ which, according to Vasari, Titian painted with
+wonderful skill at the age of eighteen. The broad, masterly technique of
+the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with Vasari's
+description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no boy of
+eighteen, not even Titian, could have attained. And then Vasari's
+"giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-grey
+sleeve of this _Ariosto_, but surely a vest of satin embroidered with
+silver. The late form of signature, "Titianus F.," on the stone
+balustrade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of the
+portrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition. It seems
+likely that the balustrade bore originally only the "V" repeated, which
+curiously enough occurs also on the similar balustrade of the beautiful
+_Portrait of a young Venetian_, by Giorgione, first cited as such by
+Morelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it passed from the
+collection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P. Richter. The signature "Ticianus"
+occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the first
+period. The works in the earlier half of this first period do not appear
+to have been signed, the "Titiano F." of the _Baffo_ inscription being
+admittedly of later date. Thus that the _Cristo della Moneta_ bears the
+"Ticianus F." on the collar of the Pharisee's shirt is an additional
+argument in favour of maintaining its date as originally given by Vasari
+(1514), instead of putting it back to 1508 or thereabouts. Among a good
+many other paintings with this last signature may be mentioned the
+_Jeune Homme au Gant_ and _Vierge au Lapin_ of the Louvre; the _Madonna
+with St. Anthony Abbot_ of the Uffizi; the _Bacchus and Ariadne_, the
+_Assunta_, the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia (dated 1522). The _Virgin and
+Child with St. Catherine_ of the National Gallery, and the _Christ with
+the Pilgrims at Emmaus_ of the Louvre--neither of them early works--are
+signed "Tician." The usual signature of the later time is "Titianus F.,"
+among the first works to show it being the Ancona altar-piece and the
+great _Madonna di San Niccol�_ now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican. It
+has been incorrectly stated that the late _St. Jerome_ of the Brera
+bears the earlier signature, "Ticianus F." This is not the case. The
+signature is most distinctly "Titianus," though in a somewhat unusual
+character.
+
+[31] Crowe and Cavalcaselle describe it as a "picture which has not its
+equal in any period of Giorgione's practice" (_History of Painting in
+North Italy_, vol. ii.).
+
+[32] Among other notable portraits belonging to this early period, but
+to which within it the writer hesitates to assign an exact place, are
+the so-called _Titian's Physician Parma_, No. 167 in the Vienna Gallery;
+the first-rate _Portrait of a Young Man_ (once falsely named _Pietro
+Aretino_), No. 1111 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich; the so-called
+_Alessandro de' Medici_ in the Hampton Court Gallery. The last-named
+portrait is a work injured, no doubt, but of extraordinary force and
+conciseness in the painting, and of no less singular power in the
+characterisation of a sinister personage whose true name has not yet
+been discovered.
+
+[33] The fifth _Allegory_, representing a sphinx or chimaera--now framed
+with the rest as the centre of an ensemble--is from another and far
+inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called
+_Venus_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding the
+signature of Bellini and the date (MDXV.), by Bissolo.
+
+[34] In Bellini's share in the landscape there is not a little to remind
+the beholder of the _Death of St. Peter Martyr_ to be found in the
+Venetian room of the National Gallery, where it is still assigned to the
+great master himself, though it is beyond reasonable doubt by one of his
+late pupils or followers.
+
+[35] The enlarged second edition, with the profile portrait of Ariosto
+by Titian, did not appear until 1532. Among the additions then made were
+the often-quoted lines in which the poet, enumerating the greatest
+painters of the time, couples Titian with Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna,
+Gian Bellino, the two Dossi, Michelangelo, Sebastiano, and Raffael (33rd
+canto, 2nd ed.).
+
+[36] [Greek: Philostratou Eikonon Erotes.]
+
+[37] Let the reader, among other things of the kind, refer to Rubens's
+_Jardin � Amour_, made familiar by so many repetitions and
+reproductions, and to Van Dyck's _Madone aux Perdrix_ at the Hermitage
+(see Portfolio: _The Collections of Charles I._). Rubens copied, indeed,
+both the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, some time between 1601
+and 1608, when the pictures were at Rome. These copies are now in the
+Museum at Stockholm. The realistic vigour of the _Bacchanal_ proved
+particularly attractive to the Antwerp master, and he in more than one
+instance derived inspiration from it. The ultra-realistic _Bacchus
+seated on a Barrel_, in the Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg,
+contains in the chief figure a pronounced reminiscence of Titian's
+picture; while the unconventional attitude of the amorino, or Bacchic
+figure, in attendance on the god, is imitated without alteration from
+that of the little toper whose action Vasari so explicitly describes.
+
+[38] Vasari's simple description is best: "Una donna nuda che dorme,
+tanto bella che pare viva, insieme con altre figure."
+
+[39] Moritz Thausing's _Albrecht D�rer_, Zweiter Band, p. 14.
+
+[40] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 212.
+
+[41] It appears to the writer that this masterpiece of colour and
+reposeful charm, with its wonderful gleams of orange, pale turquoise,
+red, blue, and golden white, with its early signature, "Ticianus F.,"
+should be placed not later than this period. Crowe and Cavalcaselle
+assign it to the year 1530, and hold it to be the _Madonna with St.
+Catherine_, mentioned in a letter of that year written by Giacomo
+Malatesta to Federigo Gonzaga at Mantua. Should not this last picture be
+more properly identified with our own superb _Madonna and Child with St.
+John and St. Catherine_, No. 635 in the National Gallery, the style of
+which, notwithstanding the rather Giorgionesque type of the girlish
+Virgin, shows further advance in a more sweeping breadth and a larger
+generalisation? The latter, as has already been noted, is signed
+"Tician."
+
+[42] "Tizian und Alfons von Este," _Jahrbuch der K�niglich Preussischen
+Kunstsammlungen_, F�nfzehnter Band, II. Heft, 1894.
+
+[43] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.
+237-240.
+
+[44] On the circular base of the column upon which the warrior-saint
+rests his foot is the signature "Ticianus faciebat MDXXII." This, taken
+in conjunction with the signature "Titianus" on the Ancona altar-piece
+painted in 1520, tends to show that the line of demarcation between the
+two signatures cannot be absolutely fixed.
+
+[45] Lord Wemyss possesses a repetition, probably from Titian's
+workshop, of the _St. Sebastian_, slightly smaller than the Brescia
+original. This cannot have been the picture catalogued by Vanderdoort as
+among Charles I.'s treasures, since the latter, like the earliest
+version of the _St. Sebastian_, preceding the definitive work, showed
+the saint tied not to a tree, but to a column, and in it the group of
+St. Roch and the Angel was replaced by the figures of two archers
+shooting.
+
+[46] Ridolfi, followed in this particular by Crowe and Cavalcaselle,
+sees in the upturned face of the _St. Nicholas_ a reflection of that of
+Laocoon in the Vatican group.
+
+[47] It passed with the rest of the Mantua pictures into the collection
+of Charles I., and was after his execution sold by the Commonwealth to
+the banker and dealer Jabach for �120. By the latter it was made over to
+Louis XIV., together with many other masterpieces acquired in the same
+way.
+
+[48] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.
+298, 299.
+
+[49] The victory over the Turks here commemorated was won by Baffo in
+the service of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI., some twenty-three years
+before. This gives a special significance to the position in the picture
+of St. Peter, who, with the keys at his feet, stands midway between the
+Bishop and the Virgin. We have seen Baffo in one of Titian's earliest
+works (_circa_ 1503) recommended to St. Peter by Alexander VI. just
+before his departure for this same expedition.
+
+[50] It has been impossible in the first section of these remarks upon
+the work of the master of Cadore to go into the very important question
+of the drawings rightly and wrongly ascribed to him. Some attempt will
+be made in the second section, to be entitled _The Later Work of
+Titian_, to deal summarily with this branch of the subject, which has
+been placed on a more solid basis since Giovanni Morelli disentangled
+the genuine landscape drawings of the master from those of Domenico
+Campagnola, and furnished a firm basis for further study.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+"Alfonso d'Este and Laura Dianti" (Louvre)
+Altar-piece at Brescia
+"Annunciation, The" (Treviso)
+"Annunciation, The" (Venice)
+"Aretino, Portrait of" (Florence)
+"Ariosto, Portrait of" (Cobham Hall)
+"Assumption of the Virgin, The,"
+"Bacchanal, A,"
+"Bacchus and Ariadne" (National Gallery),
+"Baptism of Christ, The" (Rome),
+"Battle of Cadore, The"
+"Bella, La" (Florence)
+"Bishop of Paphos recommended by Alexander VI. to St. Peter, The" (Antwerp)
+
+
+"Christ at Emmaus"
+"Christ bearing the Cross" (Venice)
+"Christ between St. Andrew and St. Catherine" (Venice)
+"Charles V. at M�hlberg" (Madrid)
+"Concert, A" (Florence)
+"Cornaro, Portrait of" (Castle Howard)
+"Cristo della Moneta, Il" (Dresden)
+
+
+"Death of St. Peter Martyr, The"
+"Diana and Actaeon"
+"Diana and Calisto"
+
+
+"Entombment, The" (Louvre)
+
+
+"Feast of the Gods, The" (Alnwick Castle)
+"Flora" (Florence)
+Fresco of St. Christopher in the Doge's Palace
+Frescoes in the Scuola del Santo, Padua
+Frescoes on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, Venice
+
+
+"Herodias"
+"Holy Family" (Bridgewater Gallery)
+"Holy Family with St. Catherine" (National Gallery)
+
+
+"Jupiter and Antiope" (Louvre)
+
+
+"Madonna di Casa Pesaro, The" (Venice)
+"Madonna di San Niccol�, The" (Rome)
+"Man, Portrait of a" (Munich)
+"Man in Black, The" (Louvre)
+"Man of Sorrows, The" (Venice)
+"Man with the Glove, The" (Louvre)
+"Medici, Portrait of Ippolito de'"
+
+
+"Noli me tangere" (National Gallery)
+"Nymph and Shepherd" (Vienna)
+
+
+"Philip II., Portrait of"
+"Piet�" (Milan)
+
+
+"Rape of Europa, The"
+
+
+"Sacred and Profane Love" (Rome)
+"Sacred Conversation, A" (Chantilly)
+"Sacred Conversation, A" (Florence)
+"St. Mark enthroned, with four other Saints" (Venice)
+"St. Sebastian": see _Altar-piece at Brescia_
+
+
+"Tambourine-Player, The" (Vienna)
+"Three Ages, The" (Bridgewater Gallery)
+"Tobias and the Angel" (Venice)
+"Tribute-Money, The": see _Cristo della Moneta_
+"Triumph of Faith, The"
+
+
+"Vanitas" (Munich)
+"Venere del Pardo": see _Jupiter and Antiope_
+"Virgin and Child" (Mr. R.H. Benson)
+"Virgin and Child" (Florence)
+"Virgin and Child" (St. Petersburg)
+"Virgin and Child" (Vienna): see _Zingarella, La_
+"Virgin and Child with Saints" (Captain Holford)
+"Virgin and Child with four Saints" (Dresden)
+"Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot"
+   (Florence)
+"Virgin and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd" (National Gallery)
+"Virgin and Child with Saints, Angels, and a Donor" (Ancona)
+"Virgin and Child with SS. Stephen, Ambrose, and Maurice" (Louvre)
+"Virgin and Child with SS. Ulphus and Bridget" (Madrid)
+"Virgin with the Cherries, The" (Vienna)
+"Virgin with the Rabbit, The" (Louvre)
+
+
+"Worship of Venus, The" (Madrid)
+
+
+"Zingarella, La" (Vienna)
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN***
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Earlier Work of Titian, by Claude Phillips</title>
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Earlier Work of Titian, by Claude Phillips</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Earlier Work of Titian</p>
+<p>Author: Claude Phillips</p>
+<p>Release Date: June 15, 2004  [eBook #12626]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: iso-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN***</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<h4>E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Wilelmina Malli�re,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team</h4>
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr class="full" />
+<br />
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="Flora"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 679px;" alt="Flora" title="Flora"
+ src="images/image01.jpg" /></div>
+<h1>THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN</h1>
+<h1><small><i>By</i></small></h1>
+<h1>CLAUDE PHILLIPS</h1>
+<h2><i>Keeper of the Wallace Collection</i></h2>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 372px; height: 471px;"
+ alt="The Portfolio Artistic Monographs With many Illustrations]"
+ title="The Portfolio Artistic Monographs With many Illustrations]"
+ src="images/image02.jpg" /></p>
+<h3>1897</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<i>PLATES</i><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#Flora">Flora</a>. Uffizi Gallery, Florence<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Sacred_and_Profane_Love.">Sacred and Profane Love</a>.
+Borghese Gallery, Rome</li>
+  <li><a href="#Virgin_and_Child_with_Saints">Virgin and Child, with
+Saints</a>. Louvre</li>
+  <li><a href="#Jeune_Homme_au_gant">Le Jeune Homme au Gant</a>. Louvre</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<i>ILLUSTRATIONS PRINTED IN COLOUR</i><br />
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#Design_for_a_Holy_Family">Design for a Holy Family</a>.
+Chatsworth</li>
+  <li><a href="#Sketch_for_the_Madonna">Sketch for the Madonna di Casa
+Pesaro</a>. Albertina</li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<i>ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT</i><br />
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#The_man_of_sorrows">The Man of Sorrows.</a> In the
+Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice</li>
+  <li><a href="#La_Zingarella">Virgin and Child, known as "La
+Zingarella."</a> Imperial Gallery,
+Vienna</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_baptisme_of_Christ">The Baptism of Christ</a>.
+Gallery of the Capitol, Rome</li>
+  <li><a href="#the_three_ages">The Three Ages</a>. Bridgewater Gallery<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Herodias">Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist.</a>
+Doria Gallery, Rome</li>
+  <li><a href="#Vanitas">Vanitas</a>. Alte Pinakothek, Munich</li>
+  <li><a href="#St_Anthony_of_Padua">St. Anthony of Padua causing a
+new-born Infant to speak</a>. Fresco
+in the Scuola del Santo, Padua</li>
+  <li><a href="#Noli_me_tangere">"Noli me tangere."</a> National Gallery</li>
+  <li><a href="#St_Mark_enthroned">St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints</a>.
+S. Maria della Salute,
+Venice<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#The_madonna_with_the_cherries">The Madonna with the
+Cherries</a>. Imperial Gallery, Vienna<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Madonna_and_Child">Madonna and Child, with St. John and
+St. Anthony Abbot</a>. Uffizi
+Gallery, Florence</li>
+  <li><a href="#St._Eustace">St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the
+Miracle of the Stag.</a> British
+Museum<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Cristo_della_Moneta">The "Cristo della Moneta."</a>
+Dresden Gallery</li>
+  <li><a href="#Madonna_and_Child_with_four_saints">Madonna and Child,
+with four Saints.</a> Dresden Gallery</li>
+  <li><a href="#A_Concert">A Concert</a>. Probably by Titian. Pitti
+Palace, Florence</li>
+  <li><a href="#Portrait_of_a_Man">Portrait of a Man</a>. Alte
+Pinakothek, Munich</li>
+  <li><a href="#Alessandro_de_Medici">Alessandro de' Medici</a> (so
+called). Hampton Court</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_Worship_of_Venus">The Worship of Venus</a>. Prado
+Gallery, Madrid</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_Assunta">The Assunta</a>. Accademia delle Belle
+Arti, Venice</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_Annunciation">The Annunciation</a>. Cathedral at
+Treviso</li>
+  <li><a href="#Bacchus_and_Ariadne">Bacchus and Ariadne</a>. National
+Gallery</li>
+  <li><a href="#St_Sebastian">St. Sebastian</a>. Wing of altar-piece in
+the Church of SS. Nazzaro e
+Celso, Brescia</li>
+  <li><a href="#La_Vierge_au_Lapin">La Vierge au Lapin</a>. Louvre<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#St_Christopher">St. Christopher with the Infant Christ</a>.
+Fresco in the Doge's
+Palace, Venice</li>
+  <li><a href="#The_Madonna_di_Casa_Pesaro">The Madonna di Casa Pesaro</a>.
+Church of S. Maria dei Frari, Venice<br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Martyrdom_of_St_Peter">Martyrdom of St. Peter the
+Dominican</a><br />
+  </li>
+  <li><a href="#Tobias_and_the_Angel">Tobias and the Angel</a>. S.
+Marciliano, Venice</li>
+</ul>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1><a name="Page_5"></a>THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN</h1>
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+<br />
+<p>There is no greater name in Italian art&#8212;therefore no greater in
+art&#8212;than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high
+as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so
+mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil
+them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect
+balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael
+an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is
+wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the
+poet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than any
+one of these. Titian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, nor
+the most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, even
+of his time and country. Yet is it possible, remembering the
+<i>Entombment</i> of the Louvre, the <i>Assunta</i>, the <i>Madonna
+di Casa Pesaro</i>,
+the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i>, to say that he has, take him all in all,
+been
+surpassed in this the highest branch of his art? Certainly nowhere else
+have the pomp and splendour of the painter's achievement at its apogee
+been so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly ever
+overstepping the bounds of nature. The sacred art of no other painter
+of
+the full sixteenth century&#8212;not even that of Raphael himself&#8212;has to an
+equal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of the
+world, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred passion
+must perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is not
+necessarily a distortion of truth.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_6"></a>And then as a portraitist&#8212;we are dealing, be it
+remembered, with
+Italian art only&#8212;there must be conceded to him the first place, as a
+limner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner in
+his secret heart for some other master. One will remember the
+disquieting power, the fascination in the true sense of the word, of
+Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on
+occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the
+Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del
+Piombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic
+truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of
+Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective
+and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate the
+other. Yet another will cite the lofty melancholy, the aristocratic
+charm of the Brescian Moretto, or the marvellous power of the
+Bergamasque Moroni to present in their natural union, with no
+indiscretion of over-emphasis, the spiritual and physical elements
+which
+go to make up that mystery of mysteries, the human individuality. There
+is, however, no advocate of any of these great masters who, having
+vaunted the peculiar perfections in portraiture of his own favourite,
+will not end&#8212;with a sigh perhaps&#8212;by according the palm to Titian.</p>
+<p>In landscape his pre-eminence is even more absolute and
+unquestioned. He
+had great precursors here, but no equal; and until Claude Lorrain long
+afterwards arose, there appeared no successor capable, like himself, of
+expressing the quintessence of Nature's most significant beauties
+without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.
+Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had,
+unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, and
+the Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesque
+influence, the true gift of the landscape-painter. Atmospheric
+conditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions;
+and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity
+of
+the landscape in the great <i>Piet&agrave;</i> of the Brera, the
+ominous sunset in
+our own <i>Agony in the Garden</i> of the National Gallery, the
+cheerful
+all-pervading glow of the beautiful little <i>Sacred Conversation</i>
+at the
+Uffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late <i>Baptism of Christ</i>
+in
+the <a name="Page_7"></a>Church of S. Corona at Vicenza. To attempt a
+discussion of the
+landscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as
+well
+as the most fascinating of subjects&#8212;so various is it even in the few
+well-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument of
+expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of
+his personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione&#8212;judging it from
+such unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of
+Castelfranco, the so-called <i>Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the
+Soldier</i><a name="FNanchor_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1"><sup>[1]</sup></a>
+in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called <i>Three
+Philosophers</i> in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna&#8212;has in it still a
+slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection.
+It
+was reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullest
+development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the <i>Three Ages</i>
+and
+the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>. Then all himself, and with hardly
+a rival
+in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of
+earth and sky which enframe the figures in the <i>Worship of Venus</i>,
+the
+<i>Bacchanal</i>, and, above all, the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>; to
+give back his
+impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty
+which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred
+Conversations. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the <i>St.
+Peter Martyr</i>, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic
+amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.
+The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be
+said to exist in the late <i>Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo)</i>
+of
+the Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose and
+Giorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late <i>Rape of Europa</i>,
+the
+bold sweep and the rainbow hues of the <a name="Page_8"></a>landscape
+in which recall the
+much earlier <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>. In the exquisite <i>Shepherd
+and
+Nymph</i> of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna&#8212;a masterpiece in monotone
+of
+quite the last period&#8212;the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque time
+reappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, as
+in the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by that
+solemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the final
+years of Titian's old age.</p>
+<p>Thus, though there cannot be claimed for Titian that universality in
+art
+and science which the lovers of Leonardo's painting must ever deplore,
+since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of
+scope
+of Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht
+D&uuml;rer;
+it must be seen that as a <i>painter</i> he covered more ground than
+any
+first-rate master of the sixteenth century. While in more than one
+branch of the painter's art he stood forth supreme and without a rival,
+in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorial
+decorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his younger
+rivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves more
+practised and more successfully daring in this particular branch.</p>
+<p>To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, such
+parallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must
+go
+to Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or had
+been, the great merchant city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly be
+styled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian
+predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was
+during
+the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle
+of
+supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer
+period
+during the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation of
+those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned
+them; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as an
+accessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who,
+in his greatest efforts&#8212;those sumptuous and almost truculent <i>portraits
+d'apparat</i> of princes, nobles, and splendid dames&#8212;knew no superior,
+though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and
+Velazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more
+demonstrative, a seemingly <a name="Page_9"></a>closer embrace,
+drawing from the contact a
+more exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness some
+of the stain of earth. Titian, though he was at least as genuine a
+realist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mere
+outsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which was
+everywhere&#8212;in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home of
+his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art had
+ever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine
+harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion, that
+distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art that
+is not Italian.</p>
+<p>The relation of the two masters&#8212;both of them in the first line of
+the
+world's painters&#8212;was much that of Venice to Antwerp. The apogee of each
+city in its different way represented the highest point that modern
+Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as
+distinguished from mental culture. But then Venice was wrapped in the
+transfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering above
+the rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains,
+the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region. Reality, with
+all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality.
+But
+it was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the method
+of presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could
+add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the
+splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the
+genuine naturalness of such a mode of life. Art itself could only add
+to
+it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the
+colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression
+to
+the beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charm
+of the people. This is what Titian, supreme among his contemporaries of
+the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which,
+in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek
+for a parallel.</p>
+<p>Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly
+enlist
+our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in
+some
+special branch of their art; yet, after all, we find <a name="Page_10"></a>ourselves
+invariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them&#8212;taking <i>him</i>
+as
+the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries
+and
+successors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may
+be,
+combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his
+creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has
+never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then
+Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the
+poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a
+higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been
+able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself
+so
+incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments
+of
+a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme
+limits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great
+<i>Madonna del Carmelo</i> at the Venice Academy and the magnificent
+<i>Trinity</i> in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near
+Udine may
+be taken to prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms
+to the painter of the <i>Assunta</i>, the <i>Entombment</i> and the <i>Christ
+at
+Emmaus</i>? Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of
+illumination,
+a Titanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit and
+placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not
+altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in
+art.
+All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between
+the
+two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, even
+though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive
+the
+supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred
+drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A not
+dissimilar comparison might be instituted between the portraits of
+Lorenzo Lotto and those of our master. No Venetian painter of the
+golden
+prime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him,
+while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individuality
+submitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his own
+tremulous sensitiveness and charm. In this way no portraits of the
+sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in
+deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar
+temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical <a
+ name="Page_11"></a>and mental
+characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.<a
+ name="FNanchor_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2"><sup>[2]</sup></a></p>
+<p>Yet where is the critic bold enough to place even the finest of
+these
+exquisite productions on the same level as <i>Le Jeune Homme au Gant</i>
+and
+<i>L'Homme en Noir</i> of the Louvre, the <i>Ippolito de' Medici</i>,
+the <i>Bella
+di Tiziano</i>, the <i>Aretino</i> of the Pitti, the <i>Charles V. at
+the Battle
+of M&uuml;hlberg</i> and the full-length <i>Philip II.</i> of the
+Prado Museum at
+Madrid?</p>
+<p>Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that Titian has
+serious rivals in those Veronese developed into Venetians, the two
+elder
+Bonifazi and Paolo Veronese; that is, there will be found lovers of
+painting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours in
+frank juxtaposition to a palette relatively restricted, used with an
+art
+more subtle, if less dazzling than theirs, and resulting in a deeper,
+graver richness, a more significant beauty, if in a less stimulating
+gaiety and variety of aspect. No less a critic than Morelli himself
+pronounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliant
+colourist of the Venetian school; and the <i>Dives and Lazarus</i> of
+the
+Venice Academy, the <i>Finding of Moses</i> at the Brera are at hand
+to give
+solid support to such an assertion.</p>
+<p>In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be
+the
+greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be
+found in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinal
+principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors&#8212;painters such
+as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri,
+Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci&#8212;Caliari
+dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as
+well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors,
+however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing the
+abruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing and
+tempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural masses of a vibrant
+grey and large depths of cool dark shadow&#8212;brown shot through with
+silver. No other Venetian master could have painted the <i>Mystic
+Marriage
+of St. Catherine</i> <a name="Page_12"></a>in the church of that name
+at Venice, the <i>Allegory
+on the Victory of Lepanto</i> in the Palazzo Ducale, or the vast <i>Nozze
+di
+Cana</i> of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it is in
+one
+sense a step in advance even of Giorgione, Titian, Palma, and Paris
+Bordone&#8212;constituting as it does more particularly a further development
+of painting from the purely decorative standpoint&#8212;must appear just a
+little superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the nobler,
+graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods of
+Titian. With him, as with Giorgione, and, indeed, with Tintoretto,
+colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was
+to
+give a realisation, at once splendid and penetrating in its truth, of
+the subject presented; and colour in accordance with the true Venetian
+principle was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the very
+body and soul of painting&#8212;as what it is, indeed, in Nature.</p>
+<p>To put forward Paolo Veronese as merely the dazzling virtuoso would
+all
+the same be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art.
+He can rise as high in dramatic passion and pathos as the greatest of
+them all, when he is in the vein; but these are precisely the occasions
+on which he most resolutely subordinates his colour to his subject and
+makes the most poetic use of chiaroscuro; as in the great altar-piece
+<i>The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian</i> in the church of that name, the
+too
+little known <i>St. Francis receiving the Stigmata</i> on a ceiling
+compartment of the Academy of Arts at Vienna, and the wonderful
+<i>Crucifixion</i> which not many years ago was brought down from the
+sky-line of the Long Gallery in the Louvre, and placed, where it
+deserves to be, among the masterpieces. And yet in this last piece the
+colour is not only in a singular degree interpretative of the subject,
+but at the same time technically astonishing&#8212;with certain subtleties of
+unusual juxtaposition and modulation, delightful to the craftsman,
+which
+are hardly seen again until we come to the latter half of the present
+century. So that here we have the great Veneto-Veronese master escaping
+altogether from our theory, and showing himself at one and the same
+time
+profoundly moving, intensely significant, and admirably decorative in
+colour. Still what was with him the splendid exception was with Titian,
+and those who have been grouped with Titian, the guiding rule of art.
+Though our master remains, take him all in all, the greatest of
+Venetian
+colourists, he never condescends <a name="Page_13"></a>to vaunt all
+that he knows, or to
+select his subjects as a groundwork for bravura, even the most
+legitimate. He is the greatest painter of the sixteenth century, just
+because, being the greatest colourist of the higher order, and in
+legitimate mastery of the brush second to none, he makes the worthiest
+use of his unrivalled accomplishment, not merely to call down the
+applause due to supreme pictorial skill and the victory over self-set
+difficulties, but, above all, to give the fullest and most legitimate
+expression to the subjects which he presents, and through them to
+himself.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_14"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h3><i>Cadore and Venice&#8212;Early Giorgionesque works up to the date of
+the
+residence in Padua&#8212;New interpretations of Giorgione's and Titian's
+pictures.</i></h3>
+<br />
+<p>Tiziano Vecelli was born in or about the year 1477 at Pieve di
+Cadore, a
+district of the southern Tyrol then belonging to the Republic of
+Venice,
+and still within the Italian frontier. He was the son of Gregorio di
+Conte Vecelli by his wife Lucia, his father being descended from an
+ancient family of the name of Guecello (or Vecellio), established in
+the
+valley of Cadore. An ancestor, Ser Guecello di Tommasro da Pozzale, had
+been elected Podesta of Cadore as far back as 1321.<a name="FNanchor_3"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> The name Tiziano
+would appear to have been a traditional one in the family. Among others
+we find a contemporary Tiziano Vecelli, who is a lawyer of note
+concerned in the administration of Cadore, keeping up a kind of
+obsequious friendship with his famous cousin at Venice. The Tizianello
+who, in 1622, dedicated to the Countess of Arundel an anonymous Life of
+Titian known as Tizianello's <i>Anonimo</i>, and died at Venice in
+1650, was
+Titian's cousin thrice removed.</p>
+<p>Gregorio Vecelli was a valiant soldier, distinguished for his
+bravery in
+the field and his wisdom in the council of Cadore, but not, it may be
+assumed, possessed of wealth or, in a poor mountain district like
+Cadore, endowed with the means of obtaining it. The other offspring of
+the marriage with Lucia were Francesco,&#8212;supposed, though without
+substantial proof, to have been older than his brother,&#8212;Caterina, and
+Orsa. At the age of nine, according to Dolce <a name="Page_15"></a>in
+the <i>Dialogo della
+Pittura</i>, or of ten, according to Tizianello's <i>Anonimo</i>,
+Titian was
+taken from Cadore to Venice, there to enter upon the serious study of
+painting. Whether he had previously received some slight tuition in the
+rudiments of the art, or had only shown a natural inclination to become
+a painter, cannot be ascertained with any precision; nor is the point,
+indeed, one of any real importance. What is much more vital in our
+study
+of the master's life-work is to ascertain how far the scenery of his
+native Cadore left a permanent impress on his landscape art, and in
+what
+way his descent from a family of mountaineers and soldiers, hardy, yet
+of a certain birth and breeding, contributed to shape his individuality
+in its development to maturity. It has been almost universally assumed
+that Titian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery of
+Cadore in the backgrounds to his pictures; and yet, if we except the
+great <i>Battle of Cadore</i> itself (now known only in Fontana's
+print, in a
+reduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Uffizi,
+and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in a
+modified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altar-pieces,
+Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawings
+of the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we
+find
+the jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. In
+the
+majority of instances, however, the middle distance and foreground to
+these is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts,
+its monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountain
+sides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring, but the richer
+vegetation of the Friulan mountains in their lower slopes, or of the
+beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian
+plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the
+play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of
+Venetian
+art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery
+of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for
+studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and
+back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland.
+How far Titian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needy
+mountaineers, may be taken to account for his excessive eagerness to
+reap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for his
+unresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to be
+got in, <a name="Page_16"></a>must be a matter for individual
+appreciation. Josiah
+Gilbert&#8212;quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle<a name="FNanchor_4"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_4"><sup>[4]</sup></a>&#8212;pertinently asks, "Might
+this mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewd
+Swiss?" In the getting, Titian was certainly all this, but in the
+spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and
+voluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of his
+career. Vasari relates that Titian was lodged at Venice with his uncle,
+an "honourable citizen," who, seeing his great inclination for
+painting,
+placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became a
+proficient. Dolce, apparently better instructed, gives, in his <i>Dialogo
+della Pittura</i>, Zuccato, best known as a mosaic worker, as his first
+master; next makes him pass into the studio of Gentile Bellini, and
+thence into that of the <i>caposcuola</i> Giovanni Bellini; to take,
+however,
+the last and by far the most important step of his early career when he
+becomes the pupil and partner, or assistant, of Giorgione. Morelli<a
+ name="FNanchor_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>
+would prefer to leave Giovanni Bellini altogether out of Titian's
+artistic descent. However this may be, certain traces of Gentile's
+influence may be observed in the art of the Cadorine painter,
+especially
+in the earlier portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technical
+execution generally. On the other hand, no extant work of his
+beginnings
+suggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino's
+pupils&#8212;one of the <i>discipuli</i>, as some of these were fond of
+describing
+themselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the
+fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the
+influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his
+following or not. Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art of
+Venice and the <i>Veneto</i> an influence not less strong of its kind
+than
+that which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regions
+during his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on the
+works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the
+painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and
+Borgognone&#8212;such men as Ambrogio de' Predis, Bernardino de' Conti, and,
+indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself. To the fashion for
+the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class, even Alvise Vivarini,
+the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocento
+develop<a name="Page_17"></a>ment, bowed when he painted the Madonnas
+of the Redentore and S.
+Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the Vienna
+Gallery. Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr.
+Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under
+the
+paramount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the
+altar-piece
+of S. Cristina near Treviso, the <i>Madonna and Child with Saints</i>
+in the
+Ellesmere collection, and the <i>Madonna and Child with St. Peter
+Martyr</i>
+in the Naples Gallery, while in the <i>Marriage of St. Catherine</i>
+at
+Munich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regards
+exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour,
+essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise's
+death, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could,
+faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in his
+later years was transformed into something very like a satellite of
+Giovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather
+to
+the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent
+overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the
+point
+of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.</p>
+<p>What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both of
+Giorgione and Titian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is not
+so much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent
+lean
+on Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves. Neither of
+them is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutely
+dependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for a
+time held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliest
+manhood held towards Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent
+also
+of Lorenzo Lotto, who, in the earliest known examples&#8212;the so-called
+<i>Dana&euml;</i> of Sir Martin Conway's collection, and the <i>St.
+Jerome</i> of the
+Louvre&#8212;is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art passes through
+successive developments, he will still show himself open to more or
+less
+enduring influences from the one side and the other. Sebastiano del
+Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly be
+accounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career out
+of leading-strings. First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling <i>Piet&agrave;</i>
+in
+the Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authentic
+inscription, "Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus
+(<i>sic</i>)," is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece
+of
+documentary evidence, it <a name="Page_18"></a>would even now pass as
+such. Next, he becomes
+the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save
+perhaps
+Titian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in a
+quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque,
+that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, have
+acquired a world-wide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soul
+to Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of early
+training and association, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal
+itself,
+he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the
+very end of his career.</p>
+<p>Giorgione and Titian were as nearly as possible of the same age,
+being
+both of them born in or about 1477. Lorenzo Lotto's birth is to be
+placed about the year 1476&#8212;or, as others would have it, 1480. Palma saw
+the light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485. So
+that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier
+half of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eight
+years&#8212;between 1477 and 1485.</p>
+<p>In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's <i>Life and Times of Titian</i> a
+revolutionary
+theory, foreshadowed in their <i>Painting in North Italy</i>, was for
+the
+first time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained. They
+sought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, that
+Palma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced and
+shaped the art of his contemporary Titian, instead of having been
+influenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artists
+would have induced the student to believe. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's
+theory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelli
+appears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to be
+found on a <i>Santa Conversazione</i>, once in the collection of M.
+Reiset,
+and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d'Aumale. This date now
+proves with the artist's signature to be a forgery, and the picture in
+question, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode of
+conception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more modern
+technique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma in
+the development of the full Renaissance types and the full Renaissance
+methods of execution. There can be small doubt that this particular
+theory of the indefatigable critics, to whom the history of Italian art
+owes so much, will little by little be allowed to die a natural death,
+if it be not, indeed, already defunct. <a name="Page_19"></a>More and
+more will the view so
+forcibly stated by Giovanni Morelli recommend itself, that Palma in
+many
+of those elements of his art most distinctively Palmesque leans upon
+the
+master of Cadore. The Bergamasque painter was not indeed a personality
+in art sufficiently strong and individual to dominate a Titian, or to
+leave upon his style and methods profound and enduring traces. As such,
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle themselves hesitate to put him forward, though
+they cling with great persistency to their pet theory of his influence.
+This exquisite artist, though by no means inventive genius, did, on the
+other hand, permanently shape the style of Cariani and the two elder
+Bonifazi; imparting, it may be, also some of his voluptuous charm in
+the
+rendering of female loveliness to Paris Bordone, though the latter
+must,
+in the main, be looked upon as the artistic offspring of Titian.</p>
+<p>It is by no means certain, all the same, that this question of
+influence
+imparted and submitted to can with advantage be argued with such
+absoluteness of statement as has been the rule up to the present time,
+both on the one side and the other. It should be remembered that we are
+dealing with three young painters of about the same age, working in the
+same art-centre, perhaps, even, for a time in the same studio&#8212;issuing,
+at any rate, all three from the flank of Giovanni Bellini. In a
+situation like this, it is not only the preponderance of age&#8212;two or
+three years at the most, one way or the other&#8212;that is to be taken into
+account, but the preponderance of genius and the magic gift of
+influence. It is easy to understand how the complete renewal, brought
+about by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini's teaching and example,
+operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open
+to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness
+of
+sensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible
+was
+the fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over his
+youthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influence
+widen, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellino
+himself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there
+could
+be no question of light received back from painters of his own
+generation in exchange for that diffused around him; but with Titian
+and
+Palma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell here
+in each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous
+<a name="Page_20"></a>plant of the same family, yet with all its
+Giorgionesque colour of a
+quite distinctive loveliness. Titian, we shall see, carried the style
+to
+its highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways
+a
+new thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in
+nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than
+Giorgione, Titian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to that
+element of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a way
+counteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interprets
+the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic
+attributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itself
+beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this
+frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this <i>terre
+&agrave;
+terre</i> energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early
+work of
+Titian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was
+influenced?<a name="FNanchor_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6"><sup>[6]</sup></a>
+There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the
+Giorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to the
+everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and
+this not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, in
+which, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular
+resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the
+important <i>Adam and Eve</i> of his earlier time in the Brunswick
+Gallery&#8212;once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione&#8212;and
+the preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found
+in
+Titian's <i>Three Ages</i> at Bridgewater House, in his so-called <i>Sacred
+and
+Profane Love (Medea and Venus)</i> of the Borghese Gallery, in such
+sacred
+pieces as the <i>Madonna and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida</i> at
+the Prado
+Gallery of Madrid, and the large <i>Madonna and Child with four Saints</i>
+at
+Dresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception
+stripped
+of a little of its poetic glamour, but retaining unabashed its splendid
+sensuousness, which is thus made the more markedly to stand out. We
+notice, too, in Titian's works belonging to this particular group
+another characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only because
+Palma indulged in it in a <a name="Page_21"></a>great number of his
+Sacred Conversations and
+similar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin, the
+muscular form, of some male saint, or it may be some shepherd of the
+uplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddy
+gold, of a female saint, or a fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdess
+or a heroine of antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishing
+characteristics as these&#8212;and others that could easily be singled
+out&#8212;as wholly and solely Titianesque of the early time? If so, we ought
+to assume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palma
+came from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken to
+have transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the less
+subtle shape into which he had already transmuted it. But should not
+such an assumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main,
+be made with all the allowances which the situation demands?</p>
+<p>That, when a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to
+overturn
+barriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy
+to
+unravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lines
+everywhere, one or two modern examples much nearer to our own time may
+roughly serve to illustrate. Take, for instance, the friendship that
+developed itself between the youthful Bonington and the youthful
+Delacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre:
+the
+one communicating to the other something of the stimulating quality,
+the
+frankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished the
+English from the French school; the other contributing to shape, with
+the fire of his romantic temperament, the art of the young Englishman
+who was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of the
+P.R.B.&#8212;Millais, Rossetti, and Mr. Holman Hunt&#8212;who is to state <i>ex
+cathedra</i> where influence was received, where transmitted; or
+whether
+the first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time of
+their complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, the
+third the conscience of the group? A similar puzzle would await him who
+should strive to unravel the delicate thread which winds itself round
+the artistic relation between Frederick Walker and the noted
+landscapist
+Mr. J.W. North. Though we at once recognise Walker as the dominant
+spirit, and see his influence even to-day, more than twenty years after
+his death, affirmed rather than weakened, there are certain
+characteristics of the style recognised <a name="Page_22"></a>and
+imitated as his, of which
+it would be unsafe to declare that he and not his companion originated
+them.</p>
+<p>In days of artistic upheaval and growth like the last years of the
+fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the <i>milieu</i>
+must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who
+most
+influence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeply
+rooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not be
+doubted that when in Giorgione's breast had been lighted the first
+sparks of the Promethean fire, which, with the soft intensity of its
+glow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire
+ran
+like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth, his
+contemporaries and juniors, just because their blood was of the stuff
+to
+ignite and flame like his own.</p>
+<p>The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question
+merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a
+brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that "they who
+were
+excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of
+life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of
+flesh, etc."<a name="FNanchor_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7"><sup>[7]</sup></a>
+It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and
+style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the
+Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life
+aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just
+as
+the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of
+lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which,
+in
+Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first
+years of the Cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when&#8212;to take one
+instance only among many&#8212;the Ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble Venetian
+Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance
+with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was ever of love. In
+that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina's
+courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty,
+Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa
+illustrissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius,
+the leaflets which, under the title <i>Gli Asolani, ne' quali si
+ragiona
+d' amore</i>,<a name="FNanchor_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8"><sup>[8]</sup></a>
+soon became a famous book in Italy.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Page_23"></a><a
+ name="The_man_of_sorrows"></a><img style="width: 512px; height: 382px;"
+ alt="The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya."
+ title="The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya."
+ src="images/image03.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The most Bellinesque work of Titian's youth with which we are
+acquainted
+is the curious <i>Man of Sorrows</i> of the Scuola di S. Rocco at
+Venice, a
+work so faded, so injured by restoration that to dogmatise as to its
+technique would be in the highest degree unsafe. The type approaches,
+among the numerous versions of the <i>Piet&agrave;</i> by and ascribed
+to Giovanni
+Bellini, most nearly to that in the Palazzo del Commune at Rimini.
+Seeing that Titian was in 1500 twenty-three years old, and a student of
+painting of some thirteen years' standing, there may well exist, or at
+any rate there may well have existed, from his hand things in a yet
+earlier and more distinctively Quattrocento-style than anything with
+which we are at present acquainted. This <i>Man of Sorrows</i> itself
+may
+well be a little earlier than 1500, but on this point it is not easy to
+form <a name="Page_24"></a>a definite conclusion. Perhaps it is
+reserved in the future to
+some student uniting the qualities of patience and keen insight to do
+for the youthful Titian what Morelli and his school have done for
+Correggio&#8212;that is, to restore to him a series of paintings earlier in
+date than those which criticism has, up to the present time, been
+content to accept as showing his first independent steps in art.
+Everything else that we can at present safely attribute to the youthful
+Vecelli is deeply coloured with the style and feeling of Giorgione,
+though never, as is the case with the inferior Giorgionesques, so
+entirely as to obliterate the strongly marked individuality of the
+painter himself. The <i>Virgin and Child</i> in the Imperial Gallery
+of
+Vienna, popularly known as <i>La Zingarella</i>, which, by general
+consent,
+is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this
+class,
+is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception and
+arrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength, and richness of the
+colour-chord, in the atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the
+landscape
+background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already
+Giorgionesque. Nay, even here Titian, above all, asserts <i>himself</i>,
+and
+lays the foundation of his own manner. The type of the divine Bambino
+differs widely from that adopted by Giorgione in the altar-pieces of
+Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The virgin is a woman
+beautified only by youth and intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgione
+and Titian in their loveliest types of womanhood are sensuous as
+compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as
+Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. But
+Giorgione's sensuousness is that which may fitly characterise the
+goddess, while Titian's is that of the woman, much nearer to the
+everyday world in which both artists lived.</p>
+<p>In the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is a
+beautiful <i>Madonna and Child</i> in a niche of coloured marble
+mosaic,
+which is catalogued as an early Titian under the influence of Giovanni
+Bellini. Judging only from the reproduction on a large scale done by
+Messrs. Braun and Co., the writer has ventured to suggest
+elsewhere<a name="FNanchor_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9"><sup>[9]</sup></a>&#8212;prefacing
+his suggestions with the avowal that he is not
+acquainted with the picture itself&#8212;that we may have here, not an early
+Titian, but that rarer thing an early Giorgione. From the list of the
+former master's works it must at any rate be struck out, as even the
+most superficial <a name="Page_25"></a>comparison with, for instance, <i>La
+Zingarella</i>
+suffices to prove. In the notable display of Venetian art made at the
+New Gallery in the winter of 1895 were included two pictures (Nos. 1
+and
+7 in the catalogue) ascribed to the early time of Titian and evidently
+from the same hand. These were a <i>Virgin and Child</i> from the
+collection,
+so rich in Venetian works, of Mr. R.H. Benson (formerly among the
+Burghley House pictures), and a less well-preserved <i>Virgin and
+Child
+with Saints</i> from the collection of Captain Holford at Dorchester
+House.
+The former is ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the early time of
+the master himself.<a name="FNanchor_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10"><sup>[10]</sup></a>
+Both are, in their rich harmony of colour and
+their general conception, entirely Giorgionesque. They reveal the hand
+of some at present anonymous Venetian of the second order, standing
+midway between the young Giorgione and the young Titian&#8212;one who, while
+<a name="Page_26"></a>imitating the types and the landscape of these
+greater contemporaries
+of his, replaced their depth and glow by a weaker, a more superficial
+prettiness, which yet has its own suave charm.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="La_Zingarella"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 429px;"
+ alt="Virgin and Child, known as &quot;La Zingarella.&quot; Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by L&ouml;wy."
+ title="Virgin and Child, known as &quot;La Zingarella.&quot; Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by L&ouml;wy."
+ src="images/image04.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The famous <i>Christ bearing the Cross</i> in the Chiesa di S.
+Rocco at
+Venice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed by
+Vasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to
+that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The
+biographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to be
+from the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in
+Venice,
+and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and
+Giorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life." This
+too great popularity of the work as a wonder-working picture is perhaps
+the cause that it is to-day in a state as unsatisfactory as is the <i>Man
+of Sorrows</i> in the adjacent Scuola. The picture which presents
+"Christ
+dragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in the
+background," resembles most among Giorgione's authentic creations the
+<i>Christ bearing the Cross</i> in the Casa Loschi at Vicenza. The
+resemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since this
+last&#8212;one of the earliest of Giorgiones&#8212;still recalls Giovanni Bellini,
+and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception.
+In both renderings of the divine countenance there is&#8212;or it may be the
+writer fancies that there is&#8212;underlying that expression of serenity and
+humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject, a sinister,
+disquieting look, almost a threat. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called
+attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as
+compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar
+disproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the <i>Christ
+between St. Andrew and St. Catherine</i> in the Church of SS. Ermagora
+and
+Fortunato (commonly called S. Marcuola) at Venice. Here the head of the
+infant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the
+two
+saints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest.
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle had refused to accept this picture as a genuine
+Titian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful place
+among the early works.</p>
+<p>Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the <i>Three
+Ages</i> and the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, the writer is
+inclined to place
+the <i>Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI. to St.
+<a name="Page_27"></a>Peter</i>, once in the collection of Charles I.<a
+ name="FNanchor_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> and
+now in the Antwerp
+Gallery. The main elements of Titian's art may be seen here, in
+imperfect fusion, as in very few even of his early productions. The not
+very dignified St. Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with
+a
+high relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again in
+the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or
+rather his
+immediate followers; the magnificently robed Alexander VI. (Rodrigo
+Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, gives back the style in portraiture
+of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio; while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro&#8212;an
+ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of
+fleets, as the background suggests&#8212;is one of the most characteristic
+portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos, its intensity,
+contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same
+<i>Baffo</i> in the renowned <i>Madonna di Casa Pesaro</i>, painted
+twenty-three
+years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It
+is the first in order of a great series, including the <i>Ariosto</i>
+of
+Cobham, the <i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i>, the <i>Portrait of a Man</i>
+in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous <i>Concert</i> of the
+Pitti,
+ascribed to Giorgione. Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. Georges
+Lafenestre<a name="FNanchor_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12"><sup>[12]</sup></a>
+have called attention to the fact that the detested
+Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot
+well have been executed after that time. He would have been a bold man
+who should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI.
+into a votive picture painted immediately after his death! How is it
+possible to assume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless assume, that
+the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, one of the masterpieces of
+Venetian art,
+was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at the
+latest, in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione
+himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted
+his Castelfranco altar-piece, his <i>Venus</i>, or his <i>Three
+Philosophers
+(Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas)</i>. Old Gian Bellino himself had not
+entered
+upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S.
+Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.<a name="FNanchor_13"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_13"><sup>[13]</sup></a></p>
+<p><a name="Page_28"></a>It is impossible on the present occasion to
+give any detailed account
+of the fresco decorations painted by Giorgione and Titian on the
+facades
+of the new Fondaco de' Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on
+the 28th of January 1505. Full particulars will be found in Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle's often-quoted work. Vasari's many manifest errors and
+disconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do not
+predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained
+relations between Giorgione and our painter, to which this particular
+business is supposed to have given rise. That they together decorated
+with a series of frescoes which acquired considerable celebrity the
+exterior of the Fondaco is all that is known for certain, Titian being
+apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Of
+these frescoes only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, and
+facing the Grand Canal, has been preserved, in a much-damaged
+condition&#8212;the few fragments that remained of those facing the side
+canal having been destroyed in 1884.<a name="FNanchor_14"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_14"><sup>[14]</sup></a> Vasari shows us a Giorgione
+angry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior
+beauty
+of some work on the "<i>facciata di verso la Merceria,</i>" which in
+reality
+belongs to Titian, and thereupon implacably cutting short their
+connection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, but
+refuted by the less contemporary authority of Tizianello's <i>Anonimo</i>.
+Of
+what great painters, standing in the relation of master and pupil, have
+not such stories been told, and&#8212;the worst of it is&#8212;told with a certain
+foundation of truth? Apocryphal is, no doubt, that which has evolved
+itself from the internal evidence supplied by the <i>Baptism of Christ</i>
+of
+Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci; but a stronger substructure of fact
+supports the unpleasing anecdotes as to Titian and Tintoretto, as to
+Watteau and Pater, as to our own Hudson and Reynolds, and, alas! as to
+very many others. How touching, on the other hand, is that simple entry
+in Francesco Francia's day-book, made when <a name="Page_29"></a><a
+ name="Page_30"></a>his chief journeyman,
+Timoteo Viti, leaves him: "1495 a di 4 aprile &egrave; partito il mio
+caro
+Timoteo; chi Dio li dia ogni bene et fortuna!" ("On the 4th day of
+April
+1495 my dear Timoteo left me. May God grant him all happiness and good
+fortune!")</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_baptisme_of_Christ"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 695px;"
+ alt="The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ title="The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ src="images/image05.jpg" /></p>
+<p>There is one reason that makes it doubly difficult, relying on
+developments of style only, to make, even tentatively, a chronological
+arrangement of Titian's early works. This is that in those painted
+<i>poesie</i> of the earlier Venetian art of which the germs are to be
+found
+in Giovanni Bellini and Cima, but the flower is identified with
+Giorgione, Titian surrendered himself to the overmastering influence of
+the latter with less reservation of his own individuality than in his
+sacred works. In the earlier imaginative subjects the vivifying glow of
+Giorgionesque poetry moulds, colours, and expands the genius of Titian,
+but so naturally as neither to obliterate nor to constrain it. Indeed,
+even in the late time of our master&#8212;checking an unveiled sensuousness
+which sometimes approaches dangerously near to a downright
+sensuality&#8212;the influence of the master and companion who vanished half
+a century before victoriously reasserts itself. It is this <i>renouveau</i>
+of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives so
+exquisite a charm to the <i>Venere del Pardo</i>, so strange a pathos
+to that
+still later <i>Nymph and Shepherd,</i> which was a few years ago
+brought out
+of its obscurity and added to the treasures of the Imperial Gallery at
+Vienna.</p>
+<p>The sacred works of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with
+a
+difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a
+majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation,
+very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness
+and
+reserve which informs such creations as the <i>Madonna of Castelfranco</i>
+and the <i>Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch</i> of the Prado
+Museum.
+Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque
+ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of the <i>Assunta</i>, the
+true
+passion going hand-in-hand with beauty of the Louvre <i>Entombment</i>,
+the
+rhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i>.</p>
+<p>The <i>Baptism of Christ</i>, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the
+Gallery of
+the Capitol at Rome, had been by Crowe and Cavalcaselle taken away from
+Titian and given to Paris Bordone, but the keen insight of Morelli led
+him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to Titian.
+Internal
+<a name="Page_31"></a>evidence is indeed conclusive in this case that
+the picture must be
+assigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.<a
+ name="FNanchor_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15"><sup>[15]</sup></a>
+Here Titian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christ
+more in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemn
+hieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries.
+The luxuriant landscape is in the main Giorgionesque, save that here
+and
+there a naked branch among the leafage&#8212;and on one of them the
+woodpecker&#8212;strongly recalls Giovanni Bellini. The same robust,
+round-limbed young Venetian, with the inexpressive face, does duty here
+as St. John the Baptist, who in the <i>Three Ages</i>, presently to be
+discussed, appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd. The
+Christ, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxuriant
+hair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine
+<i>Cristo della Moneta</i>. The question at once arises here, Did
+Titian in
+the type of this figure derive inspiration from Giovanni Bellini's
+splendid <i>Baptism of Christ</i>, finished in 1510 for the Church of
+S.
+Corona at Vicenza, but which the younger artist might well have seen a
+year or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in the
+workshop of the venerable master? Apart from its fresh
+na&iuml;vet&eacute;, and its
+rare pictorial charm, how trivial and merely anecdotic does the
+conception of Titian appear by the side of that of Bellini, so lofty,
+so
+consoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunset
+colour!<a name="FNanchor_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16"><sup>[16]</sup></a>
+Alone in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram,
+placed <a name="Page_32"></a>in the picture with an awkwardness
+attractive in its na&iuml;vete,
+but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standing
+alone.</p>
+<p>The beautiful <i>Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida,</i>
+placed in
+the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now at last officially
+restored to Titian, after having been for years innumerable ascribed to
+Giorgione, whose style it not more than generally recalls. Here at any
+rate all the rival wise men are agreed, and it only remains for the
+student of the old masters, working to-day on the solid substructure
+provided for him by his predecessors, to wonder how any other
+attribution could have been accepted. But then the critic of the
+present
+day is a little too prone to be wise and scornful <i>&agrave; ban
+march&eacute;</i>,
+forgetting that he has been spared three parts of the road, and that he
+starts for conquest at the high point, to reach which the pioneers of
+scientific criticism in art have devoted a lifetime of noble toil. It
+is
+in this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early
+art
+of the Cadorine which Crowe and Cavalcaselle have defined as
+"Palmesque." The <i>St. Bridget</i> and the <i>St. Ulphus</i> are
+both types
+frequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamasque painter, and
+it has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model with
+hair of wavy gold must have sat to Giorgione, Titian, and Palma. This
+can only be true, however, in a modified sense, seeing that Giorgione
+did not, so much as his contemporaries and followers, affect the type
+of
+the beautiful Venetian blond, "large, languishing, and lazy." The hair
+of his women&#8212;both the sacred personages and the divinities nominally
+classic or wholly Venetian&#8212;is, as a rule, of a rich chestnut, or at the
+most dusky fair, and in them the Giorgionesque oval of the face tempers
+with its spirituality the strength of physical passion that the general
+physique denotes. The polished surface of this panel at Madrid, the
+execution, sound and finished without being finicking, the high
+yellowish lights on the crimson draperies, are all very characteristic
+of this, the first manner of Vecelli. The green hangings at the back of
+the picture are such as are very generally associated with the
+colour-schemes of Palma. An old repetition, with <a name="Page_33"></a>a
+slight variation in
+the Bambino, is in the royal collection at Hampton Court, where it long
+bore&#8212;indeed it does so still on the frame&#8212;the name of Palma Vecchio.</p>
+<p>It will be remembered that Vasari assigns to the <i>Tobias and the
+Angel</i>
+in the Church of S. Marciliano at Venice the exact date 1507,
+describing
+it, moreover, with greater accuracy than he does any other work by
+Titian. He mentions even "the thicket, in which is a St. John the
+Baptist kneeling as he prays to heaven, whence comes a splendour of
+light." The Aretine biographer is followed in this particular by
+Morelli, usually so eagle-eyed, so little bound by tradition in tracing
+the beginnings of a great painter. The gifted modern critic places the
+picture among the quite early works of our master. Notwithstanding this
+weight of authority, the writer feels bound to dissent from the view
+just now indicated, and in this instance to follow Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, who assign to the <i>Tobias and the Angel</i> a place
+much
+later on in Titian's long career. The picture, though it hangs high in
+the little church for which it was painted, will speak for itself to
+those who interrogate it without <i>parti pris</i>. Neither in the
+figures&#8212;the magnificently classic yet living archangel Raphael and the
+more na&iuml;ve and realistic Tobias&#8212;nor in the rich landscape with St.
+John
+the Baptist praying is there anything left of the early Giorgionesque
+manner. In the sweeping breadth of the execution, the summarising power
+of the brush, the glow from within of the colour, we have so many
+evidences of a style in its fullest maturity. It will be safe,
+therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian's middle period.<a
+ name="FNanchor_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17"><sup>[17]</sup></a></p>
+<p>The <i>Three Ages</i> in the Bridgewater Gallery and the so-called <i>Sacred
+and Profane Love</i> in the Borghese Gallery represent the apogee of
+Titian's Giorgionesque style. Glowing through and through with the
+<a name="Page_34"></a>spirit of the master-poet among Venetian
+painters, yet falling short a
+little, it may be, of that subtle charm of his, compounded indefinably
+of sensuous delight and spiritual yearning, these two masterpieces
+carry
+the Giorgionesque technically a pretty wide step farther than the
+inventor of the style took it. Barbarelli never absolutely threw off
+the
+trammels of the Quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained to
+the last&#8212;not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm&#8212;the
+na&iuml;vet&eacute;,
+the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely
+full-fledged.</p>
+<p>The <i>Three Ages</i>, from its analogies of type and manner with
+the
+<i>Baptism</i> of the Capitol, would appear to be the earlier of the
+two
+imaginative works here grouped together, but to date later than that
+picture.<a name="FNanchor_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18"><sup>[18]</sup></a>
+The tonality of the picture is of an exquisite
+silveriness&#8212;that of clear, moderate daylight, though this relative
+paleness may have been somewhat increased by time. It may a little
+disconcert at first sight those who have known the lovely pastoral only
+from hot, brown copies, such as the one which, under the name of
+Giorgione, was formerly in the Dudley House Collection, and now belongs
+to Sir William Farrer. It is still so difficult to battle with the
+deeply-rooted notion that there can be no Giorgione, no painting of his
+school, without the accompaniment of a rich brown sauce! The
+shepherdess
+has a robe of fairest crimson, and her flower-crowned locks in tint
+more
+nearly approach to the <i>blond cendr&eacute;</i> which distinguishes
+so many of
+Palma's <i>donne</i> than to the ruddier gold that Titian himself
+generally
+affects. The more passionate of the two, she gazes straight into the
+eyes of her strong-limbed rustic lover, who half-reclining rests his
+hand upon her shoulder. On the twin reed-pipes, which she still holds
+in
+her hands, she has just breathed forth a strain of music, and to it, as
+it still lingers in their ears, they yield themselves entranced. Here
+the youth is naked, the maid clothed and adorned&#8212;a reversal, this, of
+Giorgione's <i>F&ecirc;te Champ&ecirc;tre</i> in the Salon
+Carr&eacute; of the Louvre, where the
+women are undraped, and the amorous young cavaliers appear in complete
+and rich attire. To the right are a group of thoroughly Titianesque
+amorini&#8212;the winged one, dominating the others, being perhaps Amor
+himself; while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls ranged
+<a name="Page_35"></a>round him on the ground&#8212;obvious reminders of the
+last stage of all, at
+which he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity between
+the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of
+the personages&#8212;the one aiding the other to express the moment of pause
+in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all
+that the very whirlwind of passion can give. Near at hand may be
+pitfalls, the smiling love-god may prove less innocent than he looks,
+and in the distance Fate may be foreshadowed by the figure of weary Age
+awaiting Death. Yet this one moment is all the lovers' own, and they
+profane it not by speech, but stir their happy languor only with faint
+notes of music borne on the still, warm air.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="the_three_ages"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 365px;"
+ alt="The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery. From the Plate in Lafenestre's &quot;Vie et Oeuvre du Titien&quot; (May, Paris.)"
+ title="The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery. From the Plate in Lafenestre's &quot;Vie et Oeuvre du Titien&quot; (May, Paris.)"
+ src="images/image06.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i> of the Borghese Gallery is one
+of the
+world's pictures, and beyond doubt the masterpiece of the early or
+Giorgionesque period. To-day surely no one will be found to gainsay
+Morelli when he places it at the end of that period, which it so
+incomparably sums up&#8212;not at the beginning, when its perfection would be
+as incomprehensible as the less absolute achievement displayed in other
+early pieces which such a classification as this would place after the
+Borghese picture. The accompanying reproduction obviates all necessity
+<a name="Page_36"></a>for a detailed description. Titian painted
+afterwards perhaps more
+wonderfully still&#8212;with a more sweeping vigour of brush, with a higher
+authority, and a play of light as brilliant and diversified. He never
+attained to a higher finish and perfection of its kind, or more
+admirably suited the technical means to the thing to be achieved. He
+never so completely gave back, coloured with the splendour of his own
+genius, the rays received from Giorgione. The delicious sunset
+landscape
+has all the Giorgionesque elements, with more spaciousness, and lines
+of
+a still more suave harmony. The grand Venetian <i>donna</i> who sits
+sumptuously robed, flower-crowned, and even gloved, at the sculptured
+classic fount is the noblest in her pride of loveliness, as she is one
+of the first, of the long line of voluptuous beauties who will occupy
+the greatest brushes of the Cinquecento. The little love-god who,
+insidiously intervening, paddles in the water of the fountain and
+troubles its surface, is Titian's very own, owing nothing to any
+forerunner. The divinely beautiful <i>Profane Love</i>&#8212;or, as we shall
+presently see, <i>Venus</i>&#8212;is the most flawless presentment of female
+loveliness unveiled that modern art has known up to this date, save
+only
+the <i>Venus</i> of Giorgione himself (in the Dresden Gallery), to
+which it
+can be but little posterior. The radiant freshness of the face, with
+its
+glory of half-unbound hair, does not, indeed, equal the sovereign
+loveliness of the Dresden <i>Venus</i> or the disquieting charm of the
+Giovanelli <i>Zingarella</i> (properly Hypsipyle). Its beauty is all
+on the
+surface, while theirs stimulates the imagination of the beholder. The
+body with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and
+movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true
+Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous
+drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high
+lights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that
+Titian
+ever achieved. Only in the late <i>Venere del Pardo</i>, which so
+closely
+follows the chief motive of Giorgione's <i>Venus</i>, does he approach
+it in
+frankness and purity. Far more genuinely classic is it in spirit,
+because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, than
+anything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous
+in
+their study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.<a
+ name="FNanchor_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19"><sup>[19]</sup></a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Sacred_and_Profane_Love."></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 244px;" alt="Sacred and Profane Love."
+ title="Sacred and Profane Love." src="images/image07.jpg" /></p>
+<p><a name="Page_37"></a>It is impossible to discuss here in detail all
+the conjectural
+explanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popular
+of all Venetian pictures&#8212;least of all that strange one brought forward
+by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the <i>Artless and Sated Love</i>, for
+which they
+have found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves in
+an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show but a languid desire to
+solve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the
+pictures
+described by Marcantonio Michiel (the <i>Anonimo</i> of Jacopo
+Morelli), in
+the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the <i>Inferno with
+Aeneas and Anchises</i> and <i>Landscape with the Birth of Paris</i>,
+Herr Franz
+Wickhoff<a name="FNanchor_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20"><sup>[20]</sup></a>
+has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring
+crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of
+Barbarelli's best known works. The <i>Three Philosophers</i> he calls
+<i>Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas</i>, the Giovanelli <i>Tempest with the
+Gipsy
+and the Soldier</i> he explains anew as <i>Admetus and Hypsipyle</i>.<a
+ name="FNanchor_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21"><sup>[21]</sup></a> The
+subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and
+popularly called, or rather miscalled, the <i>Dream of Raphael</i>, is
+recognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione.
+He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the
+commentator of Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping
+side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it),
+the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in
+peaceful sleep.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_38"></a>Passing over to the Giorgionesque period of
+Titian, he boldly sets to
+work on the world-famous <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, and shows us
+the
+Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned
+humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the
+<i>Argonautica</i> of Valerius Flaccus&#8212;that wearisome imitation of the
+similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea&#8212;the sumptuously
+attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)&#8212;sits at the fountain in
+unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and
+holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not
+yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love
+is the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comes
+Venus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea's father,
+irresistibly pleading that she shall go to the alien lover, who waits
+in
+the wood. It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in the
+toils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is the
+subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible&#8212;in Titian's realisation
+of the legend&#8212;to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main theme
+upon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing<a
+ name="FNanchor_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22"><sup>[22]</sup></a> had
+already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when
+he
+described the Borghese picture as <i>The Maiden with Venus and Amor at
+the
+Well</i>. The <i>vraisemblance</i> of Herr Wickhoff's brilliant
+interpretation
+becomes the greater when we reflect that Titian at least twice
+afterwards borrowed subjects from classical antiquity, taking his
+<i>Worship of Venus</i>, now at Madrid, from the <i>Erotes</i> of
+Philostratus,
+and our own wonderful <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i> at the National
+Gallery from
+the <i>Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos</i> of Catullus. In the future
+it is
+quite possible that the Austrian savant may propose new and precise
+interpretations for the <i>Three Ages</i> and for Giorgione's <i>Concert
+Champ&ecirc;tre</i> at the Louvre.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Herodias"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 642px;"
+ alt="Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq."
+ title="Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq."
+ src="images/image08.jpg" /></p>
+<p>It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student
+of
+Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him
+at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young
+poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly
+allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have
+hard,
+clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours.
+It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere of pause and
+quiet <a name="Page_39"></a>that they bring with them, the way in
+which they indefinably take
+possession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond their
+radiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet
+we
+need not mourn overmuch, or too painfully set to work to revise our
+whole <a name="Page_40"></a>conception of Venetian idyllic art as
+matured in the first years
+of the Cinquecento. True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo,
+not
+less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian
+and
+Giorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and
+the
+lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they
+have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would
+no
+doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more
+fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular
+to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic
+legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of
+the golden prime disdained to represent&#8212;or it may be unconsciously
+shrank from representing&#8212;the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic
+and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. Giorgione
+embodies in such a picture as the <i>Adrastus and Hypsipyle</i>, or
+the
+<i>Aeneas and Evander</i>, not so much what has been related to him of
+those
+ancient legends as his own mood when he is brought into contact with
+them; he transposes his motive from a dramatic into a lyrical
+atmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something "rich
+and strange," coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmly
+human fantasy. Titian, in the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, as for
+identification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep close
+to the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. But
+for all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, for
+the splendour of female loveliness unveiled, for the piquant contrast
+of
+female loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He
+has
+presented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such a
+delightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries
+to
+decipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian in these exquisite
+idylls&#8212;for so we may still dare to call them&#8212;have consciously or
+unconsciously achieved, is the indissoluble union of humanity outwardly
+quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion, to the
+environing nature. It is Nature herself that in these true painted
+poems
+mysteriously responds, that interprets to the beholder the moods of
+man,
+much as a mighty orchestra&#8212;Nature ordered and controlled&#8212;may by its
+undercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the very
+personages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so
+we
+may be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his <a name="Page_41"></a>new
+interpretations,
+not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first
+acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our
+old
+ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art
+from
+another and a more prosaic, because a more precise and literal,
+standpoint.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Vanitas"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 631px;"
+ alt="Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ title="Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ src="images/image09.jpg" /></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_42"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<br />
+<h3><i>Frescoes of the Scuola del Santo&#8212;The "Herodias" type of
+picture&#8212;Holy
+Families and Sacred Conversations&#8212;Date of the "Cristo della Moneta" Is
+the "Concert" of the Pitti by Titian?&#8212;The "Bacchanal" of Alnwick
+Castle</i>.</h3>
+<br />
+<p>It has been pointed out by Titian's biographers that the wars which
+followed upon the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing all
+over North Italy the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation.
+It was not long after this&#8212;on the death of his master Giorgione&#8212;that
+Sebastiano Luciani migrated to Rome and, so far as he could, shook off
+his allegiance to the new Venetian art; it was then that Titian
+temporarily left the city of his adoption to do work in fresco at Padua
+and Vicenza. If the date 1508, given by Vasari for the great
+frieze-like
+wood-engraving, <i>The Triumph of Faith</i>, be accepted, it must be
+held
+that it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi<a
+ name="FNanchor_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23"><sup>[23]</sup></a>
+cites
+painted compositions of the <i>Triumph</i> as either the originals or
+the
+repetitions of the wood-engravings, for which Titian himself drew the
+blocks. The frescoes themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out on
+the walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished;
+but that they ever came into existence there would not appear to be any
+direct evidence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in the
+process of translation into wood-engraving, are not materially at
+variance with those in the frescoes of the Scuola del Santo. But the
+movement, the spirit of the whole is essentially different. This
+mighty,
+onward-sweeping procession, with Adam and Eve, the Patriarchs, the
+Prophets and Sibyls, the martyred Innocents, the great chariot with
+Christ enthroned, drawn by the four Doctors of the Church and impelled
+forward by the Emblems of the four <a name="Page_43"></a>Evangelists,
+with a great company of
+Apostles and Martyrs following, has all the vigour and elasticity, all
+the decorative amplitude that is wanting in the frescoes of the Santo.
+It is obvious that inspiration was derived from the <i>Triumphs</i> of
+Mantegna, then already so widely popularised by numerous engravings.
+Titian and those under whose inspiration he worked here obviously
+intended an antithesis to the great series of canvases presenting the
+apotheosis of Julius Caesar, which were then to be seen in the not far
+distant Mantua. Have we here another pictorial <a name="Page_44"></a>commentary,
+like the
+famous <i>Cristo detta Moneta,</i> with which we shall have to deal
+presently, on the "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo," which
+was the favourite device of Alfonso of Ferrara and the legend round his
+gold coins? The whole question is interesting, and deserves more
+careful
+consideration than can be accorded to it on the present occasion.
+Hardly
+again, until he reached extreme old age, did such an impulse of sacred
+passion colour the art of the painter of Cadore as here. In the earlier
+section of his life-work the <i>Triumph of Faith</i> constitutes a
+striking
+exception.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St_Anthony_of_Padua"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 549px;"
+ alt="St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak. Fresco in the Scuola del Santo, Padua. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak. Fresco in the Scuola del Santo, Padua. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image10.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Passing over, as relatively unimportant, Titian's share in the
+much-defaced fresco decorations of the Scuola del Carmine, we come now
+to those more celebrated ones in the Scuola del Santo. Out of the
+sixteen frescoes executed in 1510-11 by Titian, in concert with
+Domenico
+Campagnola and other assistants of less fame, the following three are
+from the brush of the master himself:&#8212;<i>St. Anthony causes a new-born
+Infant to speak, testifying to the innocence of its Mother; St. Anthony
+heals the leg of a Youth; A jealous Husband puts to death his Wife,
+whom
+the Saint afterwards restores to life.</i> Here the figures, the
+composition, the beautiful landscape backgrounds bear unmistakably the
+trace of Giorgione's influence. The composition has just the timidity,
+the lack of rhythm and variety, that to the last marks that of
+Barbarelli. The figures have his na&iuml;ve truth, his warmth and
+splendour
+of life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift the
+uninspiring subjects a little above the actual. The <i>Nobleman
+putting to
+death his Wife</i> is dramatic, almost terrible in its fierce, awkward
+realism, yet it does not rise much higher in interpretation than what
+our neighbours would to-day call the <i>drame passionel.</i> The
+interest is
+much the same that is aroused in a student of Elizabethan literature by
+that study of murder, <i>Arden of Feversham</i>, not that higher
+attraction
+that he feels&#8212;horrors notwithstanding&#8212;for <i>The Maid's Tragedy</i> of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, or <i>The Duchess of Malfi</i> of Webster.<a
+ name="FNanchor_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24"><sup>[24]</sup></a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Noli_me_tangere"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 653px;"
+ alt="&quot;Noli me tangere.&quot; National Gallery. From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company."
+ title="&quot;Noli me tangere.&quot; National Gallery. From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company."
+ src="images/image11.jpg" /></p>
+<p><a name="Page_47"></a>A convenient date for the magnificent <i>St.
+Mark enthroned, with SS.
+Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas, and Damianus</i>, is 1512, when Titian, having
+completed his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned to
+Venice. True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in the
+truculent <i>St. Mark</i>; but, then, as essentially so were the
+frescoes
+just terminated. The noble altar-piece<a name="FNanchor_25"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_25"><sup>[25]</sup></a> symbolises, or rather
+commemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with the
+terrors of the League of Cambrai:&#8212;on the one side St. Sebastian,
+standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, St. Roch
+for
+plague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, SS. Cosmas and
+Damianus, suggesting the healing of these evils. The colour is
+Giorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli's own is so to be
+described. Especially does it show points of contact with that of the
+so-called <i>Three Philosophers</i>, which, on the authority of
+Marcantonio
+Michiel (the <i>Anonimo</i>), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of
+the
+last works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is both
+sumptuous and boldly contrasted in the local hues, the sovereign unity
+of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, by
+any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate
+Giorgionesques.
+Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione
+successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a
+more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These last
+are among the most admirable portrait-figures in the life-work of
+Titian. In them a simplicity, a concentration akin to that of Giovanni
+Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and
+flexibility of Barbarelli. The St. Sebastian is the most beautiful
+among
+the youthful male figures, as the <i>Venus</i> of Giorgione and the
+Venus of
+the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i> are the most beautiful among the
+female
+figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such
+presentments of youth in its flower abounded. There is something
+androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the
+strength
+and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its
+suavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that a
+delight in portraying the fresh comeliness, the elastic beauty of form
+proper to the youth just passing into the man was common to many
+Venetian <a name="Page_48"></a>painters at this stage, and coloured
+their art as it had
+coloured the whole art of Greece.</p>
+<p>Hereabouts the writer would like to place the singularly attractive,
+yet
+a little puzzling, <i>Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd</i>,
+which is No. 4 in the National Gallery. The type of the landscape is
+early, and even for that time the execution in this particular is, for
+Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially the
+projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against
+the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. The
+noble type and the stilted attitude of the <i>St. Joseph</i> suggest
+the <i>St.
+Mark</i> of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket
+of
+the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of
+Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the
+Salute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, by
+a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no
+means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly
+in the <i>St. Anthony causing a new-born Infant to speak</i>, of the
+Scuola.
+Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of
+the early time before complete freedom of design was attained.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St_Mark_enthroned"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 808px;"
+ alt="St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della Salute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ title="St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della Salute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ src="images/image12.jpg" /></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_madonna_with_the_cherries"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 453px;"
+ alt="The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by L&ouml;wy."
+ title="The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by L&ouml;wy."
+ src="images/image13.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The splendidly beautiful <i>Herodias with the head of St. John the
+Baptist</i>, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone,
+but by
+Morelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian,
+belongs to about the same time as the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>,
+and
+would therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Padua
+and Vicenza. The intention has been not so much to emphasise the tragic
+character of the motive as to exhibit to the highest advantage the
+voluptuous charm, the languid indifference of a Venetian beauty posing
+for Herod's baleful consort. Repetitions of this <i>Herodias</i> exist
+in the
+Northbrook Collection and in that of Mr. R.H. Benson. The latter, which
+is presumably from the workshop of the master, and shows variations in
+one or two unimportant particulars from the Doria picture, is here,
+failing the original, reproduced with the kind permission of the owner.
+A conception traceable back to Giorgione would appear to underlie, not
+only this Doria picture, but that <i>Herodias</i> which at Dorchester
+House
+is, for not obvious reasons, attributed to Pordenone, and another
+similar one by Palma Vecchio, of which a late copy exists <a
+ name="Page_51"></a>in the
+collection of the Earl of Chichester. Especially is this community of
+origin noticeable in the head of St. John on the charger, as it appears
+in each of these works. All of them again show a family resemblance in
+this particular respect to the interesting full-length <i>Judith</i>
+at the
+Hermitage, now ascribed to Giorgione, to the over-painted half-length
+<i>Judith</i> in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice, and to
+Hollar's
+print after a picture supposed by the engraver to give the portrait of
+Giorgione himself in the character of David, the slayer of Goliath.<a
+ name="FNanchor_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26"><sup>[26]</sup></a>
+<a name="Page_52"></a>The sumptuous but much-injured <i>Vanitas</i>,
+which is No. 1110 in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich&#8212;a beautiful woman of the same opulent type as the
+<i>Herodias</i>, holding a mirror which reflects jewels and other
+symbols of
+earthly vanity&#8212;may be classed with the last-named work. Again we owe it
+to Morelli<a name="FNanchor_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27"><sup>[27]</sup></a>
+that this painting, ascribed by Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle&#8212;as the <i>Herodias</i> was ascribed&#8212;to Pordenone, has
+been
+with general acceptance classed among the early works of Titian. The
+popular <i>Flora</i> of the Uffizi, a beautiful thing still, though
+all the
+bloom of its beauty has been effaced, must be placed rather later in
+this section of Titian's life-work, displaying as it does a technique
+more facile and accomplished, and a conception of a somewhat higher
+individuality. The model is surely the same as that which has served
+for
+the Venus of the <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, though the picture
+comes
+some years after that piece. Later still comes the so-called <i>Alfonso
+d'Este and Laura Dianti</i>, as to which something will be said farther
+on.
+Another puzzle is provided by the beautiful "<i>Noli me tangere</i>" of
+the
+National Gallery, which must necessarily have its place somewhere here
+among the early works. Giorgionesque the picture still is, and most
+markedly so in the character of the beautiful landscape; yet the
+execution shows an altogether unusual freedom and mastery for that
+period. The <i>Magdalen</i> is, appropriately enough, of the same type
+as the
+exquisite, golden blond courtezans&#8212;or, if you will, models&#8212;who
+constantly appear and reappear in this period of Venetian art. Hardly
+anywhere has the painter exhibited a more wonderful freedom and
+subtlety
+of brush than in the figure of the Christ, in which glowing flesh is so
+finely set off by the white of fluttering, half-transparent draperies.
+The canvas has exquisite colour, almost without colours; the only local
+tint of any very defined character being the dark red of the Magdalen's
+robe. Yet a certain affectation, a certain exaggeration of fluttering
+movement and strained attitude repel the beholder a little at first,
+and
+neutralise for him the rare beauties of the canvas. It is as if a wave
+of some strange transient influence had passed over Titian at this
+moment, then again to be dissipated.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Page_53"></a><a
+ name="Madonna_and_Child"></a><img style="width: 512px; height: 386px;"
+ alt="Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by Brogi."
+ title="Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by Brogi."
+ src="images/image14.jpg" /></p>
+<p><a name="Page_54"></a>But to turn now once more to the series of our
+master's Holy Families
+and Sacred Conversations which began with <i>La Zingarella</i>, and
+was
+continued with the <i>Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida</i>
+of
+Madrid. The most popular of all those belonging to this still early
+time
+is the <i>Virgin with the Cherries</i> in the Vienna Gallery. Here the
+painter is already completely himself. He will go much farther in
+breadth if not in polish, in transparency, in forcefulness, if not in
+attractiveness of colour; but he is now, in sacred art at any rate,
+practically free from outside influences. For the pensive girl-Madonna
+of Giorgione we now have the radiant young matron of Titian, joyous yet
+calm in her play with the infant Christ, while the Madonna of his
+master
+and friend was unrestful and full of tender foreboding even in seeming
+repose. Pretty close on this must have followed the <i>Madonna and
+Child
+with St. Stephen, St. Ambrose and St. Maurice</i>, No 439 in the
+Louvre, in
+which the rich colour-harmonies strike a somewhat deeper note. An
+atelier repetition of this fine original is No. 166 in the Vienna
+Gallery; the only material variation traceable in this last-named
+example being that in lieu of St. Ambrose, wearing a kind of biretta,
+we
+have St. Jerome bareheaded.</p>
+<p>Very near in time and style to this particular series, with which it
+may
+safely be grouped, is the beautiful and finely preserved <i>Holy Family</i>
+in the Bridgewater Gallery, where it is still erroneously attributed to
+Palma Vecchio. It is to be found in the same private apartment on the
+groundfloor of Bridgewater House, that contains the <i>Three Ages</i>.
+Deep
+glowing richness of colour and smooth perfection without smallness of
+finish make this picture remarkable, notwithstanding its lack of any
+deeper significance. Nor must there be forgotten in an enumeration of
+the early Holy Families, one of the loveliest of all, the <i>Madonna
+and
+Child with the infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot</i>, which adorns
+the
+Venetian section of the Uffizi Gallery. Here the relationship to
+Giorgione is more clearly shown than in any of these Holy Families of
+the first period, and in so far the painting, which cannot be placed
+very early among them, constitutes a partial exception in the series.
+The Virgin is of a more refined and pensive type than in the <i>Madonna
+with the Cherries</i> of Vienna, or the <i>Madonna with Saints</i>,
+No. 439 in
+the Louvre, and the divine Bambino less robust in build and aspect. The
+magnificent St. Anthony is quite Giorgionesque in the serenity tinged
+with sadness of his contemplative mood.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Virgin_and_Child_with_Saints"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 431px;"
+ alt="Virgin and Child with Saints. From a photograph by Bra&uuml;n-Clement &amp; Cie."
+ title="Virgin and Child with Saints. From a photograph by Bra&uuml;n-Clement &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image15.jpg" /></p>
+<p><a name="Page_55"></a>Last of all in this particular group&#8212;another
+work in respect of which
+Morelli has played the rescuer&#8212;is the <i>Madonna and Child with four
+Saints</i>, No. 168 in the Dresden Gallery, a much-injured but
+eminently
+Titianesque work, which may be said to bring this particular series to
+within a couple of years or so of the <i>Assunta</i>&#8212;that great
+landmark of
+the first period of maturity. The type of the Madonna here is still
+very
+similar to that in the <i>Madonna with the Cherries</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St._Eustace"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 382px;"
+ alt="St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the Stag. From a Drawing by Titian in the British Museum."
+ title="St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the Stag. From a Drawing by Titian in the British Museum."
+ src="images/image16.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Apart from all these sacred works, and in every respect an
+exceptional
+production, is the world-famous <i>Cristo della Moneta</i> of the
+Dresden
+Gallery. As to the exact date to be assigned to this panel among the
+early works of Titian considerable difficulty exists. For once agreeing
+with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Morelli is inclined to disregard the
+testimony of Vasari, from whose text it would result that it was
+painted
+in or after the year 1514, and to place it as far back as 1508.
+Notwithstanding this weight of authority the writer is strongly
+inclined, following Vasari in this instance, and trusting to certain
+<a name="Page_56"></a>indications furnished by the picture itself, to
+return to the date 1514
+or thereabouts. There is no valid reason to doubt that the <i>Christ
+of
+the Tribute-Money</i> was painted for Alfonso I. of Ferrara, and the
+less
+so, seeing that it so aptly illustrates the already quoted legend on
+his
+coins: "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo." According to
+Vasari, it was painted <i>nella porta d'un armario</i>&#8212;that is to say,
+in
+the door of a press or wardrobe. But this statement need not be taken
+in
+its most literal sense. If it were to be assumed from this passage that
+the picture was painted on the spot, its date must be advanced to 1516,
+since Titian did not pay his first visit to Ferrara before that year.
+There is no sufficient ground, however, for assuming that he did not
+execute his wonderful panel in the usual fashion&#8212;that is to say, at
+home in Venice. The last finishing touches might, perhaps, have been
+given to it <i>in situ</i>, as they were to Bellini's <i>Bacchanal</i>,
+done also
+for the Duke of Ferrara. The extraordinary finish of the painting,
+which
+is hardly to be paralleled in this respect in the life-work of the
+artist, may have been due to his desire to "show his hand" to his new
+patron in a subject which touched him so nearly. And then the finish is
+not of the Quattrocento type, not such as we find, for instance, in the
+<i>Leonardo Loredano</i> of Giovanni Bellini, the finest panels of
+Cima, or
+the early <i>Christ bearing the Cross</i> of Giorgione. In it
+exquisite
+polish of surface and consummate rendering of detail are combined with
+the utmost breadth and majesty of composition, with a now perfect
+freedom in the casting of the draperies. It is difficult, indeed, to
+imagine that this masterpiece&#8212;so eminently a work of the Cinquecento,
+and one, too, in which the master of Cadore rose superior to all
+influences, even to that of Giorgione&#8212;could have been painted in 1508,
+that is some two years before Bellini's <i>Baptism of Christ</i> in S.
+Corona, and in all probability before the <i>Three Philosophers</i> of
+Giorgione himself. The one of Titian's own early pictures with which it
+appears to the writer to have most in common&#8212;not so much in technique,
+indeed, as in general style&#8212;is the <i>St. Mark</i> of the Salute, and
+than
+this it is very much less Giorgionesque. To praise the <i>Cristo della
+Moneta</i> anew after it has been so incomparably well praised seems
+almost
+an impertinence. The soft radiance of the colour so well matches the
+tempered majesty, the infinite mansuetude of the conception; the
+spirituality, which is of the essence of the august subject, <a
+ name="Page_57"></a><a name="Page_58"></a>is so
+happily expressed, without any sensible diminution of the splendour of
+Renaissance art approaching its highest. And yet nothing could well be
+simpler than the scheme of colour as compared with the complex
+harmonies
+which Venetian art in a somewhat later phase affected. Frank contrasts
+are established between the tender, glowing flesh of the Christ, seen
+in
+all the glory of achieved manhood, and the coarse, brown skin of the
+son
+of the people who appears as the Pharisee; between the bright yet
+tempered red of His robe and the deep blue of His mantle. But the
+golden
+glow, which is Titian's own, envelops the contrasting figures and the
+contrasting hues in its harmonising atmosphere, and gives unity to the
+whole.<a name="FNanchor_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28"><sup>[28]</sup></a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Cristo_della_Moneta"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 710px;"
+ alt="The &quot;Cristo della Moneta.&quot; Dresden Gallery. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ title="The &quot;Cristo della Moneta.&quot; Dresden Gallery. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ src="images/image17.jpg" /></p>
+<p>A small group of early portraits&#8212;all of them somewhat difficult to
+place&#8212;call for attention before we proceed. Probably the earliest
+portrait among those as yet recognised as from the hand of our
+painter&#8212;leaving out of the question the <i>Baffo</i> and the
+portrait-figures in the great <i>St. Mark</i> of the Salute&#8212;is the
+magnificent <i>Ariosto</i> in the Earl of Darnley's Collection at
+Cobham
+Hall.<a name="FNanchor_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29"><sup>[29]</sup></a>
+There is very considerable doubt, to say the least, as to
+whether this half-length really represents the court poet of Ferrara,
+but the point requires more elaborate discussion than can be here
+conceded to it. Thoroughly Giorgionesque is the soberly tinted yet
+sumptuous picture in its general arrangement, as in its general tone,
+and in this respect it is the fitting companion and the descendant of
+Giorgione's <i>Antonio Broccardo</i> at Buda-Pesth, of his <i>Knight
+of Malta</i>
+at the Uffizi. Its resemblance, moreover, is, as regards the general
+lines of the composition, a very striking one to the celebrated Sciarra
+<i>Violin-Player</i> by Sebastiano del Piombo, now in the gallery of
+Baron
+Alphonse Rothschild at Paris, where it is as heretofore given to
+Raphael.<a name="FNanchor_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30"><sup>[30]</sup></a>
+The handsome, <a name="Page_59"></a><a name="Page_61"></a>manly head
+has lost both subtlety and
+character through some too severe process of cleaning, but Venetian art
+has hardly anything more magnificent to show than the costume, with the
+quilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin which occupies so prominent a
+place in the picture.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a
+ name="Madonna_and_Child_with_four_saints"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 370px;"
+ alt="Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ title="Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ src="images/image18.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The so-called <i>Concert</i> of the Pitti Palace, which depicts a
+young
+Augustinian monk as he plays on a keyed instrument, having on one side
+of him a youthful cavalier in a plumed hat, on the other a bareheaded
+clerk holding a bass-viol, was, until Morelli arose, almost universally
+looked upon as one of the most typical Giorgiones.<a name="FNanchor_31"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_31"><sup>[31]</sup></a> The most gifted
+of the purely aesthetic critics who have approached the Italian
+Renaissance, Walter Pater, actually built round this <i>Concert</i>
+his
+exquisite study on the School of Giorgione. There can be little doubt,
+notwithstanding, that Morelli was right in denying the authorship of
+Barbarelli, and tentatively, for he does no more, assigning the so
+subtly attractive and pathetic <i>Concert</i> to the early time of
+Titian. To
+express a definitive opinion on the latter point in the present state
+of
+<a name="Page_62"></a>the picture would be somewhat hazardous. The
+portrait of the modish
+young cavalier and that of the staid elderly clerk, whose baldness
+renders tonsure impossible&#8212;that is just those portions of the canvas
+which are least well preserved&#8212;are also those that least conclusively
+suggest our master. The passion-worn, ultra-sensitive physiognomy of
+the
+young Augustinian is, undoubtedly, in its very essence a Giorgionesque
+creation, for the fellows of which we must turn to the Castelfranco
+master's just now cited <i>Antonio Broccardo</i>, to his male
+portraits in
+Berlin and at the Uffizi, to his figure of the youthful Pallas, son of
+Evander, in the <i>Three Philosophers</i>. Closer to it, all the same,
+are
+the <i>Raffo</i> and the two portraits in the <i>St. Mark</i> of the
+Salute, and
+closer still is the supremely fine <i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i> of the
+Salon
+Carr&eacute;, that later production of Vecelli's early time. The <i>Concert</i>
+of
+the Pitti, so far as it can be judged through the retouches that cover
+it, displays an art certainly not finer or more delicate, but yet in
+its
+technical processes broader, swifter, and more synthetic than anything
+that we can with certainty point to in the life-work of Barbarelli. The
+large but handsome and flexible hands of the player are much nearer in
+type and treatment to Titian than they are to his master. The beautiful
+motive&#8212;music for one happy moment uniting by invisible bonds of
+sympathy three human beings&#8212;is akin to that in the <i>Three Ages</i>,
+though
+there love steps in as the beautifier of rustic harmony. It is to be
+found also in Giorgione's <i>Concert Champ&ecirc;tre</i>, in the
+Louvre, in which
+the thrumming of the lute is, however, one among many delights
+appealing
+to the senses. This smouldering heat, this tragic passion in which
+youth
+revels, looking back already with discontent, yet forward also with
+unquenchable yearning, is the keynote of the Giorgionesque and the
+early
+Titianesque male portraiture. It is summed up by the <i>Antonio
+Broccardo</i>
+of the first, by the <i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i> of the second.
+Altogether
+other, and less due to a reaction from physical ardour, is the
+exquisite
+sensitiveness of Lorenzo Lotto, who sees most willingly in his sitters
+those qualities that are in the closest sympathy with his own
+highly-strung nature, and loves to present them as some secret,
+indefinable woe tears at their heart-strings. A strong element of the
+Giorgionesque pathos informs still and gives charm to the Sciarra
+<i>Violin-Player</i> of Sebastiano del Piombo; only that there it is
+already
+tempered by the haughty self-restraint more proper to Florentine and
+Roman <a name="Page_63"></a>portraiture. There is little or nothing to
+add after this as to
+the <i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i>, except that as a representation of
+aristocratic youth it has hardly a parallel among the master's works
+except, perhaps, a later and equally admirable, though less
+distinguished, portrait in the Pitti.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Jeune_Homme_au_gant"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 610px;"
+ alt="Jeune Homme au gant. Walter L. Colls. ph. sc. From a Photograph by Bra&uuml;n Clement &amp; Cie."
+ title="Jeune Homme au gant. Walter L. Colls. ph. sc. From a Photograph by Bra&uuml;n Clement &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image19.jpg" /><br />
+</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="A_Concert"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 483px;"
+ alt="A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image20.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of the
+Venetians, painted in the <i>pensieroso</i> mood his portraits of
+high-bred
+English cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest manhood,
+was this particular aspect of youth in its flower again depicted with
+the same felicity.<a name="FNanchor_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32"><sup>[32]</sup></a></p>
+<p><a name="Page_64"></a>To Crowe and Cavalcaselle's pages the reader
+must be referred for a
+detailed and interesting account of Titian's intrigues against the
+venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office
+of
+broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. We see there how,
+on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo
+proposed to Titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the
+Tenth (Giovanni de' Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such a
+step. Titian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds to
+petition the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker's patent for
+life, on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions
+as
+are conceded to Giovanni Bellini. The petition is presented on the 31st
+of May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that day moves and carries a
+resolution accepting Titian's offer with all the conditions attached.
+Though he has arrived at the extreme limit of his splendid career, old
+Gian Bellino, who has just given new proof of his still transcendent
+power in the great altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), which
+is in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit still
+under the encroachments of his dangerous competitor, younger than
+himself by half a century. On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Ten
+revokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares that
+Titian is not to receive his broker's patent on the first vacancy, but
+must wait his turn. Seemingly nothing daunted, Titian petitions again,
+asking for the reversion of the particular broker's patent which will
+become vacant on the death of Giovanni Bellini; and this new offer,
+which stipulates for certain special payments and provisions, is
+accepted by the Council. Titian, like most other holders of the
+much-coveted office, shows himself subsequently much more eager to
+receive its not inconsiderable emoluments than to finish the pictures,
+the painting of which is the one essential duty attached to the office.
+Some further bargaining takes place with the Council on the 18th of
+January 1516, but, a few days after the death of Giovanni Bellini at
+the
+end of November in the same year, fresh resolutions are passed
+post<a name="Page_65"></a>poning the grant to Titian of Bellini's
+patent; notwithstanding
+which, there is conclusive evidence of a later date to show that he is
+allowed the full enjoyment of his "Senseria in Fontego di Tedeschi"
+(sic), with all its privileges and immunities, before the close
+of
+this same year, 1516.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Portrait_of_a_Man"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 663px;"
+ alt="Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ title="Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by Hanfst&auml;ngl."
+ src="images/image21.jpg" /></p>
+<p>It is in this year that Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, and
+entered <a name="Page_66"></a>into relations with Alfonso I., which
+were to become more
+intimate as the position of the master became greater and more
+universally recognised in Italy. It was here, as we may safely assume,
+that he completed, or, it may be, repaired, Giovanni Bellini's last
+picture, the great <i>Bacchanal</i> or <i>Feast of the Gods on Earth</i>,
+now at
+Alnwick Castle. It is there that he obtained the commission for two
+famous works, the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>,
+designed, in
+continuation of the series commenced with Bellini's <i>Feast of the
+Gods</i>,
+to adorn a favourite apartment in Alfonso's castle of Ferrara; the
+series being completed a little later on by that crown and climax of
+the
+whole set, the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i> of the National Gallery.</p>
+<p>Bellini appears in an unfamiliar phase in this final production of
+his
+magnificent old age, on which the signature, together with the date,
+1514, so carefully noted by Vasari, is still most distinctly to be
+read.
+Much less Giorgionesque&#8212;if the term be in this case permissible&#8212;and
+more Quattrocentist in style than in the immediately preceding
+altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, he is here hardly less
+interesting. All admirers of his art are familiar with the four
+beautiful <i>Allegories</i> of the Accademia delle Belle Arti at
+Venice,
+which constitute, besides the present picture, almost his sole
+excursion
+into the regions of pagan mythology and symbolism. These belong,
+however, to a considerably earlier period of his maturity, and show a
+fire which in the <i>Bacchanal</i> has died out.<a name="FNanchor_33"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_33"><sup>[33]</sup></a> Vasari describes this
+<i>Bacchanal</i> as "one of the most beautiful works ever executed by
+Gian
+Bellino," and goes on to remark that it has in the draperies "a certain
+angular (or cutting) quality in accordance with the German style." He
+strangely attributes this to an imitation of D&uuml;rer's <i>Rosenkranzfest</i>,
+painted some eight years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo,
+adjacent to the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. This particularity, noted by the
+author of the <i>Vite</i>, and, in some passages, a certain hardness
+and
+opacity of colour, give rise to the surmise that, even in the parts of
+the picture which belong to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti may be
+traced. It was he who most probably painted the background and the
+figure of St. Jerome in the master's altar-piece finished in <a
+ name="Page_67"></a>the
+preceding year for S. Giovanni Crisostomo; it was he, too, who to a
+great extent executed, though he cannot have wholly devised, the
+Bellinesque <i>Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints</i> in the Church of
+San
+Pietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period. Even in
+the <i>Madonna</i> of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian
+Bellino's
+finest landscape of the late time, certain hardnesses of colour in the
+main group <a name="Page_68"></a>suggest the possibility of a minor
+co-operation by Basaiti.
+Some passages of the <i>Bacchanal</i>, however&#8212;especially the figures
+of the
+two blond, fair-breasted goddesses or nymphs who, in a break in the
+trees, stand relieved against the yellow bands of a sunset sky&#8212;are as
+beautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase has
+produced up to the date of the picture's appearance. Very suggestive of
+Bellini is the way in which the hair of some of the personages is
+dressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced by
+artificial means. These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in his
+earliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid.
+Still this coiffure&#8212;for as such it must be designated&#8212;is to be found
+more or less throughout the master's career. It is very noticeable in
+the <i>Allegories</i> just mentioned.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Alessandro_de_Medici"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 655px;"
+ alt="Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a Photograph by Spooner &amp; Co."
+ title="Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a Photograph by Spooner &amp; Co."
+ src="images/image22.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Infinitely pathetic is the old master's vain attempt to infuse into
+the
+chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires. An
+atmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously
+betraying
+life-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like fire
+through the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and Titian. The
+audacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rustic
+festival, in which the gods unbend and, after the homelier fashion of
+mortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, it
+would seem, only <i>pour la forme</i>. A careful examination of the
+picture
+substantially confirms Vasari's story that the <i>Feast of the Gods</i>
+was
+painted upon by Titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in many
+passages a Titianesque hand. It may well be, at the same time, that
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what the
+younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the
+elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left
+unfinished by him. The whole conception, the <i>charpente</i>, the
+contours
+of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are the
+carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the
+branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of the
+picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground
+with
+its small pebbles.<a name="FNanchor_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34"><sup>[34]</sup></a>
+Even <a name="Page_69"></a>the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a
+castle sunset-lit&#8212;so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and
+its castle&#8212;is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution. By
+Titian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that might be taken to
+betray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, the
+cloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, the
+upper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to the
+right. If it is Titian that we have here, as certainly appears most
+probable, he cannot be deemed to have exerted his full powers in
+completing or developing the Bellinesque landscape. The task may well,
+indeed, have presented itself to him as an uninviting one. There is
+nothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the
+exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the <i>Three Ages</i> and the <i>Sacred
+and Profane Love</i>, while the broader handling suggests rather the
+technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which
+opens out in the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_70"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<h3><i>The "Worship of Venus" and "Bacchanal" Place in Art of the
+"Assunta"&#8212;The "Bacchus and Ariadne"&#8212;So-called Portraits of Alfonso of
+Ferrara and Laura Dianti&#8212;The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia&#8212;Altar-pieces
+at Ancona and in the Vatican&#8212;The "Entombment" of the Louvre&#8212;The
+"Madonna di Casa Pesaro"&#8212;Place among Titian's works of "St. Peter
+Martyr."</i></h3>
+<br />
+<p>In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosto
+brought out there his first edition of the <i>Orlando Farioso</i>.<a
+ name="FNanchor_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35"><sup>[35]</sup></a> A
+greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some
+quarters
+been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's
+career,
+when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being
+as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that
+in the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>, painted for
+Alfonso, we
+have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who
+infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian
+Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in
+their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very
+pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process
+of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from
+a
+broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and
+unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation
+to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous
+eccentricity.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_Worship_of_Venus"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 548px;"
+ alt="The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment, &amp; Cie."
+ title="The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment, &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image23.jpg" /></p>
+<p>In the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i> we have
+left behind
+<a name="Page_71"></a>already the fresh morning of Titian's genius,
+represented by the
+Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its
+bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some
+evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more
+delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The <i>Worship of Venus</i>
+might be more appropriately named <i>Games of the Loves in Honour of
+Venus</i>. The subject is taken from the <i>Imagines</i><a
+ name="FNanchor_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36"><sup>[36]</sup></a> of
+Philostratus, a
+renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman
+<a name="Page_72"></a>Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious
+grace and charm of the
+Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of
+paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples,
+but
+by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the
+author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the
+Praxitelean type&#8212;a more earthly sister of those which have been named
+the "Townley Venus" and the "V&eacute;nus d'Arles"&#8212;myriads of Loves
+sport,
+kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of
+them
+shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry
+answer
+is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the
+life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the
+splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner)
+dimmed it. These delicious pagan <i>amorini</i> are the successors of
+the
+angelic <i>putti</i> of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of
+the
+Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly
+beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the
+North,
+in touch with the South, as Albrecht D&uuml;rer, Mabuse, and Jacob
+Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred
+works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier
+and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To
+say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish
+sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at
+their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in
+similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.<a name="FNanchor_37"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_37"><sup>[37]</sup></a></p>
+<p>The sumptuous <i>Bacchanal</i>, for which, we are told, Alfonso
+gave the
+commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance <a
+ name="Page_73"></a>of a less
+delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From
+certain points of analogy with an <i>Ariadne</i> described by
+Philostratus,
+it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation
+of
+the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus,
+whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus
+is,
+however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honour
+to the god, Ariadne's new lover. The revel in a certain audacious
+abandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists have
+retired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certain
+agreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of the
+Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic
+statues
+then, and until lately, entitled <i>The Sleeping Ariadne</i>, does not
+lead
+the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so
+lately won back from despair. The undraped figure,<a name="FNanchor_38"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_38"><sup>[38]</sup></a> both in its
+attitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped
+Bacchante, or goddess, in Bellini's <i>Bacchanal</i> at Alnwick.
+Titian's
+lovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio's
+dazzling <i>Antiope</i> in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's <i>Venus</i>
+or
+Titian's own <i>Antiope</i>, in which a certain feminine dignity
+spiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise
+defenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively Titianesque
+colour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbed
+dancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to the
+spectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we find
+again in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture,
+and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the <i>Entombment</i>.</p>
+<p>The charming little <i>Tambourine Player</i>, which is No. 181 in
+the Vienna
+Gallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works just
+now described, but rather before than after them.</p>
+<p>What that is new remains to be said about the <i>Assunta</i>, or <i>Assumption
+of the Virgin</i>, which was ordered of Titian as early as 1516, but
+not
+shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until
+the
+20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetian
+altar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had <a
+ name="Page_74"></a>and
+what had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the
+world.
+Thus Raphael had produced the <i>Stanze</i>, the <i>Cartoons</i>, the
+<i>Madonnas of
+Foligno</i> and <i>San Sisto</i>, but not yet the <i>Transfiguration;</i>
+Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his <i>magnum opus</i>,
+the
+Ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four years
+earlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata in
+Florence. Among painters whom, origin notwithstanding, we must group as
+Venetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri
+at
+S. Maria Formosa his famous <i>Santa Barbara</i>; Lorenzo Lotto in the
+following year had produced his characteristic and, in its charm of
+fluttering movement, strangely unconventional altar-piece for S.
+Bartolommeo at Bergamo, the <i>Madonna with Ten Saints</i>. In none of
+these
+masterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen by
+Titian, which was far from being the case, was there any help to be
+derived in the elaboration of a work which cannot be said to have had
+any precursor in the art of Venice. There was in existence one
+altar-piece dealing with the same subject from which Titian might
+possibly have obtained a hint. This was the <i>Assumption of the Virgin</i>
+painted by D&uuml;rer in 1509 for Jacob Heller, and now only known by
+Paul
+Juvenel's copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort. The group of the
+Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and
+the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its
+fine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art. Without exercising
+a
+too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact
+between this group and the corresponding one in the <i>Assunta</i>.
+But
+Titian could not at that time have seen the original of the Heller
+altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it
+remained for a century.<a name="FNanchor_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39"><sup>[39]</sup></a>
+He no doubt did see the <i>Assumption</i> in the
+<i>Marienleben</i> completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands
+in a
+definite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more
+formal&#8212;much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The
+<i>Assunta</i> was already in Vasari's time much dimmed, and thus
+difficult
+to see in its position on the high altar. Joshua Reynolds, when he
+visited the Frari in 1752, says that "he saw it near; it was most
+terribly dark but nobly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle Belle
+Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, <a name="Page_75"></a><a
+ name="Page_77"></a>but sufficiently
+restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the
+greatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre,
+passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well
+adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly
+contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is
+triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and
+awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of
+which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of
+the
+Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling
+of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with
+awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in
+her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and
+not without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which
+her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the
+climax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous,
+more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure
+in the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual
+character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_Assunta"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 1013px;"
+ alt="The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice."
+ title="The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice."
+ src="images/image24.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Placed as the <i>Assunta</i> now is in the immediate neighbourhood
+of one of
+Tintoretto's best-preserved masterpieces, the <i>Miracolo del Schiavo</i>,
+it
+undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern
+connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely
+triumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual,
+more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that
+unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its
+agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right
+to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his
+subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above
+the earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, in
+unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in
+poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian
+stands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it were
+necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the
+life-work of the other&#8212;making the world the poorer by the loss of
+Titian or Tintoretto&#8212;can it be doubted for a moment what the choice
+would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face
+with the mighty genius of the latter?</p>
+<p><a name="Page_78"></a>But to return for a moment to the <i>Assunta</i>.
+The enlargement of
+dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent
+group
+of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It
+carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable,
+without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime
+beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank
+with the finest of those in Raphael's <i>Cartoons</i>, yet they
+preserve in a
+higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of
+vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture
+is
+the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not
+always the case with the <i>Cartoons</i>, and the reverse process,
+everywhere
+adhered to in the <i>Transfiguration</i>, is what gives to that
+overrated
+last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. Titian himself
+in the <i>St. Sebastian</i> of Brescia, and above all in the
+much-vaunted
+masterpiece, <i>The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican</i>, sins in
+the
+same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his
+better self.</p>
+<p>Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain,
+and
+only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into
+possession
+of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.<a
+ name="FNanchor_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40"><sup>[40]</sup></a>
+What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer
+opposition at the outset. In this case the public, admitted on the high
+festival of St. Bernardino's Day in the year 1518 to see the vast
+panel,
+showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than
+the friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de'
+Frari,
+and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology
+to
+the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against
+the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian's wonderful
+achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.</p>
+<p>To the year 1519 belongs the <i>Annunciation</i> in the Cathedral
+of Treviso,
+the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly
+overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits
+the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the
+foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely
+ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the
+beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to
+the Floren<a name="Page_79"></a>tines and the Sienese&#8212;both sculptors
+and painters&#8212;south of
+the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of
+the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in
+the
+Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto's pathetic
+<i>Annunciation</i> at Recanati, <a name="Page_80"></a>for all its
+excess of agitation, appear
+dignified by comparison. Titian's own <i>Annunciation</i>, bequeathed
+to the
+Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up
+on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and
+appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better
+known picture.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><i><a name="The_Annunciation"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 641px;"
+ alt="The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image25.jpg" /></i></p>
+<p>Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso's Duchess,&#8212;the
+passive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character
+has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,&#8212;our
+master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we
+are told, the finished <i>Bacchanal</i>, already described above. He
+appears
+to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early
+part
+of 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed at
+Ferrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our <i>Bacchus and
+Ariadne</i>, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture
+too
+late in the earlier section of Vecelli's work, though, with all its
+freshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a further
+advance on the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>, and
+must be
+deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the <i>Feast of the
+Gods</i>
+of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of Titian already
+described
+our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time
+has
+not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of
+the
+golden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the
+<i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i> the allegiance to
+Giorgiono has
+been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the na&iuml;vet&eacute;
+remains, but not the
+infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the <i>Bacchus
+and
+Ariadne</i> Titian's genius flames up with an intensity of passion such
+as
+will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of
+this class. Certainly, with all the beauties of the <i>Venuses</i>, of
+the
+<i>Diana and Actaeon</i>, the <i>Diana and Calisto</i>, the <i>Rape
+of Europa</i>, we
+descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance,
+though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its
+power to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the
+<i>Venere del Pardo</i> of the Louvre and the <i>Nymph and Shepherd</i>
+of Vienna,
+is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier
+times, with its exquisite na&iuml;vet&eacute; and mitigated
+sensuousness.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Bacchus_and_Ariadne"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 510px;"
+ alt="Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company."
+ title="Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company."
+ src="images/image26.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i> is a Titian which even the Louvre,
+the Museum
+of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in <a
+ name="Page_81"></a>our master's
+works, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most
+readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are
+interested
+in Italian art. This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or
+subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose
+<i>Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos</i> he followed with a closeness
+which did
+not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of
+the subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that had
+animated the original. How is it possible to better express the <i>At
+parte ex ali&acirc; florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna,
+tuoque
+incensus amore</i> of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager
+movement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian? Or to
+<a name="Page_82"></a>paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those
+other lines: <i>Horum pars
+tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra
+iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant</i>? Ariadne's crown
+of
+stars&#8212;the <i>Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona</i> of the
+poem&#8212;shines in Titian's sky with a sublime radiance which corresponds
+perfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, of
+Catullus. The splendour of the colour in this piece&#8212;hardly equalled in
+its happy audacity, save by the <i>Madonna del Coniglio</i> or <i>Vierge
+au
+Lapin</i> of the Louvre,<a name="FNanchor_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41"><sup>[41]</sup></a>
+would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, did
+the prescribed limits of space admit of such an indulgence. Even here,
+however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the
+delights
+of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his
+imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic
+harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the
+sake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those
+Veronese transformed into Venetians&#8212;Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari;
+or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the
+more violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the
+mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With Titian the
+highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment,
+are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in
+the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be
+considered the supreme exponent.</p>
+<p>The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carr&eacute; of the Louvre now
+known as
+<i>Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti</i>, but in the collection of
+Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, <i>Titian's
+Mistress after the Life</i>, comes in very well at this stage. The
+exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound
+hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities
+inspired by Giorgione&#8212;the <a name="Page_83"></a>loveliest of all in
+some respects, the most
+consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still
+to the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue,
+myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole
+enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here
+and there with gleams of light. Vasari described how Titian painted,
+<i>ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d' artiglieria</i>,
+the
+Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who
+afterwards became the wife of the duke, <i>che &egrave; opera stupenda</i>.
+It is
+upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between
+the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid
+<i>donna</i> and the <i>Alfonso of Ferrara</i> of the Museo del Prado,
+that the
+popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably,
+like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a
+lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, the
+accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,<a
+ name="FNanchor_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42"><sup>[42]</sup></a>
+comes forward
+with convincing arguments to show that the handsome <i>insouciant</i>
+personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in Titian's
+picture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has hitherto been almost
+universally assumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be
+his
+son, Ercole II. This alone invalidates the favourite designation of the
+Louvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the
+"stupendous" portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari. A
+comparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called <i>Giorgio Cornaro</i>
+of Castle Howard&#8212;a famous portrait by Titian of a gentleman holding a
+hawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at the
+recent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery&#8212;results in something like
+certainty that in both is the same personage portrayed. It is not only
+that the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are the
+same in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree
+exceedingly
+well; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same
+impression
+of splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused. This
+means that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the gracious
+Ercole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the Castle
+Howard picture is Alfonso's son and successor portrayed. In the latter
+canvas, which bears, according <a name="Page_84"></a>to Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, the later
+signature "Titianus F.," the personage is, it may be, a year or two
+older. Let it be borne in mind that only on the <i>back</i> of the
+canvas is,
+or rather was, to be found the inscription: "Georgius Cornelius, frater
+Catterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (<i>sic</i>)," upon the
+authority of
+which it bears its present designation.</p>
+<p>The altar-piece, <i>The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St.
+Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor</i>, now in San Domenico, but formerly
+in
+San Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature
+"Titianus
+Cadorinus pinsit," this being about the first instance in which the
+later spelling "Titianus" appears. If as a pictorial achievement it
+cannot rank with the San Niccol&ograve; and the Pesaro altar-pieces, it
+presents some special points of interest which make it easily
+distinguishable from these. The conception is marked by a peculiar
+intensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, and
+hardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type. It reveals a
+passionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which one
+expects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in Titian, whose dramatic
+force is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well
+under
+control. The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter
+was
+acquainted with Raphael's <i>Madonna di Foligno</i>; but it is
+dramatic and
+real where the Urbinate's masterpiece was lofty and symbolical. Still
+Titian's St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in
+steadfastness
+and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the
+humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento
+altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a
+master of the full Renaissance. An improved version of the upper
+portion
+of the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in the
+clouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccol&ograve; altar-piece.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St_Sebastian"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 970px;"
+ alt="St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image27.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the Papal
+Legate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Church
+of SS. Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style and
+sentiment. The <i>St. Sebastian</i> presently to be referred to,
+constituting
+the right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,<a
+ name="FNanchor_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43"><sup>[43]</sup></a>
+and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent of
+Duke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure the
+much-talked-of piece <a name="Page_86"></a>for his master. Titian
+succumbed to an offer of
+sixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first nor
+the last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side
+of
+his character. But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemy
+of the Legate, drew back and left to Titian the discredit without the
+profit of the transaction. The central compartment of the Brescia
+altar-piece presents <i>The Resurrection</i>, the upper panels on the
+left
+and right show together the <i>Annunciation</i>, the lower left panel
+depicts
+the patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor,
+Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous <i>St. Sebastian</i><a
+ name="FNanchor_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44"><sup>[44]</sup></a> in
+the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch.
+The <i>St. Sebastian</i> is neither more nor less than the magnificent
+academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to
+bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his
+splendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in the
+beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting
+the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide gulf indeed separates the
+mood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposeful
+charm of the Giorgionesque saint in the <i>St. Mark</i> of the Salute,
+or the
+healthy realism of the unconcerned <i>St. Sebastian</i> in the S.
+Niccol&ograve;
+altar-piece. Here, as later on with the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i>, those
+who
+admire in Venetian art in general, and in that of Titian in particular,
+its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature,
+must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by a
+conception in its very essence artificial. Yet, brought face to face
+with the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, and
+against their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth and
+richness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling and
+painting.<a name="FNanchor_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45"><sup>[45]</sup></a>
+Analogies have been drawn between the <i>Medicean Faun</i> and
+the <i>St. Sebastian</i>, chiefly on account of the strained posi<a
+ name="Page_87"></a><a name="Page_88"></a>tion of
+the arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue and
+the painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance,
+notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laocoon
+in the world-famous group of the Vatican. Of this a model had been made
+by Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast
+was
+kept in Titian's workshop, from which he is said to have studied.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Design_for_a_Holy_Family"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 423px;"
+ alt="Design for a Holy Family. Chatsworth. From a photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment &amp; Cie."
+ title="Design for a Holy Family. Chatsworth. From a photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image28.jpg" /></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="La_Vierge_au_Lapin"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 418px;"
+ alt="La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by Neurdein."
+ title="La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by Neurdein."
+ src="images/image29.jpg" /></p>
+<p>In the <i>Madonna di S. Niccol&ograve;</i>, which was painted or
+rather finished in
+the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccol&ograve;
+de'
+Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is
+suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not
+extravagance
+of technique. The composition must have had much greater unity before
+the barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of the
+circular top which it had in common with the <i>Assunta</i>, the
+Ancona, and
+the Pesaro altar-pieces. Technically superior to the second of these
+great works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action and
+sentiment, by no such passionate identification of the artist with his
+subject. It is only in passing from one of its beauties to another that
+its artistic worth can be fully appreciated. Then we admire the rapt
+expression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the <i>St.
+Nicholas</i>,<a name="FNanchor_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46"><sup>[46]</sup></a>
+the mansuetude of the <i>St. Francis</i>, the Venetian
+loveliness of the <i>St. Catherine</i>, the palpitating life of the <i>St.
+Sebastian</i>. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump
+young gondolier stripped and painted as he was&#8212;contemplating, if
+anything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, <i>ritratto
+dal' vivo e senza artificio niuno</i>. The royal saint of Alexandria is
+a
+sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning
+elaboration of coiffure, to the <i>St. Catherine</i> of the <i>Madonna
+del
+Coniglio</i>, and the not dissimilar figure in our own <i>Holy Family
+with
+St. Catherine</i> at the National Gallery.</p>
+<p>The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with
+the
+infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in
+the
+Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge's private apartments to the Senate
+Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as
+we
+know, Titian's first performance as a <i>frescante</i> since the
+completion,
+twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of
+Padua.
+As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and
+brilliant in <a name="Page_90"></a><a name="Page_91"></a>colour for a
+fresco, very fairly preserved&#8212;deserving, in
+fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, the
+rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the
+subject
+is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of
+personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly
+transforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is
+greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened
+with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.
+Even the colossal, half-effaced <i>St. Christopher with the Infant
+Christ</i>, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the
+Town
+Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="St_Christopher"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 901px;"
+ alt="St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ title="St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari."
+ src="images/image30.jpg" /></p>
+<p>Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the
+<i>Entombment</i> of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other
+than
+altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded
+which belongs to the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i> among purely secular
+subjects? It was in 1523 that Titian acquired a new and illustrious
+patron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son
+of
+that most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d'Este
+Gonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara. The <i>Entombment</i> being
+a
+"Mantua piece,"<a name="FNanchor_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47"><sup>[47]</sup></a>
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally assumed
+that it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as
+some
+correspondence published by them goes to show, it must have been
+painted
+at, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523. Judging entirely by the
+style and technical execution of the canvas itself, the writer feels
+strongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years or
+thereabouts&#8212;that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closely
+following upon that in which the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>
+were painted. Mature as Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for the
+last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were
+saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type
+and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea
+has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the <a
+ name="Page_92"></a><i>Assunta</i>,
+the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such
+as we meet with in the <i>Bacchanal</i>. The Magdalen, with her
+features
+distorted by grief, resembles&#8212;allowing for the necessary differences
+imposed by the situation&#8212;the women making offering to the love-goddess
+in the <i>Worship of Venus</i>. The figure of the Virgin, on the other
+hand,
+enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a type
+which would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and his
+school. To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the
+<i>Entombment</i>, without by dissection killing it, is a task of
+difficulty.
+What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye and
+enthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, is
+perhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, of
+informing sentiment. Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection
+of
+the two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace&#8212;the
+well-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to
+accentuate
+the mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, bound
+together by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from them
+communicates itself, as it were, to the beholder. In the colouring,
+while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a
+whole,
+each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily asserting, its own
+splendour and its own special significance. And yet the yellow of the
+Magdalen's dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier the
+embrowned flesh of sturdy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson of
+Nicodemus's garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling white
+of the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of the
+Virgin's robe, combine less to produce the impression of great
+pictorial
+magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous
+tragedy.</p>
+<p>Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the
+Doge's
+chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about
+the altar,<a name="FNanchor_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48"><sup>[48]</sup></a>
+with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the
+kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the
+altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="The_Madonna_di_Casa_Pesaro"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 917px;"
+ alt="The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de' Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya."
+ title="The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de' Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya."
+ src="images/image31.jpg" /></p>
+<p>The <i>Madonna di Casa Pesaro</i>, which Titian finished in 1526,
+after
+having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the
+masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of
+exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at
+the
+<a name="Page_93"></a><a name="Page_95"></a>Frari, the <i>Assunta</i>.
+For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pomp
+and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite
+sufficient <i>vraisemblance</i>, of divine and sacred with real
+personages,
+it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its class. And yet,
+apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties
+overcome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole,
+many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than we
+should care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a more
+splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand.
+It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and
+less
+interesting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virgin
+and Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by an
+invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed
+crowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's
+<i>Castelfranco Madonna</i>, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud
+in
+their humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop
+of
+Paphos (Baffo), at their head. The natural tie that should unite the
+sacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power to
+impress, is thus greatly diminished, and we are dangerously near to a
+condition in which they become merely grand conventional figures in a
+decorative ensemble of the higher order. To analyse the general scheme
+or the details of the glorious colour-harmony, which has survived so
+many drastic renovations and cleanings, is not possible on this
+occasion, or indeed necessary. The magic of bold and subtle chiaroscuro
+is obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two gigantic
+pillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in the
+main, but illuminated above and below by the light emanating from the
+divine putti; the boldest feature in the scheme is the striking
+cinnamon-yellow mantle of St. Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, the
+two boldly contrasting with the magnificent dark-red and gold banner of
+the Borgias crowned with the olive branch Peace.<a name="FNanchor_49"></a><a
+ href="#Footnote_49"><sup>[49]</sup></a> This is an
+unexpected note of the most stimulating effect, which <a name="Page_96"></a>braces
+the
+spectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness. Thus, too, Titian
+went to work in the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>&#8212;giving forth a single
+clarion
+note in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos. The writer
+is unable to accept as from the master's own hand the unfinished <i>Virgin
+and Child</i> which, at the Uffizi, generally passes for the
+preliminary
+sketch of the central group in the Pesaro altar-piece. The original
+sketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in the
+Albertina at Vienna. The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds a
+like original study for the kneeling Baffo.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Sketch_for_the_Madonna"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 653px;"
+ alt="Sketch for the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Albertina, Vienna. From a photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment &amp; Cie."
+ title="Sketch for the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Albertina, Vienna. From a photograph by Braun, Cl&eacute;ment &amp; Cie."
+ src="images/image32.jpg" /></p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Martyrdom_of_St_Peter"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 864px;"
+ alt="Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving by Henri Laurent."
+ title="Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving by Henri Laurent."
+ src="images/image33.jpg" /></p>
+<p>By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the
+placing
+of Titian's world-renowned <i>Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican</i>
+on the
+altar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one
+of
+the most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity. On
+the 16th of August 1867&#8212;one of the blackest of days in the calendar for
+the lover of Venetian art&#8212;the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> was burnt in the
+Cappella del Rosario of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of
+Giovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the <i>Virgin and Child with
+Saints and Angels</i>, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had
+caused
+the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during
+the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Now
+the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their
+estimate of the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> from the numerous existing
+copies and
+prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the
+picture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal
+impression
+may, under the circumstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well be
+more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist by
+a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has
+conceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had the
+good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the
+marvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselle
+minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by
+the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape,
+in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance
+falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above&#8212;with its single
+startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore,
+with a certain <a name="Page_97"></a><a name="Page_98"></a>amount of
+reluctance that he ventures to own that the
+composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing,
+notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the
+overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and
+unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its
+Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing
+influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months
+at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who,
+returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had
+remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the
+exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of
+passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it
+culminated in the <i>Transfiguration</i>? All through the wonderful
+career of
+the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese <i>Entombment</i>, and going
+on
+through the <i>Spasimo di Sicilia</i> to the end, there is this
+tendency to
+consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a
+pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Much
+less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the <i>Stanze</i>
+and the <i>Cartoons</i>, in which true dramatic significance and the
+sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The
+<i>Transfiguration</i> itself is, however, the most crying example of
+the
+reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In it
+are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if we
+take them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two
+failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same
+frame.
+Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here
+stifled. In the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> the tremendous figure of the
+attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all
+fluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based on
+nothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied
+attitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In the
+same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in
+the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and
+conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing
+for
+the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all
+the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the <i>dramatis personae</i>
+of the gruesome scene&#8212;extraordinary facial expressiveness. An <a
+ name="Page_99"></a><a name="Page_101"></a>immense
+effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that
+can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must
+ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come face
+to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the <i>St.
+Sebastian</i> of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the
+magic
+of the painter <i>par excellence</i> would assert itself. Very
+curiously it
+is not any more less contemporary copy&#8212;least of all that by Ludovico
+Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo&#8212;that gives this impression that Titian in the original
+would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work.
+The
+best notion of the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> is, so far as the writer is
+aware,
+to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which
+hangs in the great hall of the &Eacute;cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
+Even
+through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties,
+especially
+in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without
+further carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and,
+criticism
+notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who,
+perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower
+rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be
+discovered in Venetian painting, described it as <i>la pi&ugrave;
+compiuta, la
+pi&ugrave; celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che
+altra, la
+quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto</i> (sic) <i>ancor mai</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Tobias_and_the_Angel"></a><img
+ style="width: 512px; height: 796px;"
+ alt="Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ title="Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson."
+ src="images/image34.jpg" /></p>
+<p>It was after a public competition between Titian, Palma, and
+Pordenone,
+instituted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the great
+commission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at
+the
+end of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. Of
+Pordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finished
+drawing of the <i>Martyrdom of St. Peter</i> in the Uffizi, which is
+either
+by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any
+rate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem in
+some respects, as compared with Titian's astonishing performance, it
+represents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime in
+its gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitely
+touching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, still
+asserts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to be
+preliminary sketches for the <i>St. Peter Martyr</i> are: a
+pen-and-ink
+sketch in the Louvre <a name="Page_102"></a>showing the assassin
+chasing the companion of the
+victim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at the
+saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet
+thumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actual
+massacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is the
+drawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives the
+impression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by
+Titian
+for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, <i>A Nobleman murdering his
+Wife</i>,
+which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the &Eacute;cole des
+Beaux-Arts
+of Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writer
+feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of Titian
+himself.<a name="FNanchor_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50"><sup>[50]</sup></a></p>
+<br />
+<p style="font-weight: bold;">NOTES:</p>
+<a name="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1">[1]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's
+Bilder zu R&ouml;mischen Heldengedichten" (<i>Jahrbuch der
+K&ouml;niglich
+Preussischen Kunstsammlungen</i>: Sechzehnter Band, I. Heft) has most
+ingeniously, and upon what may be deemed solid grounds, renamed this
+most Giorgionesque of all Giorgiones after an incident in the <i>Thebaid</i>
+of Statius, <i>Adrastus and Hypsipyle</i>. He gives reasons which may
+be
+accepted as convincing for entitling the <i>Three Philosophers</i>,
+after a
+familiar incident in Book viii. of the <i>Aeneid</i>, "Aeneas,
+Evander, and
+Pallas contemplating the Rock of the Capitol." His not less ingenious
+explanation of Titian's <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i> will be dealt
+with a
+little later on. These identifications are all-important, not only in
+connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first
+time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of
+Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of
+the Venetian idyll generally.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2">[2]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto's
+portraits and a sustained analysis of his art generally, Mr. Bernard
+Berenson's <i>Lorenzo Lotto</i> should be consulted. See also M. Emile
+Michel's article, "Les Portraits de Lorenzo Lotto," in the <i>Gazette
+des
+Beaux Arts</i>, 1896, vol. i.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3">[3]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> For these and other particulars of the childhood of Titian,
+see Crowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>
+(second edition, 1881), in which are carefully summarised all the
+general and local authorities on the subject.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4">[4]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol. i. p. 29.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5">[5]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Die Galerien zu M&uuml;nchen und Dresden</i>, p. 75.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6">[6]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian
+school of art than as a Venetian painter of the late time) expressly
+states that Palma came young to Venice and learnt much from Titan: "<i>C'
+egli apprese certa dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere
+prime
+dello stesso Tiziano</i>" (Lermolieff: <i>Die Galerien zu M&uuml;nchen
+und
+Dresden</i>).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7">[7]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Vasari, <i>Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco</i>.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8">[8]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> One of these is a description of wedding festivities
+presided over by the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other
+guests from the capital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and
+three ladies. This gentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell
+upon, and embroider in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the
+love of man for woman. A subject this which, transposed into an
+atmosphere at once more frankly sensuous and of a higher spirituality,
+might well have served as the basis for such a picture as Giorgione's
+<i>F&ecirc;te Champ&ecirc;tre</i> in the Salon Carr&eacute; of the
+Louvre!</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9">[9]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Magazine of Art</i>, July 1895.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10">[10]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol. i. p. 111.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11">[11]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects,
+taken after his execution, as <i>Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo
+(Borgia) his son</i>.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12">[12]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>La Vie et l'Oeuvre du Titien</i>, 1887.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13">[13]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the
+picture, "Ritratto di uno di Casa Pesaro in Venetia che fu fatto
+generale di Sta chiesa. Titiano fecit," is unquestionably of much later
+date than the work itself. The cartellino is entirely out of
+perspective
+with the marble floor to which it is supposed to adhere. The part of
+the
+background showing the galleys of Pesaro's fleet is so coarsely
+repainted that the original touch cannot be distinguished. The form
+"Titiano" is not to be found in any authentic picture by Vecelli.
+"Ticianus," and much more rarely "Tician," are the forms for the
+earlier
+time; "Titianus" is, as a rule, that of the later time. The two forms
+overlap in certain instances to be presently mentioned.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14">[14]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Kugler's <i>Italian Schools of Painting</i>, re-edited by Sir
+Henry Layard.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15">[15]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Marcantonio Michiel, who saw this <i>Baptism</i> in the year
+1531 in the house of M. Zuanne Ram at S. Stefano in Venice, thus
+describes it: "La tavola del S. Zuane che battezza Cristo nel Giordano,
+che &egrave; nel fiume insino alle ginocchia, con el bel paese, ed esso
+M.
+Zuanne Ram ritratto sino al cinto, e con la schena contro li
+spettatori,
+fu de man de Tiziano" (<i>Notizia d' Opere di Disegno</i>, pubblicata
+da J.
+Jacopo Morelli, Ed. Frizzoni, 1884).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16">[16]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> This picture having been brought to completion in 1510,
+and Cima's great altar-piece with the same subject, behind the
+high-altar in the Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being
+dated 1494, the inference is irresistible that in this case the head of
+the school borrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has
+always been looked upon as one of his close followers. In size, in
+distribution, in the arrangement and characterisation of the chief
+groups, the two altar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a
+merely accidental and family resemblance must be dismissed. This type
+of
+Christ, then, of a perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness
+tempering
+majesty, dates back, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred
+type of the elder master is more passionate, more human. Our own
+<i>Incredulity of St. Thomas</i>, by Cima, in the National Gallery,
+shows, in
+a much more perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the
+beautiful <i>Man of Sorrows</i> in the same collection, still
+nominally
+ascribed to Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any
+rate from that of an artist dominated by his influence. When the
+life-work of the Conegliano master has been more closely studied in
+connection with that of his contemporaries, it will probably appear
+that
+he owes very much less to Bellini than it has been the fashion to
+assume. The idea of an actual subordinate co-operation with the
+<i>caposcuola</i>, like that of Bissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so
+many
+others, must be excluded. The earlier and more masculine work of Cima
+bears a definite relation to that of Bartolommeo Montagna.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17">[17]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The <i>Tobias and the Angel</i> shows some curious points of
+contact with the large <i>Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John</i>
+by Titian, in the Louvre&#8212;a work which is far from equalling the S.
+Marciliano picture throughout in quality. The beautiful head of the St.
+Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John,
+though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type and
+movement of the head. There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice a
+kind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano Titian,
+assigned by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini to
+Santo Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432). Here the adapter
+has ruined Titian's great conception by substituting his own trivial
+archangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copy
+of this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich). A reproduction of
+the Titian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of the
+present monograph (p. 99).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18">[18]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Vasari places the <i>Three Ages</i> after the first visit to
+Ferrara, that is almost as much too late as he places the <i>Tobias</i>
+of S.
+Marciliano too early. He describes its subject as "un pastore ignudo ed
+una forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni."</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19">[19]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> From an often-cited passage in the <i>Anonimo</i>, describing
+Giorgione's great <i>Venus</i> now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year
+1525,
+when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn that
+it was finished by Titian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda,
+che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo da
+Castelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." The
+Cupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but the
+landscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance
+to
+those which enframe the figures in the <i>Three Ages, Sacred and
+Profane
+Love</i>, and the "<i>Noli me tangere</i>" of the National Gallery. The
+same
+<i>Anonimo</i> in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice
+a
+<i>Dead Christ supported by an Angel</i>, from the hand of Giorgone,
+which,
+according to him, had been retouched by Titian. It need hardly be
+pointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing in
+common with the coarse and thoroughly second-rate <i>Dead Christ
+supported
+by Child-Angels,</i> still to be seen at the Monte di Piet&agrave; of
+Treviso. The
+engraving of a <i>Dead Christ supported by an Angel</i>, reproduced in
+M.
+Lafenestre's <i>Vie et Oeuvre du Titien</i> as having possibly been
+derived
+from Giorgione's original, is about as unlike his work or that of
+Titian
+as anything in sixteenth-century Italian art could possibly be. In the
+extravagance of its mannerism it comes much nearer to the late style of
+Pordenone or to that of his imitators.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20">[20]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen</i>, Heft I.
+1895.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21">[21]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the <i>Notizia
+d' Opere di Disegno</i>, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione
+Frizzoni, 1884.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22">[22]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> M. Thausing, <i>Wiener Kunstbriefe</i>, 1884.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23">[23]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Le Meraviglie dell' Arte</i>.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24">[24]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The original drawing by Titian for the subject of this
+fresco is to be found among those publicly exhibited at the
+&Eacute;cole des
+Beaux Arts of Paris. It is in error given by Morelli as in the Malcolm
+Collection, and curiously enough M. Georges Lafenestre repeats this
+error in his <i>Vie et Oeuvre du Titien.</i> The drawing differs so
+essentially from the fresco that it can only be considered as a
+discarded design for it. It is in the style which Domenico Campagnola,
+in his Giorgionesque-Titianesque phase, so assiduously imitates.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25">[25]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of
+Titian is to speak of the <i>St. Mark</i> as "una piccola tavoletta,
+un S.
+Marco a sedere in mezzo a certi santi."</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26">[26]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> In connection with this group of works, all of them
+belonging to the quite early years of the sixteenth century, there
+should also be mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet
+little known <i>Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist</i> by
+Sebastiano Luciani, bearing the date 1510. This has recently passed
+into
+the rich collection of Mr. George Salting. It shows the painter
+admirably in his purely Giorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing
+witness that it was painted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco
+master. It groups therefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at
+S. Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook's injured but
+still lovely <i>Venetian Lady as the Magdalen</i> (the same ruddy
+blond
+model), and with the four Giorgionesque <i>Saints</i> in the Church of
+S.
+Bartolommeo al Rialto.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27">[27]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <i>Die Galerien zu M&uuml;nchen und Dresden</i>, p. 74.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28">[28]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The <i>Christ</i> of the Pitti Gallery&#8212;a bust-figure of the
+Saviour, relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most
+solemn beauty&#8212;must date a good many years after the <i>Cristo della
+Moneta</i>. In both works the beauty of the hand is especially
+remarkable.
+The head of the Pitti <i>Christ</i> in its present state might not
+conclusively proclaim its origin; but the pathetic and intensely
+significant landscape is one of Titian's loveliest.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29">[29]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the
+Royal Academy in 1895.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30">[30]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> An ingenious suggestion was made, when the <i>Ariosto</i> was
+last publicly exhibited, that it might be that <i>Portrait of a
+Gentleman
+of the House of Barbarigo</i> which, according to Vasari, Titian
+painted
+with wonderful skill at the age of eighteen. The broad, masterly
+technique of the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with
+Vasari's description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no
+boy of eighteen, not even Titian, could have attained. And then
+Vasari's
+"giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-grey
+sleeve of this <i>Ariosto</i>, but surely a vest of satin embroidered
+with
+silver. The late form of signature, "Titianus F.," on the stone
+balustrade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of the
+portrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition. It seems
+likely that the balustrade bore originally only the "V" repeated, which
+curiously enough occurs also on the similar balustrade of the beautiful
+<i>Portrait of a young Venetian</i>, by Giorgione, first cited as such
+by
+Morelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it passed from the
+collection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P. Richter. The signature
+"Ticianus"
+occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the
+first
+period. The works in the earlier half of this first period do not
+appear
+to have been signed, the "Titiano F." of the <i>Baffo</i> inscription
+being
+admittedly of later date. Thus that the <i>Cristo della Moneta</i>
+bears the
+"Ticianus F." on the collar of the Pharisee's shirt is an additional
+argument in favour of maintaining its date as originally given by
+Vasari
+(1514), instead of putting it back to 1508 or thereabouts. Among a good
+many other paintings with this last signature may be mentioned the
+<i>Jeune Homme au Gant</i> and <i>Vierge au Lapin</i> of the Louvre;
+the <i>Madonna
+with St. Anthony Abbot</i> of the Uffizi; the <i>Bacchus and Ariadne</i>,
+the
+<i>Assunta</i>, the <i>St. Sebastian</i> of Brescia (dated 1522). The <i>Virgin
+and
+Child with St. Catherine</i> of the National Gallery, and the <i>Christ
+with
+the Pilgrims at Emmaus</i> of the Louvre&#8212;neither of them early
+works&#8212;are
+signed "Tician." The usual signature of the later time is "Titianus
+F.,"
+among the first works to show it being the Ancona altar-piece and the
+great <i>Madonna di San Niccol&ograve;</i> now in the Pinacoteca of
+the Vatican. It
+has been incorrectly stated that the late <i>St. Jerome</i> of the
+Brera
+bears the earlier signature, "Ticianus F." This is not the case. The
+signature is most distinctly "Titianus," though in a somewhat unusual
+character.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31">[31]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Crowe and Cavalcaselle describe it as a "picture which has
+not its equal in any period of Giorgione's practice" (<i>History of
+Painting in North Italy</i>, vol. ii.).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32">[32]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Among other notable portraits belonging to this early
+period, but to which within it the writer hesitates to assign an exact
+place, are the so-called <i>Titian's Physician Parma</i>, No. 167 in
+the
+Vienna Gallery; the first-rate <i>Portrait of a Young Man</i> (once
+falsely
+named <i>Pietro Aretino</i>), No. 1111 in the Alte Pinakothek of
+Munich; the
+so-called <i>Alessandro de' Medici</i> in the Hampton Court Gallery.
+The
+last-named portrait is a work injured, no doubt, but of extraordinary
+force and conciseness in the painting, and of no less singular power in
+the characterisation of a sinister personage whose true name has not
+yet
+been discovered.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33">[33]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The fifth <i>Allegory</i>, representing a sphinx or
+chimaera&#8212;now framed with the rest as the centre of an ensemble&#8212;is from
+another and far inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions.
+The so-called <i>Venus</i> of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is,
+notwithstanding the signature of Bellini and the date (MDXV.), by
+Bissolo.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34">[34]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> In Bellini's share in the landscape there is not a little
+to remind the beholder of the <i>Death of St. Peter Martyr</i> to be
+found in
+the Venetian room of the National Gallery, where it is still assigned
+to
+the great master himself, though it is beyond reasonable doubt by one
+of
+his late pupils or followers.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35">[35]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The enlarged second edition, with the profile portrait of
+Ariosto by Titian, did not appear until 1532. Among the additions then
+made were the often-quoted lines in which the poet, enumerating the
+greatest painters of the time, couples Titian with Leonardo, Andrea
+Mantegna, Gian Bellino, the two Dossi, Michelangelo, Sebastiano, and
+Raffael (33rd canto, 2nd ed.).</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36">[36]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> <span lang="el" title="Philostratou Eikonon Erotes.">&#934;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#963;&#964;&#961;&#945;&#964;&#959;&#965;
+&#917;&#953;&#954;&#959;&#957;&#969;&#957; &#917;&#961;&#969;&#964;&#949;&#962;</span></p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37">[37]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Let the reader, among other things of the kind, refer to
+Rubens's <i>Jardin &agrave; Amour</i>, made familiar by so many
+repetitions and
+reproductions, and to Van Dyck's <i>Madone aux Perdrix</i> at the
+Hermitage
+(see Portfolio: <i>The Collections of Charles I.</i>). Rubens copied,
+indeed,
+both the <i>Worship of Venus</i> and the <i>Bacchanal</i>, some time
+between 1601
+and 1608, when the pictures were at Rome. These copies are now in the
+Museum at Stockholm. The realistic vigour of the <i>Bacchanal</i>
+proved
+particularly attractive to the Antwerp master, and he in more than one
+instance derived inspiration from it. The ultra-realistic <i>Bacchus
+seated on a Barrel</i>, in the Gallery of the Hermitage at St.
+Petersburg,
+contains in the chief figure a pronounced reminiscence of Titian's
+picture; while the unconventional attitude of the amorino, or Bacchic
+figure, in attendance on the god, is imitated without alteration from
+that of the little toper whose action Vasari so explicitly describes.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38">[38]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Vasari's simple description is best: "Una donna nuda che
+dorme, tanto bella che pare viva, insieme con altre figure."</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39">[39]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Moritz Thausing's <i>Albrecht D&uuml;rer</i>, Zweiter Band, p. 14.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40">[40]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Crowe and Cavalcaselle, <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol.
+i. p. 212.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41">[41]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> It appears to the writer that this masterpiece of colour
+and reposeful charm, with its wonderful gleams of orange, pale
+turquoise, red, blue, and golden white, with its early signature,
+"Ticianus F.," should be placed not later than this period. Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle assign it to the year 1530, and hold it to be the <i>Madonna
+with St. Catherine</i>, mentioned in a letter of that year written by
+Giacomo Malatesta to Federigo Gonzaga at Mantua. Should not this last
+picture be more properly identified with our own superb <i>Madonna and
+Child with St. John and St. Catherine</i>, No. 635 in the National
+Gallery,
+the style of which, notwithstanding the rather Giorgionesque type of
+the
+girlish Virgin, shows further advance in a more sweeping breadth and a
+larger generalisation? The latter, as has already been noted, is signed
+"Tician."</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42">[42]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> "Tizian und Alfons von Este," <i>Jahrbuch der K&ouml;niglich
+Preussischen Kunstsammlungen</i>, F&uuml;nfzehnter Band, II. Heft, 1894.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43">[43]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Crowe and Cavalcaselle, <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol.
+i. pp. 237-240.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44">[44]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> On the circular base of the column upon which the
+warrior-saint rests his foot is the signature "Ticianus faciebat
+MDXXII." This, taken in conjunction with the signature "Titianus" on
+the
+Ancona altar-piece painted in 1520, tends to show that the line of
+demarcation between the two signatures cannot be absolutely fixed.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45">[45]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Lord Wemyss possesses a repetition, probably from Titian's
+workshop, of the <i>St. Sebastian</i>, slightly smaller than the
+Brescia
+original. This cannot have been the picture catalogued by Vanderdoort
+as
+among Charles I.'s treasures, since the latter, like the earliest
+version of the <i>St. Sebastian</i>, preceding the definitive work,
+showed
+the saint tied not to a tree, but to a column, and in it the group of
+St. Roch and the Angel was replaced by the figures of two archers
+shooting.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46">[46]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Ridolfi, followed in this particular by Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, sees in the upturned face of the <i>St. Nicholas</i> a
+reflection of that of Laocoon in the Vatican group.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47">[47]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> It passed with the rest of the Mantua pictures into the
+collection of Charles I., and was after his execution sold by the
+Commonwealth to the banker and dealer Jabach for &pound;120. By the
+latter it
+was made over to Louis XIV., together with many other masterpieces
+acquired in the same way.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48">[48]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> Crowe and Cavalcaselle, <i>Life and Times of Titian</i>, vol.
+i. pp. 298, 299.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49">[49]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> The victory over the Turks here commemorated was won by
+Baffo in the service of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI., some
+twenty-three years before. This gives a special significance to the
+position in the picture of St. Peter, who, with the keys at his feet,
+stands midway between the Bishop and the Virgin. We have seen Baffo in
+one of Titian's earliest works (<i>circa</i> 1503) recommended to St.
+Peter
+by Alexander VI. just before his departure for this same expedition.</p>
+</div>
+<a name="Footnote_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50">[50]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> It has been impossible in the first section of these
+remarks upon the work of the master of Cadore to go into the very
+important question of the drawings rightly and wrongly ascribed to him.
+Some attempt will be made in the second section, to be entitled <i>The
+Later Work of Titian</i>, to deal summarily with this branch of the
+subject, which has been placed on a more solid basis since Giovanni
+Morelli disentangled the genuine landscape drawings of the master from
+those of Domenico Campagnola, and furnished a firm basis for further
+study.</p>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+<ul>
+  <li>"Alfonso d'Este and Laura Dianti" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_52">52</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_82">82</a>-<a href="#Page_84">84</a></li>
+  <li><a name="Altar_piece_at_Brescia"></a>Altar-piece at Brescia, <a
+ href="#Page_84">84</a>-<a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+  <li>"Annunciation, The" (Treviso), <a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+  <li>"Annunciation, The" (Venice), <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+  <li>"Aretino, Portrait of" (Florence), <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Ariosto, Portrait of" (Cobham Hall), <a href="#Page_27">27</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+  <li>"Assumption of the Virgin, The," <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_73">73</a>-<a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Bacchanal, A," <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a></li>
+  <li>"Bacchus and Ariadne" (National Gallery), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+  <li>"Baptism of Christ, The" (Rome), <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+  <li>"Battle of Cadore, The," <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+  <li>"Bella, La" (Florence), <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Bishop of Paphos recommended by Alexander VI. to St. Peter, The"
+(Antwerp), <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Christ at Emmaus," <a href="#Page_10">10</a></li>
+  <li>"Christ bearing the Cross" (Venice), <a href="#Page_26">26</a></li>
+  <li>"Christ between St. Andrew and St. Catherine" (Venice), <a
+ href="#Page_26">26</a></li>
+  <li>"Charles V. at M&uuml;hlberg" (Madrid), <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Concert, A" (Florence), <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a></li>
+  <li>"Cornaro, Portrait of" (Castle Howard), <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+  <li>"<a name="Cristo_della_Moneta_Il"></a>Cristo della Moneta, Il"
+(Dresden), <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_55">55</a>-<a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Death of St. Peter Martyr, The," <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_96">96</a>-<a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+  <li>"Diana and Actaeon," <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+  <li>"Diana and Calisto," <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Entombment, The" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Feast of the Gods, The" (Alnwick Castle), <a href="#Page_66">66</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+  <li>"Flora" (Florence), <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+  <li>Fresco of St. Christopher in the Doge's Palace, <a
+ href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+  <li>Frescoes in the Scuola del Santo, Padua, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+  <li>Frescoes on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, Venice, <a href="#Page_28">28</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Herodias," <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+  <li>"Holy Family" (Bridgewater Gallery), <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+  <li>"Holy Family with St. Catherine" (National Gallery), <a
+ href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"<a name="Jupiter_and_Antiope"></a>Jupiter and Antiope" (Louvre),
+    <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Madonna di Casa Pesaro, The" (Venice), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+  <li>"Madonna di San Niccol&ograve;, The" (Rome), <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+  <li>"Man, Portrait of a" (Munich), <a href="#Page_27">27</a></li>
+  <li>"Man in Black, The" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Man of Sorrows, The" (Venice), <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li>
+  <li>"Man with the Glove, The" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+  <li>"Medici, Portrait of Ippolito de'," <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Noli me tangere" (National Gallery), <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+  <li>"Nymph and Shepherd" (Vienna), <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Philip II., Portrait of," <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+  <li>"Piet&agrave;" (Milan), <a href="#Page_6">6</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Rape of Europa, The," <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Sacred and Profane Love" (Rome), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+  <li>"Sacred Conversation, A" (Chantilly), <a href="#Page_18">18</a></li>
+  <li>"Sacred Conversation, A" (Florence), <a href="#Page_6">6</a></li>
+  <li>"St. Mark enthroned, with four other Saints" (Venice), <a
+ href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+  <li>"St. Sebastian": see <i><a href="#Altar_piece_at_Brescia">Altar-piece
+at Brescia</a></i></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Tambourine-Player, The" (Vienna), <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+  <li>"Three Ages, The" (Bridgewater Gallery), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>-<a href="#Page_35">35</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+  <li>"Tobias and the Angel" (Venice), <a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+  <li>"Tribute-Money, The": see <i><a href="#Cristo_della_Moneta_Il">Cristo
+della Moneta</a></i></li>
+  <li>"Triumph of Faith, The," <a href="#Page_42">42</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_44">44</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Vanitas" (Munich), <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li>
+  <li>"Venere del Pardo": see <i><a href="#Jupiter_and_Antiope">Jupiter
+and Antiope</a></i></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child" (Mr. R.H. Benson), <a href="#Page_25">25</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child" (Florence), <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child" (St. Petersburg), <a href="#Page_24">24</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child" (Vienna): see <i><a href="#Zingarella_La">Zingarella,
+La</a></i></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with Saints" (Captain Holford), <a
+ href="#Page_25">25</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with four Saints" (Dresden), <a href="#Page_20">20</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_55">55</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot"
+(Florence), <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd" (National
+Gallery), <a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with Saints, Angels, and a Donor" (Ancona), <a
+ href="#Page_84">84</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with SS. Stephen, Ambrose, and Maurice"
+(Louvre), <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin and Child with SS. Ulphus and Bridget" (Madrid), <a
+ href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin with the Cherries, The" (Vienna), <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+  <li>"Virgin with the Rabbit, The" (Louvre), <a href="#Page_82">82</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"Worship of Venus, The" (Madrid), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>-<a href="#Page_72">72</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_92">92</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<ul>
+  <li>"<a name="Zingarella_La"></a>Zingarella, La" (Vienna), <a
+ href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+</ul>
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN***</p>
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@@ -0,0 +1,3404 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Earlier Work of Titian, by Claude Phillips
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Earlier Work of Titian
+
+Author: Claude Phillips
+
+Release Date: June 15, 2004  [eBook #12626]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Wilelmina Malliere, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 12626-h.htm or 12626-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/2/12626/12626-h/12626-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/2/12626/12626-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN
+
+By
+
+CLAUDE PHILLIPS
+
+Keeper of the Wallace Collection
+
+1897
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _Flora_]
+
+
+[Illustration: The Portfolio Artistic Monographs With many
+Illustrations]
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+PLATES
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+Flora. Uffizi Gallery, Florence .......................    Frontispiece
+
+Sacred and Profane Love. Borghese Gallery, Rome..................... 36
+
+Virgin and Child, with Saints. Louvre............................... 54
+
+Le Jeune Homme au Gant. Louvre...................................... 62
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS PRINTED IN COLOUR
+
+Design for a Holy Family. Chatsworth................................ 86
+
+Sketch for the Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Albertina.................... 96
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
+
+The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice............... 23
+
+Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." Imperial Gallery, Vienna 25
+
+The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome................. 29
+
+The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery ................................ 35
+
+Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria Gallery, Rome..... 39
+
+Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.................................... 41
+
+St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak. Fresco in the
+Scuola del Santo, Padua............................................. 43
+
+"Noli me tangere." National Gallery................................. 45
+
+St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della Salute, Venice. 49
+
+The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna............. 51
+
+PAGE
+Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot. Uffizi Gallery,
+  Florence.........................................................  53
+
+St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the Stag. British
+Museum ............................................................  55
+
+The "Cristo della Moneta." Dresden Gallery.........................  57
+
+Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery...............  59
+
+A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence..............  63
+
+Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.........................  65
+
+Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court...................  67
+
+The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid........................  71
+
+The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice....................  75
+
+The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso.............................  79
+
+Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery..............................  81
+
+St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS. Nazzaro e Celso,
+Brescia............................................................. 85
+
+La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre.........................................  87
+
+St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge's Palace,
+Venice ............................................................  89
+
+The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria dei Frari, Venice...  93
+
+Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican...............................  97
+
+Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice........................  99
+
+
+
+
+THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+There is no greater name in Italian art--therefore no greater in
+art--than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high
+as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so
+mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil
+them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect
+balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael
+an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is
+wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the
+poet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than any
+one of these. Titian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, nor
+the most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, even
+of his time and country. Yet is it possible, remembering the
+_Entombment_ of the Louvre, the _Assunta_, the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_,
+the _St. Peter Martyr_, to say that he has, take him all in all, been
+surpassed in this the highest branch of his art? Certainly nowhere else
+have the pomp and splendour of the painter's achievement at its apogee
+been so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly ever
+overstepping the bounds of nature. The sacred art of no other painter of
+the full sixteenth century--not even that of Raphael himself--has to an
+equal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of the
+world, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred passion
+must perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is not
+necessarily a distortion of truth.
+
+And then as a portraitist--we are dealing, be it remembered, with
+Italian art only--there must be conceded to him the first place, as a
+limner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner in
+his secret heart for some other master. One will remember the
+disquieting power, the fascination in the true sense of the word, of
+Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on
+occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the
+Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del
+Piombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic
+truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of
+Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective
+and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate the
+other. Yet another will cite the lofty melancholy, the aristocratic
+charm of the Brescian Moretto, or the marvellous power of the
+Bergamasque Moroni to present in their natural union, with no
+indiscretion of over-emphasis, the spiritual and physical elements which
+go to make up that mystery of mysteries, the human individuality. There
+is, however, no advocate of any of these great masters who, having
+vaunted the peculiar perfections in portraiture of his own favourite,
+will not end--with a sigh perhaps--by according the palm to Titian.
+
+In landscape his pre-eminence is even more absolute and unquestioned. He
+had great precursors here, but no equal; and until Claude Lorrain long
+afterwards arose, there appeared no successor capable, like himself, of
+expressing the quintessence of Nature's most significant beauties
+without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.
+Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had,
+unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, and
+the Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesque
+influence, the true gift of the landscape-painter. Atmospheric
+conditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions;
+and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity of
+the landscape in the great _Pieta_ of the Brera, the ominous sunset in
+our own _Agony in the Garden_ of the National Gallery, the cheerful
+all-pervading glow of the beautiful little _Sacred Conversation_ at the
+Uffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late _Baptism of Christ_ in
+the Church of S. Corona at Vicenza. To attempt a discussion of the
+landscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as well
+as the most fascinating of subjects--so various is it even in the few
+well-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument of
+expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of
+his personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione--judging it from
+such unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of
+Castelfranco, the so-called _Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the
+Soldier_[1] in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called _Three
+Philosophers_ in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--has in it still a
+slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection. It
+was reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullest
+development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the _Three Ages_ and
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_. Then all himself, and with hardly a rival
+in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of
+earth and sky which enframe the figures in the _Worship of Venus_, the
+_Bacchanal_, and, above all, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_; to give back his
+impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty
+which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred
+Conversations. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the _St.
+Peter Martyr_, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic
+amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.
+The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be
+said to exist in the late _Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo)_ of
+the Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose and
+Giorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late _Rape of Europa_, the
+bold sweep and the rainbow hues of the landscape in which recall the
+much earlier _Bacchus and Ariadne_. In the exquisite _Shepherd and
+Nymph_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--a masterpiece in monotone of
+quite the last period--the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque time
+reappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, as
+in the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by that
+solemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the final
+years of Titian's old age.
+
+Thus, though there cannot be claimed for Titian that universality in art
+and science which the lovers of Leonardo's painting must ever deplore,
+since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of scope
+of Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht Duerer;
+it must be seen that as a _painter_ he covered more ground than any
+first-rate master of the sixteenth century. While in more than one
+branch of the painter's art he stood forth supreme and without a rival,
+in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorial
+decorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his younger
+rivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves more
+practised and more successfully daring in this particular branch.
+
+To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, such
+parallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must go
+to Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or had
+been, the great merchant city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly be
+styled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian
+predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was during
+the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle of
+supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer period
+during the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation of
+those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned
+them; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as an
+accessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who,
+in his greatest efforts--those sumptuous and almost truculent _portraits
+d'apparat_ of princes, nobles, and splendid dames--knew no superior,
+though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and
+Velazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more
+demonstrative, a seemingly closer embrace, drawing from the contact a
+more exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness some
+of the stain of earth. Titian, though he was at least as genuine a
+realist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mere
+outsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which was
+everywhere--in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home of
+his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art had
+ever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine
+harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion, that
+distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art that
+is not Italian.
+
+The relation of the two masters--both of them in the first line of the
+world's painters--was much that of Venice to Antwerp. The apogee of each
+city in its different way represented the highest point that modern
+Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as
+distinguished from mental culture. But then Venice was wrapped in the
+transfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering above
+the rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains,
+the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region. Reality, with
+all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality. But
+it was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the method
+of presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could
+add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the
+splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the
+genuine naturalness of such a mode of life. Art itself could only add to
+it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the
+colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression to
+the beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charm
+of the people. This is what Titian, supreme among his contemporaries of
+the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which,
+in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek
+for a parallel.
+
+Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly enlist
+our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in some
+special branch of their art; yet, after all, we find ourselves
+invariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them--taking _him_ as
+the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries and
+successors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may be,
+combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his
+creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has
+never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then
+Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the
+poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a
+higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been
+able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so
+incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of
+a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme
+limits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great
+_Madonna del Carmelo_ at the Venice Academy and the magnificent
+_Trinity_ in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near Udine may
+be taken to prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms
+to the painter of the _Assunta_, the _Entombment_ and the _Christ at
+Emmaus_? Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of illumination,
+a Titanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit and
+placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not
+altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in art.
+All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between the
+two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, even
+though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive the
+supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred
+drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A not
+dissimilar comparison might be instituted between the portraits of
+Lorenzo Lotto and those of our master. No Venetian painter of the golden
+prime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him,
+while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individuality
+submitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his own
+tremulous sensitiveness and charm. In this way no portraits of the
+sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in
+deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar
+temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical and mental
+characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.[2]
+
+Yet where is the critic bold enough to place even the finest of these
+exquisite productions on the same level as _Le Jeune Homme au Gant_ and
+_L'Homme en Noir_ of the Louvre, the _Ippolito de' Medici_, the _Bella
+di Tiziano_, the _Aretino_ of the Pitti, the _Charles V. at the Battle
+of Muehlberg_ and the full-length _Philip II._ of the Prado Museum at
+Madrid?
+
+Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that Titian has
+serious rivals in those Veronese developed into Venetians, the two elder
+Bonifazi and Paolo Veronese; that is, there will be found lovers of
+painting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours in
+frank juxtaposition to a palette relatively restricted, used with an art
+more subtle, if less dazzling than theirs, and resulting in a deeper,
+graver richness, a more significant beauty, if in a less stimulating
+gaiety and variety of aspect. No less a critic than Morelli himself
+pronounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliant
+colourist of the Venetian school; and the _Dives and Lazarus_ of the
+Venice Academy, the _Finding of Moses_ at the Brera are at hand to give
+solid support to such an assertion.
+
+In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be the
+greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be
+found in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinal
+principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors--painters such
+as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri,
+Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci--Caliari
+dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as
+well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors,
+however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing the
+abruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing and
+tempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural masses of a vibrant
+grey and large depths of cool dark shadow--brown shot through with
+silver. No other Venetian master could have painted the _Mystic Marriage
+of St. Catherine_ in the church of that name at Venice, the _Allegory
+on the Victory of Lepanto_ in the Palazzo Ducale, or the vast _Nozze di
+Cana_ of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it is in one
+sense a step in advance even of Giorgione, Titian, Palma, and Paris
+Bordone--constituting as it does more particularly a further development
+of painting from the purely decorative standpoint--must appear just a
+little superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the nobler,
+graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods of
+Titian. With him, as with Giorgione, and, indeed, with Tintoretto,
+colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was to
+give a realisation, at once splendid and penetrating in its truth, of
+the subject presented; and colour in accordance with the true Venetian
+principle was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the very
+body and soul of painting--as what it is, indeed, in Nature.
+
+To put forward Paolo Veronese as merely the dazzling virtuoso would all
+the same be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art.
+He can rise as high in dramatic passion and pathos as the greatest of
+them all, when he is in the vein; but these are precisely the occasions
+on which he most resolutely subordinates his colour to his subject and
+makes the most poetic use of chiaroscuro; as in the great altar-piece
+_The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ in the church of that name, the too
+little known _St. Francis receiving the Stigmata_ on a ceiling
+compartment of the Academy of Arts at Vienna, and the wonderful
+_Crucifixion_ which not many years ago was brought down from the
+sky-line of the Long Gallery in the Louvre, and placed, where it
+deserves to be, among the masterpieces. And yet in this last piece the
+colour is not only in a singular degree interpretative of the subject,
+but at the same time technically astonishing--with certain subtleties of
+unusual juxtaposition and modulation, delightful to the craftsman, which
+are hardly seen again until we come to the latter half of the present
+century. So that here we have the great Veneto-Veronese master escaping
+altogether from our theory, and showing himself at one and the same time
+profoundly moving, intensely significant, and admirably decorative in
+colour. Still what was with him the splendid exception was with Titian,
+and those who have been grouped with Titian, the guiding rule of art.
+Though our master remains, take him all in all, the greatest of Venetian
+colourists, he never condescends to vaunt all that he knows, or to
+select his subjects as a groundwork for bravura, even the most
+legitimate. He is the greatest painter of the sixteenth century, just
+because, being the greatest colourist of the higher order, and in
+legitimate mastery of the brush second to none, he makes the worthiest
+use of his unrivalled accomplishment, not merely to call down the
+applause due to supreme pictorial skill and the victory over self-set
+difficulties, but, above all, to give the fullest and most legitimate
+expression to the subjects which he presents, and through them to
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Cadore and Venice--Early Giorgionesque works up to the date of the
+residence in Padua--New interpretations of Giorgione's and Titian's
+pictures.
+
+
+Tiziano Vecelli was born in or about the year 1477 at Pieve di Cadore, a
+district of the southern Tyrol then belonging to the Republic of Venice,
+and still within the Italian frontier. He was the son of Gregorio di
+Conte Vecelli by his wife Lucia, his father being descended from an
+ancient family of the name of Guecello (or Vecellio), established in the
+valley of Cadore. An ancestor, Ser Guecello di Tommasro da Pozzale, had
+been elected Podesta of Cadore as far back as 1321.[3] The name Tiziano
+would appear to have been a traditional one in the family. Among others
+we find a contemporary Tiziano Vecelli, who is a lawyer of note
+concerned in the administration of Cadore, keeping up a kind of
+obsequious friendship with his famous cousin at Venice. The Tizianello
+who, in 1622, dedicated to the Countess of Arundel an anonymous Life of
+Titian known as Tizianello's _Anonimo_, and died at Venice in 1650, was
+Titian's cousin thrice removed.
+
+Gregorio Vecelli was a valiant soldier, distinguished for his bravery in
+the field and his wisdom in the council of Cadore, but not, it may be
+assumed, possessed of wealth or, in a poor mountain district like
+Cadore, endowed with the means of obtaining it. The other offspring of
+the marriage with Lucia were Francesco,--supposed, though without
+substantial proof, to have been older than his brother,--Caterina, and
+Orsa. At the age of nine, according to Dolce in the _Dialogo della
+Pittura_, or of ten, according to Tizianello's _Anonimo_, Titian was
+taken from Cadore to Venice, there to enter upon the serious study of
+painting. Whether he had previously received some slight tuition in the
+rudiments of the art, or had only shown a natural inclination to become
+a painter, cannot be ascertained with any precision; nor is the point,
+indeed, one of any real importance. What is much more vital in our study
+of the master's life-work is to ascertain how far the scenery of his
+native Cadore left a permanent impress on his landscape art, and in what
+way his descent from a family of mountaineers and soldiers, hardy, yet
+of a certain birth and breeding, contributed to shape his individuality
+in its development to maturity. It has been almost universally assumed
+that Titian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery of
+Cadore in the backgrounds to his pictures; and yet, if we except the
+great _Battle of Cadore_ itself (now known only in Fontana's print, in a
+reduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Uffizi,
+and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in a
+modified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altar-pieces,
+Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawings
+of the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we find
+the jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. In the
+majority of instances, however, the middle distance and foreground to
+these is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts,
+its monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountain
+sides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring, but the richer
+vegetation of the Friulan mountains in their lower slopes, or of the
+beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian
+plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the
+play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of Venetian
+art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery
+of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for
+studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and
+back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland.
+How far Titian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needy
+mountaineers, may be taken to account for his excessive eagerness to
+reap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for his
+unresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to be
+got in, must be a matter for individual appreciation. Josiah
+Gilbert--quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle[4]--pertinently asks, "Might
+this mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewd
+Swiss?" In the getting, Titian was certainly all this, but in the
+spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and
+voluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of his
+career. Vasari relates that Titian was lodged at Venice with his uncle,
+an "honourable citizen," who, seeing his great inclination for painting,
+placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became a
+proficient. Dolce, apparently better instructed, gives, in his _Dialogo
+della Pittura_, Zuccato, best known as a mosaic worker, as his first
+master; next makes him pass into the studio of Gentile Bellini, and
+thence into that of the _caposcuola_ Giovanni Bellini; to take, however,
+the last and by far the most important step of his early career when he
+becomes the pupil and partner, or assistant, of Giorgione. Morelli[5]
+would prefer to leave Giovanni Bellini altogether out of Titian's
+artistic descent. However this may be, certain traces of Gentile's
+influence may be observed in the art of the Cadorine painter, especially
+in the earlier portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technical
+execution generally. On the other hand, no extant work of his beginnings
+suggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino's
+pupils--one of the _discipuli_, as some of these were fond of describing
+themselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the
+fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the
+influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his
+following or not. Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art of
+Venice and the _Veneto_ an influence not less strong of its kind than
+that which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regions
+during his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on the
+works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the
+painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and
+Borgognone--such men as Ambrogio de' Predis, Bernardino de' Conti, and,
+indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself. To the fashion for
+the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class, even Alvise Vivarini,
+the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocento
+development, bowed when he painted the Madonnas of the Redentore and S.
+Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the Vienna
+Gallery. Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr.
+Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under the
+paramount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the altar-piece
+of S. Cristina near Treviso, the _Madonna and Child with Saints_ in the
+Ellesmere collection, and the _Madonna and Child with St. Peter Martyr_
+in the Naples Gallery, while in the _Marriage of St. Catherine_ at
+Munich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regards
+exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour,
+essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise's
+death, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could,
+faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in his
+later years was transformed into something very like a satellite of
+Giovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather to
+the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent
+overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the point
+of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.
+
+What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both of
+Giorgione and Titian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is not
+so much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent lean
+on Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves. Neither of
+them is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutely
+dependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for a
+time held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliest
+manhood held towards Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent also
+of Lorenzo Lotto, who, in the earliest known examples--the so-called
+_Danae_ of Sir Martin Conway's collection, and the _St. Jerome_ of the
+Louvre--is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art passes through
+successive developments, he will still show himself open to more or less
+enduring influences from the one side and the other. Sebastiano del
+Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly be
+accounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career out
+of leading-strings. First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling _Pieta_ in
+the Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authentic
+inscription, "Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus
+(sic)," is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece of
+documentary evidence, it would even now pass as such. Next, he becomes
+the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save perhaps
+Titian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in a
+quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque,
+that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, have
+acquired a world-wide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soul
+to Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of early
+training and association, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal itself,
+he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the
+very end of his career.
+
+Giorgione and Titian were as nearly as possible of the same age, being
+both of them born in or about 1477. Lorenzo Lotto's birth is to be
+placed about the year 1476--or, as others would have it, 1480. Palma saw
+the light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485. So
+that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier
+half of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eight
+years--between 1477 and 1485.
+
+In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Life and Times of Titian_ a revolutionary
+theory, foreshadowed in their _Painting in North Italy_, was for the
+first time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained. They
+sought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, that
+Palma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced and
+shaped the art of his contemporary Titian, instead of having been
+influenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artists
+would have induced the student to believe. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's
+theory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelli
+appears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to be
+found on a _Santa Conversazione_, once in the collection of M. Reiset,
+and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d'Aumale. This date now
+proves with the artist's signature to be a forgery, and the picture in
+question, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode of
+conception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more modern
+technique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma in
+the development of the full Renaissance types and the full Renaissance
+methods of execution. There can be small doubt that this particular
+theory of the indefatigable critics, to whom the history of Italian art
+owes so much, will little by little be allowed to die a natural death,
+if it be not, indeed, already defunct. More and more will the view so
+forcibly stated by Giovanni Morelli recommend itself, that Palma in many
+of those elements of his art most distinctively Palmesque leans upon the
+master of Cadore. The Bergamasque painter was not indeed a personality
+in art sufficiently strong and individual to dominate a Titian, or to
+leave upon his style and methods profound and enduring traces. As such,
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle themselves hesitate to put him forward, though
+they cling with great persistency to their pet theory of his influence.
+This exquisite artist, though by no means inventive genius, did, on the
+other hand, permanently shape the style of Cariani and the two elder
+Bonifazi; imparting, it may be, also some of his voluptuous charm in the
+rendering of female loveliness to Paris Bordone, though the latter must,
+in the main, be looked upon as the artistic offspring of Titian.
+
+It is by no means certain, all the same, that this question of influence
+imparted and submitted to can with advantage be argued with such
+absoluteness of statement as has been the rule up to the present time,
+both on the one side and the other. It should be remembered that we are
+dealing with three young painters of about the same age, working in the
+same art-centre, perhaps, even, for a time in the same studio--issuing,
+at any rate, all three from the flank of Giovanni Bellini. In a
+situation like this, it is not only the preponderance of age--two or
+three years at the most, one way or the other--that is to be taken into
+account, but the preponderance of genius and the magic gift of
+influence. It is easy to understand how the complete renewal, brought
+about by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini's teaching and example,
+operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open
+to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness of
+sensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible was
+the fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over his
+youthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influence
+widen, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellino
+himself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there could
+be no question of light received back from painters of his own
+generation in exchange for that diffused around him; but with Titian and
+Palma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell here
+in each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous
+plant of the same family, yet with all its Giorgionesque colour of a
+quite distinctive loveliness. Titian, we shall see, carried the style to
+its highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways a
+new thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in
+nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than
+Giorgione, Titian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to that
+element of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a way
+counteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interprets
+the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic
+attributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itself
+beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this
+frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this _terre a
+terre_ energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early work of
+Titian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was
+influenced?[6] There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the
+Giorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to the
+everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and
+this not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, in
+which, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular
+resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the
+important _Adam and Eve_ of his earlier time in the Brunswick
+Gallery--once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione--and
+the preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found in
+Titian's _Three Ages_ at Bridgewater House, in his so-called _Sacred and
+Profane Love (Medea and Venus)_ of the Borghese Gallery, in such sacred
+pieces as the _Madonna and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ at the Prado
+Gallery of Madrid, and the large _Madonna and Child with four Saints_ at
+Dresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception stripped
+of a little of its poetic glamour, but retaining unabashed its splendid
+sensuousness, which is thus made the more markedly to stand out. We
+notice, too, in Titian's works belonging to this particular group
+another characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only because
+Palma indulged in it in a great number of his Sacred Conversations and
+similar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin, the
+muscular form, of some male saint, or it may be some shepherd of the
+uplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddy
+gold, of a female saint, or a fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdess
+or a heroine of antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishing
+characteristics as these--and others that could easily be singled
+out--as wholly and solely Titianesque of the early time? If so, we ought
+to assume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palma
+came from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken to
+have transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the less
+subtle shape into which he had already transmuted it. But should not
+such an assumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main,
+be made with all the allowances which the situation demands?
+
+That, when a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to overturn
+barriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy to
+unravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lines
+everywhere, one or two modern examples much nearer to our own time may
+roughly serve to illustrate. Take, for instance, the friendship that
+developed itself between the youthful Bonington and the youthful
+Delacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre: the
+one communicating to the other something of the stimulating quality, the
+frankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished the
+English from the French school; the other contributing to shape, with
+the fire of his romantic temperament, the art of the young Englishman
+who was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of the
+P.R.B.--Millais, Rossetti, and Mr. Holman Hunt--who is to state _ex
+cathedra_ where influence was received, where transmitted; or whether
+the first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time of
+their complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, the
+third the conscience of the group? A similar puzzle would await him who
+should strive to unravel the delicate thread which winds itself round
+the artistic relation between Frederick Walker and the noted landscapist
+Mr. J.W. North. Though we at once recognise Walker as the dominant
+spirit, and see his influence even to-day, more than twenty years after
+his death, affirmed rather than weakened, there are certain
+characteristics of the style recognised and imitated as his, of which
+it would be unsafe to declare that he and not his companion originated
+them.
+
+In days of artistic upheaval and growth like the last years of the
+fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the _milieu_
+must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who most
+influence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeply
+rooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not be
+doubted that when in Giorgione's breast had been lighted the first
+sparks of the Promethean fire, which, with the soft intensity of its
+glow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire ran
+like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth, his
+contemporaries and juniors, just because their blood was of the stuff to
+ignite and flame like his own.
+
+The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question
+merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a
+brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that "they who were
+excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of
+life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of
+flesh, etc."[7] It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and
+style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the
+Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life
+aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just as
+the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of
+lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which, in
+Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first
+years of the Cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when--to take one
+instance only among many--the Ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble Venetian
+Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance
+with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was ever of love. In
+that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina's
+courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty,
+Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa
+illustrissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius,
+the leaflets which, under the title _Gli Asolani, ne' quali si ragiona
+d' amore_,[8] soon became a famous book in Italy.
+
+[Illustration: _The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice.
+From a Photograph by Naya_.]
+
+The most Bellinesque work of Titian's youth with which we are acquainted
+is the curious _Man of Sorrows_ of the Scuola di S. Rocco at Venice, a
+work so faded, so injured by restoration that to dogmatise as to its
+technique would be in the highest degree unsafe. The type approaches,
+among the numerous versions of the _Pieta_ by and ascribed to Giovanni
+Bellini, most nearly to that in the Palazzo del Commune at Rimini.
+Seeing that Titian was in 1500 twenty-three years old, and a student of
+painting of some thirteen years' standing, there may well exist, or at
+any rate there may well have existed, from his hand things in a yet
+earlier and more distinctively Quattrocento-style than anything with
+which we are at present acquainted. This _Man of Sorrows_ itself may
+well be a little earlier than 1500, but on this point it is not easy to
+form a definite conclusion. Perhaps it is reserved in the future to
+some student uniting the qualities of patience and keen insight to do
+for the youthful Titian what Morelli and his school have done for
+Correggio--that is, to restore to him a series of paintings earlier in
+date than those which criticism has, up to the present time, been
+content to accept as showing his first independent steps in art.
+Everything else that we can at present safely attribute to the youthful
+Vecelli is deeply coloured with the style and feeling of Giorgione,
+though never, as is the case with the inferior Giorgionesques, so
+entirely as to obliterate the strongly marked individuality of the
+painter himself. The _Virgin and Child_ in the Imperial Gallery of
+Vienna, popularly known as _La Zingarella_, which, by general consent,
+is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this class,
+is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception and
+arrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength, and richness of the
+colour-chord, in the atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the landscape
+background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already
+Giorgionesque. Nay, even here Titian, above all, asserts _himself_, and
+lays the foundation of his own manner. The type of the divine Bambino
+differs widely from that adopted by Giorgione in the altar-pieces of
+Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The virgin is a woman
+beautified only by youth and intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgione
+and Titian in their loveliest types of womanhood are sensuous as
+compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as
+Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. But
+Giorgione's sensuousness is that which may fitly characterise the
+goddess, while Titian's is that of the woman, much nearer to the
+everyday world in which both artists lived.
+
+In the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is a
+beautiful _Madonna and Child_ in a niche of coloured marble mosaic,
+which is catalogued as an early Titian under the influence of Giovanni
+Bellini. Judging only from the reproduction on a large scale done by
+Messrs. Braun and Co., the writer has ventured to suggest
+elsewhere[9]--prefacing his suggestions with the avowal that he is not
+acquainted with the picture itself--that we may have here, not an early
+Titian, but that rarer thing an early Giorgione. From the list of the
+former master's works it must at any rate be struck out, as even the
+most superficial comparison with, for instance, _La Zingarella_
+suffices to prove. In the notable display of Venetian art made at the
+New Gallery in the winter of 1895 were included two pictures (Nos. 1 and
+7 in the catalogue) ascribed to the early time of Titian and evidently
+from the same hand. These were a _Virgin and Child_ from the collection,
+so rich in Venetian works, of Mr. R.H. Benson (formerly among the
+Burghley House pictures), and a less well-preserved _Virgin and Child
+with Saints_ from the collection of Captain Holford at Dorchester House.
+The former is ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the early time of
+the master himself.[10] Both are, in their rich harmony of colour and
+their general conception, entirely Giorgionesque. They reveal the hand
+of some at present anonymous Venetian of the second order, standing
+midway between the young Giorgione and the young Titian--one who, while
+imitating the types and the landscape of these greater contemporaries
+of his, replaced their depth and glow by a weaker, a more superficial
+prettiness, which yet has its own suave charm.
+
+[Illustration: _Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." Imperial
+Gallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by Loewy_.]
+
+The famous _Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Chiesa di S. Rocco at
+Venice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed by
+Vasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to
+that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The
+biographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to be
+from the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in Venice,
+and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and
+Giorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life." This
+too great popularity of the work as a wonder-working picture is perhaps
+the cause that it is to-day in a state as unsatisfactory as is the _Man
+of Sorrows_ in the adjacent Scuola. The picture which presents "Christ
+dragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in the
+background," resembles most among Giorgione's authentic creations the
+_Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Casa Loschi at Vicenza. The
+resemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since this
+last--one of the earliest of Giorgiones--still recalls Giovanni Bellini,
+and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception.
+In both renderings of the divine countenance there is--or it may be the
+writer fancies that there is--underlying that expression of serenity and
+humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject, a sinister,
+disquieting look, almost a threat. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called
+attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as
+compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar
+disproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the _Christ
+between St. Andrew and St. Catherine_ in the Church of SS. Ermagora and
+Fortunato (commonly called S. Marcuola) at Venice. Here the head of the
+infant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the two
+saints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest.
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle had refused to accept this picture as a genuine
+Titian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful place
+among the early works.
+
+Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the _Three
+Ages_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_, the writer is inclined to place
+the _Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI. to St.
+Peter_, once in the collection of Charles I.[11] and now in the Antwerp
+Gallery. The main elements of Titian's art may be seen here, in
+imperfect fusion, as in very few even of his early productions. The not
+very dignified St. Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with a
+high relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again in
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or rather his
+immediate followers; the magnificently robed Alexander VI. (Rodrigo
+Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, gives back the style in portraiture
+of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio; while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro--an
+ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of
+fleets, as the background suggests--is one of the most characteristic
+portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos, its intensity,
+contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same
+_Baffo_ in the renowned _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, painted twenty-three
+years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It
+is the first in order of a great series, including the _Ariosto_ of
+Cobham, the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, the _Portrait of a Man_ in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous _Concert_ of the Pitti,
+ascribed to Giorgione. Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. Georges
+Lafenestre[12] have called attention to the fact that the detested
+Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot
+well have been executed after that time. He would have been a bold man
+who should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI.
+into a votive picture painted immediately after his death! How is it
+possible to assume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless assume, that
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art,
+was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at the
+latest, in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione
+himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted
+his Castelfranco altar-piece, his _Venus_, or his _Three Philosophers
+(Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas)_. Old Gian Bellino himself had not entered
+upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S.
+Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.[13]
+
+It is impossible on the present occasion to give any detailed account
+of the fresco decorations painted by Giorgione and Titian on the facades
+of the new Fondaco de' Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on
+the 28th of January 1505. Full particulars will be found in Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle's often-quoted work. Vasari's many manifest errors and
+disconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do not
+predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained
+relations between Giorgione and our painter, to which this particular
+business is supposed to have given rise. That they together decorated
+with a series of frescoes which acquired considerable celebrity the
+exterior of the Fondaco is all that is known for certain, Titian being
+apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Of
+these frescoes only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, and
+facing the Grand Canal, has been preserved, in a much-damaged
+condition--the few fragments that remained of those facing the side
+canal having been destroyed in 1884.[14] Vasari shows us a Giorgione
+angry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior beauty
+of some work on the "_facciata di verso la Merceria,_" which in reality
+belongs to Titian, and thereupon implacably cutting short their
+connection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, but
+refuted by the less contemporary authority of Tizianello's _Anonimo_. Of
+what great painters, standing in the relation of master and pupil, have
+not such stories been told, and--the worst of it is--told with a certain
+foundation of truth? Apocryphal is, no doubt, that which has evolved
+itself from the internal evidence supplied by the _Baptism of Christ_ of
+Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci; but a stronger substructure of fact
+supports the unpleasing anecdotes as to Titian and Tintoretto, as to
+Watteau and Pater, as to our own Hudson and Reynolds, and, alas! as to
+very many others. How touching, on the other hand, is that simple entry
+in Francesco Francia's day-book, made when his chief journeyman,
+Timoteo Viti, leaves him: "1495 a di 4 aprile e partito il mio caro
+Timoteo; chi Dio li dia ogni bene et fortuna!" ("On the 4th day of April
+1495 my dear Timoteo left me. May God grant him all happiness and good
+fortune!")
+
+[Illustration: _The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome.
+From a Photograph by Anderson._]
+
+There is one reason that makes it doubly difficult, relying on
+developments of style only, to make, even tentatively, a chronological
+arrangement of Titian's early works. This is that in those painted
+_poesie_ of the earlier Venetian art of which the germs are to be found
+in Giovanni Bellini and Cima, but the flower is identified with
+Giorgione, Titian surrendered himself to the overmastering influence of
+the latter with less reservation of his own individuality than in his
+sacred works. In the earlier imaginative subjects the vivifying glow of
+Giorgionesque poetry moulds, colours, and expands the genius of Titian,
+but so naturally as neither to obliterate nor to constrain it. Indeed,
+even in the late time of our master--checking an unveiled sensuousness
+which sometimes approaches dangerously near to a downright
+sensuality--the influence of the master and companion who vanished half
+a century before victoriously reasserts itself. It is this _renouveau_
+of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives so
+exquisite a charm to the _Venere del Pardo_, so strange a pathos to that
+still later _Nymph and Shepherd,_ which was a few years ago brought out
+of its obscurity and added to the treasures of the Imperial Gallery at
+Vienna.
+
+The sacred works of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with a
+difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a
+majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation,
+very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness and
+reserve which informs such creations as the _Madonna of Castelfranco_
+and the _Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch_ of the Prado Museum.
+Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque
+ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of the _Assunta_, the true
+passion going hand-in-hand with beauty of the Louvre _Entombment_, the
+rhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the _St. Peter Martyr_.
+
+The _Baptism of Christ_, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the Gallery of
+the Capitol at Rome, had been by Crowe and Cavalcaselle taken away from
+Titian and given to Paris Bordone, but the keen insight of Morelli led
+him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to Titian. Internal
+evidence is indeed conclusive in this case that the picture must be
+assigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.[15]
+Here Titian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christ
+more in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemn
+hieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries.
+The luxuriant landscape is in the main Giorgionesque, save that here and
+there a naked branch among the leafage--and on one of them the
+woodpecker--strongly recalls Giovanni Bellini. The same robust,
+round-limbed young Venetian, with the inexpressive face, does duty here
+as St. John the Baptist, who in the _Three Ages_, presently to be
+discussed, appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd. The
+Christ, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxuriant
+hair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine
+_Cristo della Moneta_. The question at once arises here, Did Titian in
+the type of this figure derive inspiration from Giovanni Bellini's
+splendid _Baptism of Christ_, finished in 1510 for the Church of S.
+Corona at Vicenza, but which the younger artist might well have seen a
+year or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in the
+workshop of the venerable master? Apart from its fresh naivete, and its
+rare pictorial charm, how trivial and merely anecdotic does the
+conception of Titian appear by the side of that of Bellini, so lofty, so
+consoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunset
+colour![16] Alone in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram,
+placed in the picture with an awkwardness attractive in its naivete,
+but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standing
+alone.
+
+The beautiful _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida,_ placed in
+the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now at last officially
+restored to Titian, after having been for years innumerable ascribed to
+Giorgione, whose style it not more than generally recalls. Here at any
+rate all the rival wise men are agreed, and it only remains for the
+student of the old masters, working to-day on the solid substructure
+provided for him by his predecessors, to wonder how any other
+attribution could have been accepted. But then the critic of the present
+day is a little too prone to be wise and scornful _a ban marche_,
+forgetting that he has been spared three parts of the road, and that he
+starts for conquest at the high point, to reach which the pioneers of
+scientific criticism in art have devoted a lifetime of noble toil. It is
+in this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early art
+of the Cadorine which Crowe and Cavalcaselle have defined as
+"Palmesque." The _St. Bridget_ and the _St. Ulphus_ are both types
+frequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamasque painter, and
+it has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model with
+hair of wavy gold must have sat to Giorgione, Titian, and Palma. This
+can only be true, however, in a modified sense, seeing that Giorgione
+did not, so much as his contemporaries and followers, affect the type of
+the beautiful Venetian blond, "large, languishing, and lazy." The hair
+of his women--both the sacred personages and the divinities nominally
+classic or wholly Venetian--is, as a rule, of a rich chestnut, or at the
+most dusky fair, and in them the Giorgionesque oval of the face tempers
+with its spirituality the strength of physical passion that the general
+physique denotes. The polished surface of this panel at Madrid, the
+execution, sound and finished without being finicking, the high
+yellowish lights on the crimson draperies, are all very characteristic
+of this, the first manner of Vecelli. The green hangings at the back of
+the picture are such as are very generally associated with the
+colour-schemes of Palma. An old repetition, with a slight variation in
+the Bambino, is in the royal collection at Hampton Court, where it long
+bore--indeed it does so still on the frame--the name of Palma Vecchio.
+
+It will be remembered that Vasari assigns to the _Tobias and the Angel_
+in the Church of S. Marciliano at Venice the exact date 1507, describing
+it, moreover, with greater accuracy than he does any other work by
+Titian. He mentions even "the thicket, in which is a St. John the
+Baptist kneeling as he prays to heaven, whence comes a splendour of
+light." The Aretine biographer is followed in this particular by
+Morelli, usually so eagle-eyed, so little bound by tradition in tracing
+the beginnings of a great painter. The gifted modern critic places the
+picture among the quite early works of our master. Notwithstanding this
+weight of authority, the writer feels bound to dissent from the view
+just now indicated, and in this instance to follow Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, who assign to the _Tobias and the Angel_ a place much
+later on in Titian's long career. The picture, though it hangs high in
+the little church for which it was painted, will speak for itself to
+those who interrogate it without _parti pris_. Neither in the
+figures--the magnificently classic yet living archangel Raphael and the
+more naive and realistic Tobias--nor in the rich landscape with St. John
+the Baptist praying is there anything left of the early Giorgionesque
+manner. In the sweeping breadth of the execution, the summarising power
+of the brush, the glow from within of the colour, we have so many
+evidences of a style in its fullest maturity. It will be safe,
+therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian's middle period.[17]
+
+The _Three Ages_ in the Bridgewater Gallery and the so-called _Sacred
+and Profane Love_ in the Borghese Gallery represent the apogee of
+Titian's Giorgionesque style. Glowing through and through with the
+spirit of the master-poet among Venetian painters, yet falling short a
+little, it may be, of that subtle charm of his, compounded indefinably
+of sensuous delight and spiritual yearning, these two masterpieces carry
+the Giorgionesque technically a pretty wide step farther than the
+inventor of the style took it. Barbarelli never absolutely threw off the
+trammels of the Quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained to
+the last--not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm--the naivete,
+the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely
+full-fledged.
+
+The _Three Ages_, from its analogies of type and manner with the
+_Baptism_ of the Capitol, would appear to be the earlier of the two
+imaginative works here grouped together, but to date later than that
+picture.[18] The tonality of the picture is of an exquisite
+silveriness--that of clear, moderate daylight, though this relative
+paleness may have been somewhat increased by time. It may a little
+disconcert at first sight those who have known the lovely pastoral only
+from hot, brown copies, such as the one which, under the name of
+Giorgione, was formerly in the Dudley House Collection, and now belongs
+to Sir William Farrer. It is still so difficult to battle with the
+deeply-rooted notion that there can be no Giorgione, no painting of his
+school, without the accompaniment of a rich brown sauce! The shepherdess
+has a robe of fairest crimson, and her flower-crowned locks in tint more
+nearly approach to the _blond cendre_ which distinguishes so many of
+Palma's _donne_ than to the ruddier gold that Titian himself generally
+affects. The more passionate of the two, she gazes straight into the
+eyes of her strong-limbed rustic lover, who half-reclining rests his
+hand upon her shoulder. On the twin reed-pipes, which she still holds in
+her hands, she has just breathed forth a strain of music, and to it, as
+it still lingers in their ears, they yield themselves entranced. Here
+the youth is naked, the maid clothed and adorned--a reversal, this, of
+Giorgione's _Fete Champetre_ in the Salon Carre of the Louvre, where the
+women are undraped, and the amorous young cavaliers appear in complete
+and rich attire. To the right are a group of thoroughly Titianesque
+amorini--the winged one, dominating the others, being perhaps Amor
+himself; while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls ranged
+round him on the ground--obvious reminders of the last stage of all, at
+which he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity between
+the even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood of
+the personages--the one aiding the other to express the moment of pause
+in nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than all
+that the very whirlwind of passion can give. Near at hand may be
+pitfalls, the smiling love-god may prove less innocent than he looks,
+and in the distance Fate may be foreshadowed by the figure of weary Age
+awaiting Death. Yet this one moment is all the lovers' own, and they
+profane it not by speech, but stir their happy languor only with faint
+notes of music borne on the still, warm air.
+
+[Illustration: _The Three Ages. Bridgewater Gallery. From the Plate in
+Lafenestre's "Vie et Oeuvre du Titien" (May, Paris.)_]
+
+The _Sacred and Profane Love_ of the Borghese Gallery is one of the
+world's pictures, and beyond doubt the masterpiece of the early or
+Giorgionesque period. To-day surely no one will be found to gainsay
+Morelli when he places it at the end of that period, which it so
+incomparably sums up--not at the beginning, when its perfection would be
+as incomprehensible as the less absolute achievement displayed in other
+early pieces which such a classification as this would place after the
+Borghese picture. The accompanying reproduction obviates all necessity
+for a detailed description. Titian painted afterwards perhaps more
+wonderfully still--with a more sweeping vigour of brush, with a higher
+authority, and a play of light as brilliant and diversified. He never
+attained to a higher finish and perfection of its kind, or more
+admirably suited the technical means to the thing to be achieved. He
+never so completely gave back, coloured with the splendour of his own
+genius, the rays received from Giorgione. The delicious sunset landscape
+has all the Giorgionesque elements, with more spaciousness, and lines of
+a still more suave harmony. The grand Venetian _donna_ who sits
+sumptuously robed, flower-crowned, and even gloved, at the sculptured
+classic fount is the noblest in her pride of loveliness, as she is one
+of the first, of the long line of voluptuous beauties who will occupy
+the greatest brushes of the Cinquecento. The little love-god who,
+insidiously intervening, paddles in the water of the fountain and
+troubles its surface, is Titian's very own, owing nothing to any
+forerunner. The divinely beautiful _Profane Love_--or, as we shall
+presently see, _Venus_--is the most flawless presentment of female
+loveliness unveiled that modern art has known up to this date, save only
+the _Venus_ of Giorgione himself (in the Dresden Gallery), to which it
+can be but little posterior. The radiant freshness of the face, with its
+glory of half-unbound hair, does not, indeed, equal the sovereign
+loveliness of the Dresden _Venus_ or the disquieting charm of the
+Giovanelli _Zingarella_ (properly Hypsipyle). Its beauty is all on the
+surface, while theirs stimulates the imagination of the beholder. The
+body with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and
+movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true
+Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous
+drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high
+lights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that Titian
+ever achieved. Only in the late _Venere del Pardo_, which so closely
+follows the chief motive of Giorgione's _Venus_, does he approach it in
+frankness and purity. Far more genuinely classic is it in spirit,
+because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, than
+anything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous in
+their study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.[19]
+
+[Illustration: _Sacred and Profane Love._]
+
+It is impossible to discuss here in detail all the conjectural
+explanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popular
+of all Venetian pictures--least of all that strange one brought forward
+by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the _Artless and Sated Love_, for which they
+have found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves in
+an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show but a languid desire to
+solve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the pictures
+described by Marcantonio Michiel (the _Anonimo_ of Jacopo Morelli), in
+the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the _Inferno with
+Aeneas and Anchises_ and _Landscape with the Birth of Paris_, Herr Franz
+Wickhoff[20] has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring
+crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of
+Barbarelli's best known works. The _Three Philosophers_ he calls
+_Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas_, the Giovanelli _Tempest with the Gipsy
+and the Soldier_ he explains anew as _Admetus and Hypsipyle_.[21] The
+subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and
+popularly called, or rather miscalled, the _Dream of Raphael_, is
+recognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione.
+He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the
+commentator of Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping
+side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it),
+the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in
+peaceful sleep.
+
+Passing over to the Giorgionesque period of Titian, he boldly sets to
+work on the world-famous _Sacred and Profane Love_, and shows us the
+Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned
+humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the
+_Argonautica_ of Valerius Flaccus--that wearisome imitation of the
+similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea--the sumptuously
+attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)--sits at the fountain in
+unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and
+holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not
+yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love
+is the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comes
+Venus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea's father,
+irresistibly pleading that she shall go to the alien lover, who waits in
+the wood. It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in the
+toils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is the
+subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible--in Titian's realisation
+of the legend--to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main theme
+upon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing[22] had
+already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when he
+described the Borghese picture as _The Maiden with Venus and Amor at the
+Well_. The _vraisemblance_ of Herr Wickhoff's brilliant interpretation
+becomes the greater when we reflect that Titian at least twice
+afterwards borrowed subjects from classical antiquity, taking his
+_Worship of Venus_, now at Madrid, from the _Erotes_ of Philostratus,
+and our own wonderful _Bacchus and Ariadne_ at the National Gallery from
+the _Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ of Catullus. In the future it is
+quite possible that the Austrian savant may propose new and precise
+interpretations for the _Three Ages_ and for Giorgione's _Concert
+Champetre_ at the Louvre.
+
+[Illustration: _Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria
+Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq._]
+
+It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student of
+Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him
+at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young
+poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly
+allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have hard,
+clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours.
+It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere of pause and
+quiet that they bring with them, the way in which they indefinably take
+possession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond their
+radiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet we
+need not mourn overmuch, or too painfully set to work to revise our
+whole conception of Venetian idyllic art as matured in the first years
+of the Cinquecento. True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo, not
+less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian and
+Giorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the
+lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they
+have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no
+doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more
+fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular
+to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic
+legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of
+the golden prime disdained to represent--or it may be unconsciously
+shrank from representing--the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic
+and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. Giorgione
+embodies in such a picture as the _Adrastus and Hypsipyle_, or the
+_Aeneas and Evander_, not so much what has been related to him of those
+ancient legends as his own mood when he is brought into contact with
+them; he transposes his motive from a dramatic into a lyrical
+atmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something "rich
+and strange," coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmly
+human fantasy. Titian, in the _Sacred and Profane Love_, as for
+identification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep close
+to the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. But
+for all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, for
+the splendour of female loveliness unveiled, for the piquant contrast of
+female loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He has
+presented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such a
+delightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries to
+decipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian in these exquisite
+idylls--for so we may still dare to call them--have consciously or
+unconsciously achieved, is the indissoluble union of humanity outwardly
+quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion, to the
+environing nature. It is Nature herself that in these true painted poems
+mysteriously responds, that interprets to the beholder the moods of man,
+much as a mighty orchestra--Nature ordered and controlled--may by its
+undercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the very
+personages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so we
+may be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his new interpretations,
+not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first
+acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old
+ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from
+another and a more prosaic, because a more precise and literal,
+standpoint.
+
+[Illustration: _Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by
+Hanfstaengl_.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Frescoes of the Scuola del Santo--The "Herodias" type of picture--Holy
+Families and Sacred Conversations--Date of the "Cristo della Moneta" Is
+the "Concert" of the Pitti by Titian?--The "Bacchanal" of Alnwick
+Castle.
+
+
+
+It has been pointed out by Titian's biographers that the wars which
+followed upon the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing all
+over North Italy the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation.
+It was not long after this--on the death of his master Giorgione--that
+Sebastiano Luciani migrated to Rome and, so far as he could, shook off
+his allegiance to the new Venetian art; it was then that Titian
+temporarily left the city of his adoption to do work in fresco at Padua
+and Vicenza. If the date 1508, given by Vasari for the great frieze-like
+wood-engraving, _The Triumph of Faith_, be accepted, it must be held
+that it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi[23] cites
+painted compositions of the _Triumph_ as either the originals or the
+repetitions of the wood-engravings, for which Titian himself drew the
+blocks. The frescoes themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out on
+the walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished;
+but that they ever came into existence there would not appear to be any
+direct evidence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in the
+process of translation into wood-engraving, are not materially at
+variance with those in the frescoes of the Scuola del Santo. But the
+movement, the spirit of the whole is essentially different. This mighty,
+onward-sweeping procession, with Adam and Eve, the Patriarchs, the
+Prophets and Sibyls, the martyred Innocents, the great chariot with
+Christ enthroned, drawn by the four Doctors of the Church and impelled
+forward by the Emblems of the four Evangelists, with a great company of
+Apostles and Martyrs following, has all the vigour and elasticity, all
+the decorative amplitude that is wanting in the frescoes of the Santo.
+It is obvious that inspiration was derived from the _Triumphs_ of
+Mantegna, then already so widely popularised by numerous engravings.
+Titian and those under whose inspiration he worked here obviously
+intended an antithesis to the great series of canvases presenting the
+apotheosis of Julius Caesar, which were then to be seen in the not far
+distant Mantua. Have we here another pictorial commentary, like the
+famous _Cristo detta Moneta,_ with which we shall have to deal
+presently, on the "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo," which
+was the favourite device of Alfonso of Ferrara and the legend round his
+gold coins? The whole question is interesting, and deserves more careful
+consideration than can be accorded to it on the present occasion. Hardly
+again, until he reached extreme old age, did such an impulse of sacred
+passion colour the art of the painter of Cadore as here. In the earlier
+section of his life-work the _Triumph of Faith_ constitutes a striking
+exception.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak.
+Fresco in the Scuola del Santo, Padua. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Passing over, as relatively unimportant, Titian's share in the
+much-defaced fresco decorations of the Scuola del Carmine, we come now
+to those more celebrated ones in the Scuola del Santo. Out of the
+sixteen frescoes executed in 1510-11 by Titian, in concert with Domenico
+Campagnola and other assistants of less fame, the following three are
+from the brush of the master himself:--_St. Anthony causes a new-born
+Infant to speak, testifying to the innocence of its Mother; St. Anthony
+heals the leg of a Youth; A jealous Husband puts to death his Wife, whom
+the Saint afterwards restores to life._ Here the figures, the
+composition, the beautiful landscape backgrounds bear unmistakably the
+trace of Giorgione's influence. The composition has just the timidity,
+the lack of rhythm and variety, that to the last marks that of
+Barbarelli. The figures have his naive truth, his warmth and splendour
+of life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift the
+uninspiring subjects a little above the actual. The _Nobleman putting to
+death his Wife_ is dramatic, almost terrible in its fierce, awkward
+realism, yet it does not rise much higher in interpretation than what
+our neighbours would to-day call the _drame passionel._ The interest is
+much the same that is aroused in a student of Elizabethan literature by
+that study of murder, _Arden of Feversham_, not that higher attraction
+that he feels--horrors notwithstanding--for _The Maid's Tragedy_ of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, or _The Duchess of Malfi_ of Webster.[24]
+
+[Illustration: _"Noli me tangere." National Gallery. From a Photograph
+published by the Autotype Company._]
+
+A convenient date for the magnificent _St. Mark enthroned, with SS.
+Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas, and Damianus_, is 1512, when Titian, having
+completed his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned to
+Venice. True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in the
+truculent _St. Mark_; but, then, as essentially so were the frescoes
+just terminated. The noble altar-piece[25] symbolises, or rather
+commemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with the
+terrors of the League of Cambrai:--on the one side St. Sebastian,
+standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, St. Roch for
+plague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, SS. Cosmas and
+Damianus, suggesting the healing of these evils. The colour is
+Giorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli's own is so to be
+described. Especially does it show points of contact with that of the
+so-called _Three Philosophers_, which, on the authority of Marcantonio
+Michiel (the _Anonimo_), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of the
+last works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is both
+sumptuous and boldly contrasted in the local hues, the sovereign unity
+of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, by
+any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate Giorgionesques.
+Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione
+successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a
+more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These last
+are among the most admirable portrait-figures in the life-work of
+Titian. In them a simplicity, a concentration akin to that of Giovanni
+Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and
+flexibility of Barbarelli. The St. Sebastian is the most beautiful among
+the youthful male figures, as the _Venus_ of Giorgione and the Venus of
+the _Sacred and Profane Love_ are the most beautiful among the female
+figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such
+presentments of youth in its flower abounded. There is something
+androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the strength
+and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its
+suavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that a
+delight in portraying the fresh comeliness, the elastic beauty of form
+proper to the youth just passing into the man was common to many
+Venetian painters at this stage, and coloured their art as it had
+coloured the whole art of Greece.
+
+Hereabouts the writer would like to place the singularly attractive, yet
+a little puzzling, _Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd_,
+which is No. 4 in the National Gallery. The type of the landscape is
+early, and even for that time the execution in this particular is, for
+Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially the
+projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against
+the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. The
+noble type and the stilted attitude of the _St. Joseph_ suggest the _St.
+Mark_ of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of
+the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of
+Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the
+Salute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, by
+a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no
+means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly
+in the _St. Anthony causing a new-born Infant to speak_, of the Scuola.
+Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of
+the early time before complete freedom of design was attained.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della
+Salute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson_.]
+
+[Illustration: _The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
+From a Photograph by Loewy_.]
+
+The splendidly beautiful _Herodias with the head of St. John the
+Baptist_, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but by
+Morelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian,
+belongs to about the same time as the _Sacred and Profane Love_, and
+would therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Padua
+and Vicenza. The intention has been not so much to emphasise the tragic
+character of the motive as to exhibit to the highest advantage the
+voluptuous charm, the languid indifference of a Venetian beauty posing
+for Herod's baleful consort. Repetitions of this _Herodias_ exist in the
+Northbrook Collection and in that of Mr. R.H. Benson. The latter, which
+is presumably from the workshop of the master, and shows variations in
+one or two unimportant particulars from the Doria picture, is here,
+failing the original, reproduced with the kind permission of the owner.
+A conception traceable back to Giorgione would appear to underlie, not
+only this Doria picture, but that _Herodias_ which at Dorchester House
+is, for not obvious reasons, attributed to Pordenone, and another
+similar one by Palma Vecchio, of which a late copy exists in the
+collection of the Earl of Chichester. Especially is this community of
+origin noticeable in the head of St. John on the charger, as it appears
+in each of these works. All of them again show a family resemblance in
+this particular respect to the interesting full-length _Judith_ at the
+Hermitage, now ascribed to Giorgione, to the over-painted half-length
+_Judith_ in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice, and to Hollar's
+print after a picture supposed by the engraver to give the portrait of
+Giorgione himself in the character of David, the slayer of Goliath.[26]
+The sumptuous but much-injured _Vanitas_, which is No. 1110 in the Alte
+Pinakothek of Munich--a beautiful woman of the same opulent type as the
+_Herodias_, holding a mirror which reflects jewels and other symbols of
+earthly vanity--may be classed with the last-named work. Again we owe it
+to Morelli[27] that this painting, ascribed by Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle--as the _Herodias_ was ascribed--to Pordenone, has been
+with general acceptance classed among the early works of Titian. The
+popular _Flora_ of the Uffizi, a beautiful thing still, though all the
+bloom of its beauty has been effaced, must be placed rather later in
+this section of Titian's life-work, displaying as it does a technique
+more facile and accomplished, and a conception of a somewhat higher
+individuality. The model is surely the same as that which has served for
+the Venus of the _Sacred and Profane Love_, though the picture comes
+some years after that piece. Later still comes the so-called _Alfonso
+d'Este and Laura Dianti_, as to which something will be said farther on.
+Another puzzle is provided by the beautiful "_Noli me tangere_" of the
+National Gallery, which must necessarily have its place somewhere here
+among the early works. Giorgionesque the picture still is, and most
+markedly so in the character of the beautiful landscape; yet the
+execution shows an altogether unusual freedom and mastery for that
+period. The _Magdalen_ is, appropriately enough, of the same type as the
+exquisite, golden blond courtezans--or, if you will, models--who
+constantly appear and reappear in this period of Venetian art. Hardly
+anywhere has the painter exhibited a more wonderful freedom and subtlety
+of brush than in the figure of the Christ, in which glowing flesh is so
+finely set off by the white of fluttering, half-transparent draperies.
+The canvas has exquisite colour, almost without colours; the only local
+tint of any very defined character being the dark red of the Magdalen's
+robe. Yet a certain affectation, a certain exaggeration of fluttering
+movement and strained attitude repel the beholder a little at first, and
+neutralise for him the rare beauties of the canvas. It is as if a wave
+of some strange transient influence had passed over Titian at this
+moment, then again to be dissipated.
+
+[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot.
+Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by Brogi._]
+
+But to turn now once more to the series of our master's Holy Families
+and Sacred Conversations which began with _La Zingarella_, and was
+continued with the _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ of
+Madrid. The most popular of all those belonging to this still early time
+is the _Virgin with the Cherries_ in the Vienna Gallery. Here the
+painter is already completely himself. He will go much farther in
+breadth if not in polish, in transparency, in forcefulness, if not in
+attractiveness of colour; but he is now, in sacred art at any rate,
+practically free from outside influences. For the pensive girl-Madonna
+of Giorgione we now have the radiant young matron of Titian, joyous yet
+calm in her play with the infant Christ, while the Madonna of his master
+and friend was unrestful and full of tender foreboding even in seeming
+repose. Pretty close on this must have followed the _Madonna and Child
+with St. Stephen, St. Ambrose and St. Maurice_, No 439 in the Louvre, in
+which the rich colour-harmonies strike a somewhat deeper note. An
+atelier repetition of this fine original is No. 166 in the Vienna
+Gallery; the only material variation traceable in this last-named
+example being that in lieu of St. Ambrose, wearing a kind of biretta, we
+have St. Jerome bareheaded.
+
+Very near in time and style to this particular series, with which it may
+safely be grouped, is the beautiful and finely preserved _Holy Family_
+in the Bridgewater Gallery, where it is still erroneously attributed to
+Palma Vecchio. It is to be found in the same private apartment on the
+groundfloor of Bridgewater House, that contains the _Three Ages_. Deep
+glowing richness of colour and smooth perfection without smallness of
+finish make this picture remarkable, notwithstanding its lack of any
+deeper significance. Nor must there be forgotten in an enumeration of
+the early Holy Families, one of the loveliest of all, the _Madonna and
+Child with the infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot_, which adorns the
+Venetian section of the Uffizi Gallery. Here the relationship to
+Giorgione is more clearly shown than in any of these Holy Families of
+the first period, and in so far the painting, which cannot be placed
+very early among them, constitutes a partial exception in the series.
+The Virgin is of a more refined and pensive type than in the _Madonna
+with the Cherries_ of Vienna, or the _Madonna with Saints_, No. 439 in
+the Louvre, and the divine Bambino less robust in build and aspect. The
+magnificent St. Anthony is quite Giorgionesque in the serenity tinged
+with sadness of his contemplative mood.
+
+[Illustration: From a photograph by Brauen-Clement & Cie. Virgin and
+Child with Saints.]
+
+Last of all in this particular group--another work in respect of which
+Morelli has played the rescuer--is the _Madonna and Child with four
+Saints_, No. 168 in the Dresden Gallery, a much-injured but eminently
+Titianesque work, which may be said to bring this particular series to
+within a couple of years or so of the _Assunta_--that great landmark of
+the first period of maturity. The type of the Madonna here is still very
+similar to that in the _Madonna with the Cherries_.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of the
+Stag. From a Drawing by Titian in the British Museum._]
+
+Apart from all these sacred works, and in every respect an exceptional
+production, is the world-famous _Cristo della Moneta_ of the Dresden
+Gallery. As to the exact date to be assigned to this panel among the
+early works of Titian considerable difficulty exists. For once agreeing
+with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Morelli is inclined to disregard the
+testimony of Vasari, from whose text it would result that it was painted
+in or after the year 1514, and to place it as far back as 1508.
+Notwithstanding this weight of authority the writer is strongly
+inclined, following Vasari in this instance, and trusting to certain
+indications furnished by the picture itself, to return to the date 1514
+or thereabouts. There is no valid reason to doubt that the _Christ of
+the Tribute-Money_ was painted for Alfonso I. of Ferrara, and the less
+so, seeing that it so aptly illustrates the already quoted legend on his
+coins: "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo." According to
+Vasari, it was painted _nella porta d'un armario_--that is to say, in
+the door of a press or wardrobe. But this statement need not be taken in
+its most literal sense. If it were to be assumed from this passage that
+the picture was painted on the spot, its date must be advanced to 1516,
+since Titian did not pay his first visit to Ferrara before that year.
+There is no sufficient ground, however, for assuming that he did not
+execute his wonderful panel in the usual fashion--that is to say, at
+home in Venice. The last finishing touches might, perhaps, have been
+given to it _in situ_, as they were to Bellini's _Bacchanal_, done also
+for the Duke of Ferrara. The extraordinary finish of the painting, which
+is hardly to be paralleled in this respect in the life-work of the
+artist, may have been due to his desire to "show his hand" to his new
+patron in a subject which touched him so nearly. And then the finish is
+not of the Quattrocento type, not such as we find, for instance, in the
+_Leonardo Loredano_ of Giovanni Bellini, the finest panels of Cima, or
+the early _Christ bearing the Cross_ of Giorgione. In it exquisite
+polish of surface and consummate rendering of detail are combined with
+the utmost breadth and majesty of composition, with a now perfect
+freedom in the casting of the draperies. It is difficult, indeed, to
+imagine that this masterpiece--so eminently a work of the Cinquecento,
+and one, too, in which the master of Cadore rose superior to all
+influences, even to that of Giorgione--could have been painted in 1508,
+that is some two years before Bellini's _Baptism of Christ_ in S.
+Corona, and in all probability before the _Three Philosophers_ of
+Giorgione himself. The one of Titian's own early pictures with which it
+appears to the writer to have most in common--not so much in technique,
+indeed, as in general style--is the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and than
+this it is very much less Giorgionesque. To praise the _Cristo della
+Moneta_ anew after it has been so incomparably well praised seems almost
+an impertinence. The soft radiance of the colour so well matches the
+tempered majesty, the infinite mansuetude of the conception; the
+spirituality, which is of the essence of the august subject, is so
+happily expressed, without any sensible diminution of the splendour of
+Renaissance art approaching its highest. And yet nothing could well be
+simpler than the scheme of colour as compared with the complex harmonies
+which Venetian art in a somewhat later phase affected. Frank contrasts
+are established between the tender, glowing flesh of the Christ, seen in
+all the glory of achieved manhood, and the coarse, brown skin of the son
+of the people who appears as the Pharisee; between the bright yet
+tempered red of His robe and the deep blue of His mantle. But the golden
+glow, which is Titian's own, envelops the contrasting figures and the
+contrasting hues in its harmonising atmosphere, and gives unity to the
+whole.[28]
+
+[Illustration: _The "Cristo della Moneta." Dresden Gallery. From a
+Photograph by Hanfstaengl._]
+
+A small group of early portraits--all of them somewhat difficult to
+place--call for attention before we proceed. Probably the earliest
+portrait among those as yet recognised as from the hand of our
+painter--leaving out of the question the _Baffo_ and the
+portrait-figures in the great _St. Mark_ of the Salute--is the
+magnificent _Ariosto_ in the Earl of Darnley's Collection at Cobham
+Hall.[29] There is very considerable doubt, to say the least, as to
+whether this half-length really represents the court poet of Ferrara,
+but the point requires more elaborate discussion than can be here
+conceded to it. Thoroughly Giorgionesque is the soberly tinted yet
+sumptuous picture in its general arrangement, as in its general tone,
+and in this respect it is the fitting companion and the descendant of
+Giorgione's _Antonio Broccardo_ at Buda-Pesth, of his _Knight of Malta_
+at the Uffizi. Its resemblance, moreover, is, as regards the general
+lines of the composition, a very striking one to the celebrated Sciarra
+_Violin-Player_ by Sebastiano del Piombo, now in the gallery of Baron
+Alphonse Rothschild at Paris, where it is as heretofore given to
+Raphael.[30] The handsome, manly head has lost both subtlety and
+character through some too severe process of cleaning, but Venetian art
+has hardly anything more magnificent to show than the costume, with the
+quilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin which occupies so prominent a
+place in the picture.
+
+[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery.
+From a Photograph by Hanfstaengl_.]
+
+The so-called _Concert_ of the Pitti Palace, which depicts a young
+Augustinian monk as he plays on a keyed instrument, having on one side
+of him a youthful cavalier in a plumed hat, on the other a bareheaded
+clerk holding a bass-viol, was, until Morelli arose, almost universally
+looked upon as one of the most typical Giorgiones.[31] The most gifted
+of the purely aesthetic critics who have approached the Italian
+Renaissance, Walter Pater, actually built round this _Concert_ his
+exquisite study on the School of Giorgione. There can be little doubt,
+notwithstanding, that Morelli was right in denying the authorship of
+Barbarelli, and tentatively, for he does no more, assigning the so
+subtly attractive and pathetic _Concert_ to the early time of Titian. To
+express a definitive opinion on the latter point in the present state of
+the picture would be somewhat hazardous. The portrait of the modish
+young cavalier and that of the staid elderly clerk, whose baldness
+renders tonsure impossible--that is just those portions of the canvas
+which are least well preserved--are also those that least conclusively
+suggest our master. The passion-worn, ultra-sensitive physiognomy of the
+young Augustinian is, undoubtedly, in its very essence a Giorgionesque
+creation, for the fellows of which we must turn to the Castelfranco
+master's just now cited _Antonio Broccardo_, to his male portraits in
+Berlin and at the Uffizi, to his figure of the youthful Pallas, son of
+Evander, in the _Three Philosophers_. Closer to it, all the same, are
+the _Raffo_ and the two portraits in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and
+closer still is the supremely fine _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the Salon
+Carre, that later production of Vecelli's early time. The _Concert_ of
+the Pitti, so far as it can be judged through the retouches that cover
+it, displays an art certainly not finer or more delicate, but yet in its
+technical processes broader, swifter, and more synthetic than anything
+that we can with certainty point to in the life-work of Barbarelli. The
+large but handsome and flexible hands of the player are much nearer in
+type and treatment to Titian than they are to his master. The beautiful
+motive--music for one happy moment uniting by invisible bonds of
+sympathy three human beings--is akin to that in the _Three Ages_, though
+there love steps in as the beautifier of rustic harmony. It is to be
+found also in Giorgione's _Concert Champetre_, in the Louvre, in which
+the thrumming of the lute is, however, one among many delights appealing
+to the senses. This smouldering heat, this tragic passion in which youth
+revels, looking back already with discontent, yet forward also with
+unquenchable yearning, is the keynote of the Giorgionesque and the early
+Titianesque male portraiture. It is summed up by the _Antonio Broccardo_
+of the first, by the _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the second. Altogether
+other, and less due to a reaction from physical ardour, is the exquisite
+sensitiveness of Lorenzo Lotto, who sees most willingly in his sitters
+those qualities that are in the closest sympathy with his own
+highly-strung nature, and loves to present them as some secret,
+indefinable woe tears at their heart-strings. A strong element of the
+Giorgionesque pathos informs still and gives charm to the Sciarra
+_Violin-Player_ of Sebastiano del Piombo; only that there it is already
+tempered by the haughty self-restraint more proper to Florentine and
+Roman portraiture. There is little or nothing to add after this as to
+the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, except that as a representation of
+aristocratic youth it has hardly a parallel among the master's works
+except, perhaps, a later and equally admirable, though less
+distinguished, portrait in the Pitti.
+
+[Illustration: From a Photograph by Brauen Clement & Cie. Walter L.
+Colls. ph. sc.
+
+Jeune Homme au gant]
+
+[Illustration: _A Concert. Probably by Titian. Pitti Palace, Florence.
+From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of the
+Venetians, painted in the _pensieroso_ mood his portraits of high-bred
+English cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest manhood,
+was this particular aspect of youth in its flower again depicted with
+the same felicity.[32]
+
+To Crowe and Cavalcaselle's pages the reader must be referred for a
+detailed and interesting account of Titian's intrigues against the
+venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office of
+broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. We see there how,
+on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo
+proposed to Titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the
+Tenth (Giovanni de' Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such a
+step. Titian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds to
+petition the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker's patent for
+life, on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions as
+are conceded to Giovanni Bellini. The petition is presented on the 31st
+of May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that day moves and carries a
+resolution accepting Titian's offer with all the conditions attached.
+Though he has arrived at the extreme limit of his splendid career, old
+Gian Bellino, who has just given new proof of his still transcendent
+power in the great altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), which
+is in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit still
+under the encroachments of his dangerous competitor, younger than
+himself by half a century. On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Ten
+revokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares that
+Titian is not to receive his broker's patent on the first vacancy, but
+must wait his turn. Seemingly nothing daunted, Titian petitions again,
+asking for the reversion of the particular broker's patent which will
+become vacant on the death of Giovanni Bellini; and this new offer,
+which stipulates for certain special payments and provisions, is
+accepted by the Council. Titian, like most other holders of the
+much-coveted office, shows himself subsequently much more eager to
+receive its not inconsiderable emoluments than to finish the pictures,
+the painting of which is the one essential duty attached to the office.
+Some further bargaining takes place with the Council on the 18th of
+January 1516, but, a few days after the death of Giovanni Bellini at the
+end of November in the same year, fresh resolutions are passed
+postponing the grant to Titian of Bellini's patent; notwithstanding
+which, there is conclusive evidence of a later date to show that he is
+allowed the full enjoyment of his "Senseria in Fontego di Tedeschi"
+(_sic_), with all its privileges and immunities, before the close of
+this same year, 1516.
+
+[Illustration: _Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a
+Photograph by Hanfstaengl_.]
+
+It is in this year that Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, and
+entered into relations with Alfonso I., which were to become more
+intimate as the position of the master became greater and more
+universally recognised in Italy. It was here, as we may safely assume,
+that he completed, or, it may be, repaired, Giovanni Bellini's last
+picture, the great _Bacchanal_ or _Feast of the Gods on Earth_, now at
+Alnwick Castle. It is there that he obtained the commission for two
+famous works, the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, designed, in
+continuation of the series commenced with Bellini's _Feast of the Gods_,
+to adorn a favourite apartment in Alfonso's castle of Ferrara; the
+series being completed a little later on by that crown and climax of the
+whole set, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the National Gallery.
+
+Bellini appears in an unfamiliar phase in this final production of his
+magnificent old age, on which the signature, together with the date,
+1514, so carefully noted by Vasari, is still most distinctly to be read.
+Much less Giorgionesque--if the term be in this case permissible--and
+more Quattrocentist in style than in the immediately preceding
+altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, he is here hardly less
+interesting. All admirers of his art are familiar with the four
+beautiful _Allegories_ of the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Venice,
+which constitute, besides the present picture, almost his sole excursion
+into the regions of pagan mythology and symbolism. These belong,
+however, to a considerably earlier period of his maturity, and show a
+fire which in the _Bacchanal_ has died out.[33] Vasari describes this
+_Bacchanal_ as "one of the most beautiful works ever executed by Gian
+Bellino," and goes on to remark that it has in the draperies "a certain
+angular (or cutting) quality in accordance with the German style." He
+strangely attributes this to an imitation of Duerer's _Rosenkranzfest_,
+painted some eight years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo,
+adjacent to the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. This particularity, noted by the
+author of the _Vite_, and, in some passages, a certain hardness and
+opacity of colour, give rise to the surmise that, even in the parts of
+the picture which belong to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti may be
+traced. It was he who most probably painted the background and the
+figure of St. Jerome in the master's altar-piece finished in the
+preceding year for S. Giovanni Crisostomo; it was he, too, who to a
+great extent executed, though he cannot have wholly devised, the
+Bellinesque _Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints_ in the Church of San
+Pietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period. Even in
+the _Madonna_ of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian Bellino's
+finest landscape of the late time, certain hardnesses of colour in the
+main group suggest the possibility of a minor co-operation by Basaiti.
+Some passages of the _Bacchanal_, however--especially the figures of the
+two blond, fair-breasted goddesses or nymphs who, in a break in the
+trees, stand relieved against the yellow bands of a sunset sky--are as
+beautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase has
+produced up to the date of the picture's appearance. Very suggestive of
+Bellini is the way in which the hair of some of the personages is
+dressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced by
+artificial means. These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in his
+earliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid.
+Still this coiffure--for as such it must be designated--is to be found
+more or less throughout the master's career. It is very noticeable in
+the _Allegories_ just mentioned.
+
+[Illustration: _Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a
+Photograph by Spooner & Co._]
+
+Infinitely pathetic is the old master's vain attempt to infuse into the
+chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires. An
+atmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously betraying
+life-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like fire
+through the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and Titian. The
+audacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rustic
+festival, in which the gods unbend and, after the homelier fashion of
+mortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, it
+would seem, only _pour la forme_. A careful examination of the picture
+substantially confirms Vasari's story that the _Feast of the Gods_ was
+painted upon by Titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in many
+passages a Titianesque hand. It may well be, at the same time, that
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what the
+younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the
+elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left
+unfinished by him. The whole conception, the _charpente_, the contours
+of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are the
+carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the
+branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of the
+picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground with
+its small pebbles.[34] Even the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a
+castle sunset-lit--so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and
+its castle--is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution. By
+Titian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that might be taken to
+betray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, the
+cloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, the
+upper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to the
+right. If it is Titian that we have here, as certainly appears most
+probable, he cannot be deemed to have exerted his full powers in
+completing or developing the Bellinesque landscape. The task may well,
+indeed, have presented itself to him as an uninviting one. There is
+nothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the
+exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacred
+and Profane Love_, while the broader handling suggests rather the
+technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which
+opens out in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The "Worship of Venus" and "Bacchanal" Place in Art of the
+"Assunta"--The "Bacchus and Ariadne"--So-called Portraits of Alfonso of
+Ferrara and Laura Dianti--The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia--Altar-pieces
+at Ancona and in the Vatican--The "Entombment" of the Louvre--The
+"Madonna di Casa Pesaro"--Place among Titian's works of "St. Peter
+Martyr."
+
+
+In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosto
+brought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_.[35] A
+greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters
+been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's career,
+when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being
+as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that
+in the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, we
+have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who
+infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian
+Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in
+their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very
+pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process
+of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from a
+broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and
+unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation
+to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous
+eccentricity.
+
+[Illustration: _The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a
+Photograph by Braun, Clement, & Cie_.]
+
+In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behind
+already the fresh morning of Titian's genius, represented by the
+Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its
+bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some
+evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more
+delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_
+might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of
+Venus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, a
+renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman
+Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the
+Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of
+paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but
+by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the
+author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the
+Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named
+the "Townley Venus" and the "Venus d'Arles"--myriads of Loves sport,
+kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them
+shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer
+is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the
+life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the
+splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner)
+dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of the
+angelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the
+Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly
+beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North,
+in touch with the South, as Albrecht Duerer, Mabuse, and Jacob
+Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred
+works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier
+and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To
+say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish
+sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at
+their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in
+similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.[37]
+
+The sumptuous _Bacchanal_, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave the
+commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a less
+delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From
+certain points of analogy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus,
+it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation of
+the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus,
+whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus is,
+however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honour
+to the god, Ariadne's new lover. The revel in a certain audacious
+abandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists have
+retired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certain
+agreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of the
+Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic statues
+then, and until lately, entitled _The Sleeping Ariadne_, does not lead
+the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so
+lately won back from despair. The undraped figure,[38] both in its
+attitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped
+Bacchante, or goddess, in Bellini's _Bacchanal_ at Alnwick. Titian's
+lovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio's
+dazzling _Antiope_ in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's _Venus_ or
+Titian's own _Antiope_, in which a certain feminine dignity
+spiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise
+defenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively Titianesque
+colour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbed
+dancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to the
+spectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we find
+again in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture,
+and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the _Entombment_.
+
+The charming little _Tambourine Player_, which is No. 181 in the Vienna
+Gallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works just
+now described, but rather before than after them.
+
+What that is new remains to be said about the _Assunta_, or _Assumption
+of the Virgin_, which was ordered of Titian as early as 1516, but not
+shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until the
+20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetian
+altar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had and
+what had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the world.
+Thus Raphael had produced the _Stanze_, the _Cartoons_, the _Madonnas of
+Foligno_ and _San Sisto_, but not yet the _Transfiguration;_
+Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his _magnum opus_, the
+Ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four years
+earlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata in
+Florence. Among painters whom, origin notwithstanding, we must group as
+Venetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri at
+S. Maria Formosa his famous _Santa Barbara_; Lorenzo Lotto in the
+following year had produced his characteristic and, in its charm of
+fluttering movement, strangely unconventional altar-piece for S.
+Bartolommeo at Bergamo, the _Madonna with Ten Saints_. In none of these
+masterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen by
+Titian, which was far from being the case, was there any help to be
+derived in the elaboration of a work which cannot be said to have had
+any precursor in the art of Venice. There was in existence one
+altar-piece dealing with the same subject from which Titian might
+possibly have obtained a hint. This was the _Assumption of the Virgin_
+painted by Duerer in 1509 for Jacob Heller, and now only known by Paul
+Juvenel's copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort. The group of the
+Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and
+the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its
+fine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art. Without exercising a
+too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact
+between this group and the corresponding one in the _Assunta_. But
+Titian could not at that time have seen the original of the Heller
+altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it
+remained for a century.[39] He no doubt did see the _Assumption_ in the
+_Marienleben_ completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands in a
+definite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more
+formal--much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The
+_Assunta_ was already in Vasari's time much dimmed, and thus difficult
+to see in its position on the high altar. Joshua Reynolds, when he
+visited the Frari in 1752, says that "he saw it near; it was most
+terribly dark but nobly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle Belle
+Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, but sufficiently
+restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the
+greatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre,
+passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well
+adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly
+contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is
+triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and
+awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of
+which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the
+Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling
+of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with
+awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in
+her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and
+not without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which
+her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the
+climax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous,
+more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure
+in the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual
+character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.
+
+[Illustration: _The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice_.]
+
+Placed as the _Assunta_ now is in the immediate neighbourhood of one of
+Tintoretto's best-preserved masterpieces, the _Miracolo del Schiavo_, it
+undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern
+connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely
+triumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual,
+more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that
+unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its
+agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right
+to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his
+subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above
+the earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, in
+unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in
+poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian
+stands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it were
+necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the
+life-work of the other--making the world the poorer by the loss of
+Titian or Tintoretto--can it be doubted for a moment what the choice
+would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face
+with the mighty genius of the latter?
+
+But to return for a moment to the _Assunta_. The enlargement of
+dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group
+of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It
+carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable,
+without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime
+beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank
+with the finest of those in Raphael's _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in a
+higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of
+vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is
+the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not
+always the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhere
+adhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overrated
+last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. Titian himself
+in the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia, and above all in the much-vaunted
+masterpiece, _The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_, sins in the
+same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his
+better self.
+
+Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, and
+only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possession
+of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.[40]
+What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer
+opposition at the outset. In this case the public, admitted on the high
+festival of St. Bernardino's Day in the year 1518 to see the vast panel,
+showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than
+the friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de' Frari,
+and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology to
+the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against
+the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian's wonderful
+achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.
+
+To the year 1519 belongs the _Annunciation_ in the Cathedral of Treviso,
+the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly
+overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits
+the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the
+foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely
+ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the
+beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to
+the Florentines and the Sienese--both sculptors and painters--south of
+the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of
+the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in the
+Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto's pathetic
+_Annunciation_ at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appear
+dignified by comparison. Titian's own _Annunciation_, bequeathed to the
+Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up
+on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and
+appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better
+known picture.
+
+[Illustration: _The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a
+Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso's Duchess,--the
+passive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character
+has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,--our
+master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we
+are told, the finished _Bacchanal_, already described above. He appears
+to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early part
+of 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed at
+Ferrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our _Bacchus and
+Ariadne_, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture too
+late in the earlier section of Vecelli's work, though, with all its
+freshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a further
+advance on the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, and must be
+deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the _Feast of the Gods_
+of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of Titian already described
+our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time has
+not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of the
+golden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the
+_Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ the allegiance to Giorgiono has
+been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the naivete remains, but not the
+infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the _Bacchus and
+Ariadne_ Titian's genius flames up with an intensity of passion such as
+will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of
+this class. Certainly, with all the beauties of the _Venuses_, of the
+_Diana and Actaeon_, the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, we
+descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance,
+though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its
+power to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the
+_Venere del Pardo_ of the Louvre and the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna,
+is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier
+times, with its exquisite naivete and mitigated sensuousness.
+
+[Illustration: _Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph
+published by the Autotype Company._]
+
+The _Bacchus and Ariadne_ is a Titian which even the Louvre, the Museum
+of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in our master's
+works, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most
+readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are interested
+in Italian art. This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or
+subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose
+_Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ he followed with a closeness which did
+not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of
+the subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that had
+animated the original. How is it possible to better express the _At
+parte ex alia florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoque
+incensus amore_ of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager
+movement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian? Or to
+paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines: _Horum pars
+tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra
+iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant_? Ariadne's crown of
+stars--the _Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona_ of the
+poem--shines in Titian's sky with a sublime radiance which corresponds
+perfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, of
+Catullus. The splendour of the colour in this piece--hardly equalled in
+its happy audacity, save by the _Madonna del Coniglio_ or _Vierge au
+Lapin_ of the Louvre,[41] would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, did
+the prescribed limits of space admit of such an indulgence. Even here,
+however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the delights
+of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his
+imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic
+harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the
+sake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those
+Veronese transformed into Venetians--Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari;
+or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the
+more violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the
+mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With Titian the
+highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment,
+are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in
+the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be
+considered the supreme exponent.
+
+The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carre of the Louvre now known as
+_Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti_, but in the collection of
+Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, _Titian's
+Mistress after the Life_, comes in very well at this stage. The
+exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound
+hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities
+inspired by Giorgione--the loveliest of all in some respects, the most
+consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still
+to the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue,
+myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole
+enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here
+and there with gleams of light. Vasari described how Titian painted,
+_ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d' artiglieria_, the
+Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who
+afterwards became the wife of the duke, _che e opera stupenda_. It is
+upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between
+the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid
+_donna_ and the _Alfonso of Ferrara_ of the Museo del Prado, that the
+popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably,
+like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a
+lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, the
+accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,[42] comes forward
+with convincing arguments to show that the handsome _insouciant_
+personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in Titian's
+picture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has hitherto been almost
+universally assumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be his
+son, Ercole II. This alone invalidates the favourite designation of the
+Louvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the
+"stupendous" portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari. A
+comparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_
+of Castle Howard--a famous portrait by Titian of a gentleman holding a
+hawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at the
+recent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery--results in something like
+certainty that in both is the same personage portrayed. It is not only
+that the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are the
+same in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree exceedingly
+well; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same impression
+of splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused. This
+means that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the gracious
+Ercole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the Castle
+Howard picture is Alfonso's son and successor portrayed. In the latter
+canvas, which bears, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the later
+signature "Titianus F.," the personage is, it may be, a year or two
+older. Let it be borne in mind that only on the _back_ of the canvas is,
+or rather was, to be found the inscription: "Georgius Cornelius, frater
+Catterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (_sic_)," upon the authority of
+which it bears its present designation.
+
+The altar-piece, _The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St.
+Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor_, now in San Domenico, but formerly in
+San Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature "Titianus
+Cadorinus pinsit," this being about the first instance in which the
+later spelling "Titianus" appears. If as a pictorial achievement it
+cannot rank with the San Niccolo and the Pesaro altar-pieces, it
+presents some special points of interest which make it easily
+distinguishable from these. The conception is marked by a peculiar
+intensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, and
+hardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type. It reveals a
+passionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which one
+expects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in Titian, whose dramatic
+force is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well under
+control. The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter was
+acquainted with Raphael's _Madonna di Foligno_; but it is dramatic and
+real where the Urbinate's masterpiece was lofty and symbolical. Still
+Titian's St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in steadfastness
+and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the
+humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento
+altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a
+master of the full Renaissance. An improved version of the upper portion
+of the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in the
+clouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccolo altar-piece.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS.
+Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the Papal
+Legate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Church
+of SS. Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style and
+sentiment. The _St. Sebastian_ presently to be referred to, constituting
+the right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,[43]
+and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent of
+Duke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure the
+much-talked-of piece for his master. Titian succumbed to an offer of
+sixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first nor
+the last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side of
+his character. But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemy
+of the Legate, drew back and left to Titian the discredit without the
+profit of the transaction. The central compartment of the Brescia
+altar-piece presents _The Resurrection_, the upper panels on the left
+and right show together the _Annunciation_, the lower left panel depicts
+the patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor,
+Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous _St. Sebastian_[44] in
+the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch.
+The _St. Sebastian_ is neither more nor less than the magnificent
+academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to
+bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his
+splendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in the
+beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting
+the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide gulf indeed separates the
+mood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposeful
+charm of the Giorgionesque saint in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, or the
+healthy realism of the unconcerned _St. Sebastian_ in the S. Niccolo
+altar-piece. Here, as later on with the _St. Peter Martyr_, those who
+admire in Venetian art in general, and in that of Titian in particular,
+its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature,
+must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by a
+conception in its very essence artificial. Yet, brought face to face
+with the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, and
+against their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth and
+richness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling and
+painting.[45] Analogies have been drawn between the _Medicean Faun_ and
+the _St. Sebastian_, chiefly on account of the strained position of
+the arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue and
+the painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance,
+notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laocoon
+in the world-famous group of the Vatican. Of this a model had been made
+by Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast was
+kept in Titian's workshop, from which he is said to have studied.
+
+[Illustration: DESIGN FOR A HOLY FAMILY. CHATSWORTH. _From a photograph
+by Braun, Clement & Cie_.]
+
+[Illustration: _La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre. From a Photograph by
+Neurdein._]
+
+In the _Madonna di S. Niccolo_, which was painted or rather finished in
+the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccolo de'
+Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is
+suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not extravagance
+of technique. The composition must have had much greater unity before
+the barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of the
+circular top which it had in common with the _Assunta_, the Ancona, and
+the Pesaro altar-pieces. Technically superior to the second of these
+great works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action and
+sentiment, by no such passionate identification of the artist with his
+subject. It is only in passing from one of its beauties to another that
+its artistic worth can be fully appreciated. Then we admire the rapt
+expression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the _St.
+Nicholas_,[46] the mansuetude of the _St. Francis_, the Venetian
+loveliness of the _St. Catherine_, the palpitating life of the _St.
+Sebastian_. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump
+young gondolier stripped and painted as he was--contemplating, if
+anything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, _ritratto
+dal' vivo e senza artificio niuno_. The royal saint of Alexandria is a
+sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning
+elaboration of coiffure, to the _St. Catherine_ of the _Madonna del
+Coniglio_, and the not dissimilar figure in our own _Holy Family with
+St. Catherine_ at the National Gallery.
+
+The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with the
+infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in the
+Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge's private apartments to the Senate
+Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as we
+know, Titian's first performance as a _frescante_ since the completion,
+twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of Padua.
+As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and
+brilliant in colour for a fresco, very fairly preserved--deserving, in
+fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, the
+rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the subject
+is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of
+personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly
+transforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is
+greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened
+with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.
+Even the colossal, half-effaced _St. Christopher with the Infant
+Christ_, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the Town
+Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.
+
+[Illustration: _St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the
+Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]
+
+Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the
+_Entombment_ of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other than
+altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded
+which belongs to the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ among purely secular
+subjects? It was in 1523 that Titian acquired a new and illustrious
+patron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son of
+that most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d'Este
+Gonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara. The _Entombment_ being a
+"Mantua piece,"[47] Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally assumed
+that it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as some
+correspondence published by them goes to show, it must have been painted
+at, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523. Judging entirely by the
+style and technical execution of the canvas itself, the writer feels
+strongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years or
+thereabouts--that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closely
+following upon that in which the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_
+were painted. Mature as Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for the
+last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were
+saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type
+and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea
+has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the _Assunta_,
+the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such
+as we meet with in the _Bacchanal_. The Magdalen, with her features
+distorted by grief, resembles--allowing for the necessary differences
+imposed by the situation--the women making offering to the love-goddess
+in the _Worship of Venus_. The figure of the Virgin, on the other hand,
+enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a type
+which would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and his
+school. To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the
+_Entombment_, without by dissection killing it, is a task of difficulty.
+What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye and
+enthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, is
+perhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, of
+informing sentiment. Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection of
+the two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace--the
+well-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to accentuate
+the mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, bound
+together by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from them
+communicates itself, as it were, to the beholder. In the colouring,
+while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a whole,
+each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily asserting, its own
+splendour and its own special significance. And yet the yellow of the
+Magdalen's dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier the
+embrowned flesh of sturdy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson of
+Nicodemus's garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling white
+of the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of the
+Virgin's robe, combine less to produce the impression of great pictorial
+magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous
+tragedy.
+
+Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge's
+chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about
+the altar,[48] with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the
+kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the
+altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.
+
+[Illustration: _The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de'
+Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya_.]
+
+The _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, which Titian finished in 1526, after
+having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the
+masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of
+exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at the
+Frari, the _Assunta_. For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pomp
+and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite
+sufficient _vraisemblance_, of divine and sacred with real personages,
+it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its class. And yet,
+apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties
+overcome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole,
+many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than we
+should care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a more
+splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand.
+It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and less
+interesting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virgin
+and Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by an
+invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed
+crowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's
+_Castelfranco Madonna_, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud in
+their humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of
+Paphos (Baffo), at their head. The natural tie that should unite the
+sacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power to
+impress, is thus greatly diminished, and we are dangerously near to a
+condition in which they become merely grand conventional figures in a
+decorative ensemble of the higher order. To analyse the general scheme
+or the details of the glorious colour-harmony, which has survived so
+many drastic renovations and cleanings, is not possible on this
+occasion, or indeed necessary. The magic of bold and subtle chiaroscuro
+is obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two gigantic
+pillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in the
+main, but illuminated above and below by the light emanating from the
+divine putti; the boldest feature in the scheme is the striking
+cinnamon-yellow mantle of St. Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, the
+two boldly contrasting with the magnificent dark-red and gold banner of
+the Borgias crowned with the olive branch Peace.[49] This is an
+unexpected note of the most stimulating effect, which braces the
+spectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness. Thus, too, Titian
+went to work in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_--giving forth a single clarion
+note in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos. The writer
+is unable to accept as from the master's own hand the unfinished _Virgin
+and Child_ which, at the Uffizi, generally passes for the preliminary
+sketch of the central group in the Pesaro altar-piece. The original
+sketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in the
+Albertina at Vienna. The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds a
+like original study for the kneeling Baffo.
+
+[Illustration: SKETCH FOR THE MADONNA DI CASA PESARO. ALBERTINA, VIENNA.
+_From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie_.]
+
+[Illustration: Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engraving
+by Henri Laurent.]
+
+By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the placing
+of Titian's world-renowned _Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_ on the
+altar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one of
+the most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity. On
+the 16th of August 1867--one of the blackest of days in the calendar for
+the lover of Venetian art--the _St. Peter Martyr_ was burnt in the
+Cappella del Rosario of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of
+Giovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the _Virgin and Child with
+Saints and Angels_, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had caused
+the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during
+the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Now
+the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their
+estimate of the _St. Peter Martyr_ from the numerous existing copies and
+prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the
+picture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impression
+may, under the circumstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well be
+more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist by
+a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has
+conceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had the
+good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the
+marvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselle
+minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by
+the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape,
+in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance
+falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above--with its single
+startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore,
+with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the
+composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing,
+notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the
+overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and
+unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its
+Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing
+influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months
+at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who,
+returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had
+remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the
+exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of
+passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it
+culminated in the _Transfiguration_? All through the wonderful career of
+the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entombment_, and going on
+through the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency to
+consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a
+pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Much
+less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the _Stanze_
+and the _Cartoons_, in which true dramatic significance and the
+sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The
+_Transfiguration_ itself is, however, the most crying example of the
+reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In it
+are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if we
+take them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two
+failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same frame.
+Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here
+stifled. In the _St. Peter Martyr_ the tremendous figure of the
+attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all
+fluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based on
+nothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied
+attitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In the
+same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in
+the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and
+conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for
+the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all
+the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the _dramatis personae_
+of the gruesome scene--extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense
+effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that
+can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must
+ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come face
+to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the _St.
+Sebastian_ of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the magic
+of the painter _par excellence_ would assert itself. Very curiously it
+is not any more less contemporary copy--least of all that by Ludovico
+Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS.
+Giovanni e Paolo--that gives this impression that Titian in the original
+would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work. The
+best notion of the _St. Peter Martyr_ is, so far as the writer is aware,
+to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which
+hangs in the great hall of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Even
+through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties, especially
+in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without
+further carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and, criticism
+notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who,
+perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower
+rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be
+discovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la piu compiuta, la
+piu celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, la
+quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor mai_.
+
+[Illustration: _Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a
+Photograph by Anderson_.]
+
+It was after a public competition between Titian, Palma, and Pordenone,
+instituted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the great
+commission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at the
+end of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. Of
+Pordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finished
+drawing of the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_ in the Uffizi, which is either
+by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any
+rate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem in
+some respects, as compared with Titian's astonishing performance, it
+represents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime in
+its gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitely
+touching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, still
+asserts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to be
+preliminary sketches for the _St. Peter Martyr_ are: a pen-and-ink
+sketch in the Louvre showing the assassin chasing the companion of the
+victim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at the
+saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet
+thumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actual
+massacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is the
+drawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives the
+impression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by Titian
+for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, _A Nobleman murdering his Wife_,
+which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
+of Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writer
+feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of Titian
+himself.[50]
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's Bilder zu
+Roemischen Heldengedichten" (_Jahrbuch der Koeniglich Preussischen
+Kunstsammlungen_: Sechzehnter Band, I. Heft) has most ingeniously, and
+upon what may be deemed solid grounds, renamed this most Giorgionesque
+of all Giorgiones after an incident in the _Thebaid_ of Statius,
+_Adrastus and Hypsipyle_. He gives reasons which may be accepted as
+convincing for entitling the _Three Philosophers_, after a familiar
+incident in Book viii. of the _Aeneid_, "Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas
+contemplating the Rock of the Capitol." His not less ingenious
+explanation of Titian's _Sacred and Profane Love_ will be dealt with a
+little later on. These identifications are all-important, not only in
+connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first
+time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of
+Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of
+the Venetian idyll generally.
+
+[2] For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto's portraits and a
+sustained analysis of his art generally, Mr. Bernard Berenson's _Lorenzo
+Lotto_ should be consulted. See also M. Emile Michel's article, "Les
+Portraits de Lorenzo Lotto," in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, 1896, vol.
+i.
+
+[3] For these and other particulars of the childhood of Titian, see
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate _Life and Times of Titian_ (second
+edition, 1881), in which are carefully summarised all the general and
+local authorities on the subject.
+
+[4] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 29.
+
+[5] _Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden_, p. 75.
+
+[6] Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian school of
+art than as a Venetian painter of the late time) expressly states that
+Palma came young to Venice and learnt much from Titan: "_C' egli apprese
+certa dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere prime dello stesso
+Tiziano_" (Lermolieff: _Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden_).
+
+[7] Vasari, _Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco_.
+
+[8] One of these is a description of wedding festivities presided over
+by the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other guests from the
+capital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and three ladies. This
+gentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell upon, and embroider
+in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the love of man for woman.
+A subject this which, transposed into an atmosphere at once more frankly
+sensuous and of a higher spirituality, might well have served as the
+basis for such a picture as Giorgione's _Fete Champetre_ in the Salon
+Carre of the Louvre!
+
+[9] _Magazine of Art_, July 1895.
+
+[10] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 111.
+
+[11] Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects, taken
+after his execution, as _Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo (Borgia) his
+son_.
+
+[12] _La Vie et l'Oeuvre du Titien_, 1887.
+
+[13] The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the picture,
+"Ritratto di uno di Casa Pesaro in Venetia che fu fatto generale di Sta
+chiesa. Titiano fecit," is unquestionably of much later date than the
+work itself. The cartellino is entirely out of perspective with the
+marble floor to which it is supposed to adhere. The part of the
+background showing the galleys of Pesaro's fleet is so coarsely
+repainted that the original touch cannot be distinguished. The form
+"Titiano" is not to be found in any authentic picture by Vecelli.
+"Ticianus," and much more rarely "Tician," are the forms for the earlier
+time; "Titianus" is, as a rule, that of the later time. The two forms
+overlap in certain instances to be presently mentioned.
+
+[14] Kugler's _Italian Schools of Painting_, re-edited by Sir Henry
+Layard.
+
+[15] Marcantonio Michiel, who saw this _Baptism_ in the year 1531 in the
+house of M. Zuanne Ram at S. Stefano in Venice, thus describes it: "La
+tavola del S. Zuane che battezza Cristo nel Giordano, che e nel fiume
+insino alle ginocchia, con el bel paese, ed esso M. Zuanne Ram ritratto
+sino al cinto, e con la schena contro li spettatori, fu de man de
+Tiziano" (_Notizia d' Opere di Disegno_, pubblicata da J. Jacopo
+Morelli, Ed. Frizzoni, 1884).
+
+[16] This picture having been brought to completion in 1510, and Cima's
+great altar-piece with the same subject, behind the high-altar in the
+Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being dated 1494, the
+inference is irresistible that in this case the head of the school
+borrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has always been
+looked upon as one of his close followers. In size, in distribution, in
+the arrangement and characterisation of the chief groups, the two
+altar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a merely accidental
+and family resemblance must be dismissed. This type of Christ, then, of
+a perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness tempering majesty, dates
+back, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred type of the elder
+master is more passionate, more human. Our own _Incredulity of St.
+Thomas_, by Cima, in the National Gallery, shows, in a much more
+perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the beautiful
+_Man of Sorrows_ in the same collection, still nominally ascribed to
+Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any rate from that
+of an artist dominated by his influence. When the life-work of the
+Conegliano master has been more closely studied in connection with that
+of his contemporaries, it will probably appear that he owes very much
+less to Bellini than it has been the fashion to assume. The idea of an
+actual subordinate co-operation with the _caposcuola_, like that of
+Bissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so many others, must be excluded. The
+earlier and more masculine work of Cima bears a definite relation to
+that of Bartolommeo Montagna.
+
+[17] The _Tobias and the Angel_ shows some curious points of contact
+with the large _Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John_ by
+Titian, in the Louvre--a work which is far from equalling the S.
+Marciliano picture throughout in quality. The beautiful head of the St.
+Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John,
+though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type and
+movement of the head. There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice a
+kind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano Titian,
+assigned by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini to
+Santo Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432). Here the adapter
+has ruined Titian's great conception by substituting his own trivial
+archangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copy
+of this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich). A reproduction of
+the Titian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of the
+present monograph (p. 99).
+
+[18] Vasari places the _Three Ages_ after the first visit to Ferrara,
+that is almost as much too late as he places the _Tobias_ of S.
+Marciliano too early. He describes its subject as "un pastore ignudo ed
+una forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni."
+
+[19] From an often-cited passage in the _Anonimo_, describing
+Giorgione's great _Venus_ now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year 1525,
+when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn that
+it was finished by Titian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda,
+che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo da
+Castelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." The
+Cupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but the
+landscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance to
+those which enframe the figures in the _Three Ages, Sacred and Profane
+Love_, and the "_Noli me tangere_" of the National Gallery. The same
+_Anonimo_ in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice a
+_Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, from the hand of Giorgone, which,
+according to him, had been retouched by Titian. It need hardly be
+pointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing in
+common with the coarse and thoroughly second-rate _Dead Christ supported
+by Child-Angels,_ still to be seen at the Monte di Pieta of Treviso. The
+engraving of a _Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, reproduced in M.
+Lafenestre's _Vie et Oeuvre du Titien_ as having possibly been derived
+from Giorgione's original, is about as unlike his work or that of Titian
+as anything in sixteenth-century Italian art could possibly be. In the
+extravagance of its mannerism it comes much nearer to the late style of
+Pordenone or to that of his imitators.
+
+[20] _Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen_, Heft I. 1895.
+
+[21] See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the _Notizia d' Opere
+di Disegno_, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione Frizzoni, 1884.
+
+[22] M. Thausing, _Wiener Kunstbriefe_, 1884.
+
+[23] _Le Meraviglie dell' Arte_.
+
+[24] The original drawing by Titian for the subject of this fresco is to
+be found among those publicly exhibited at the Ecole des Beaux Arts of
+Paris. It is in error given by Morelli as in the Malcolm Collection, and
+curiously enough M. Georges Lafenestre repeats this error in his _Vie et
+Oeuvre du Titien._ The drawing differs so essentially from the fresco
+that it can only be considered as a discarded design for it. It is in
+the style which Domenico Campagnola, in his Giorgionesque-Titianesque
+phase, so assiduously imitates.
+
+[25] One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of Titian
+is to speak of the _St. Mark_ as "una piccola tavoletta, un S. Marco a
+sedere in mezzo a certi santi."
+
+[26] In connection with this group of works, all of them belonging to
+the quite early years of the sixteenth century, there should also be
+mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet little known
+_Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist_ by Sebastiano Luciani,
+bearing the date 1510. This has recently passed into the rich collection
+of Mr. George Salting. It shows the painter admirably in his purely
+Giorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing witness that it was
+painted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco master. It groups
+therefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at S. Giovanni
+Crisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook's injured but still lovely
+_Venetian Lady as the Magdalen_ (the same ruddy blond model), and with
+the four Giorgionesque _Saints_ in the Church of S. Bartolommeo al
+Rialto.
+
+[27] _Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden_, p. 74.
+
+[28] The _Christ_ of the Pitti Gallery--a bust-figure of the Saviour,
+relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most solemn
+beauty--must date a good many years after the _Cristo della Moneta_. In
+both works the beauty of the hand is especially remarkable. The head of
+the Pitti _Christ_ in its present state might not conclusively proclaim
+its origin; but the pathetic and intensely significant landscape is one
+of Titian's loveliest.
+
+[29] Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the Royal
+Academy in 1895.
+
+[30] An ingenious suggestion was made, when the _Ariosto_ was last
+publicly exhibited, that it might be that _Portrait of a Gentleman of
+the House of Barbarigo_ which, according to Vasari, Titian painted with
+wonderful skill at the age of eighteen. The broad, masterly technique of
+the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with Vasari's
+description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no boy of
+eighteen, not even Titian, could have attained. And then Vasari's
+"giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-grey
+sleeve of this _Ariosto_, but surely a vest of satin embroidered with
+silver. The late form of signature, "Titianus F.," on the stone
+balustrade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of the
+portrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition. It seems
+likely that the balustrade bore originally only the "V" repeated, which
+curiously enough occurs also on the similar balustrade of the beautiful
+_Portrait of a young Venetian_, by Giorgione, first cited as such by
+Morelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it passed from the
+collection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P. Richter. The signature "Ticianus"
+occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the first
+period. The works in the earlier half of this first period do not appear
+to have been signed, the "Titiano F." of the _Baffo_ inscription being
+admittedly of later date. Thus that the _Cristo della Moneta_ bears the
+"Ticianus F." on the collar of the Pharisee's shirt is an additional
+argument in favour of maintaining its date as originally given by Vasari
+(1514), instead of putting it back to 1508 or thereabouts. Among a good
+many other paintings with this last signature may be mentioned the
+_Jeune Homme au Gant_ and _Vierge au Lapin_ of the Louvre; the _Madonna
+with St. Anthony Abbot_ of the Uffizi; the _Bacchus and Ariadne_, the
+_Assunta_, the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia (dated 1522). The _Virgin and
+Child with St. Catherine_ of the National Gallery, and the _Christ with
+the Pilgrims at Emmaus_ of the Louvre--neither of them early works--are
+signed "Tician." The usual signature of the later time is "Titianus F.,"
+among the first works to show it being the Ancona altar-piece and the
+great _Madonna di San Niccolo_ now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican. It
+has been incorrectly stated that the late _St. Jerome_ of the Brera
+bears the earlier signature, "Ticianus F." This is not the case. The
+signature is most distinctly "Titianus," though in a somewhat unusual
+character.
+
+[31] Crowe and Cavalcaselle describe it as a "picture which has not its
+equal in any period of Giorgione's practice" (_History of Painting in
+North Italy_, vol. ii.).
+
+[32] Among other notable portraits belonging to this early period, but
+to which within it the writer hesitates to assign an exact place, are
+the so-called _Titian's Physician Parma_, No. 167 in the Vienna Gallery;
+the first-rate _Portrait of a Young Man_ (once falsely named _Pietro
+Aretino_), No. 1111 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich; the so-called
+_Alessandro de' Medici_ in the Hampton Court Gallery. The last-named
+portrait is a work injured, no doubt, but of extraordinary force and
+conciseness in the painting, and of no less singular power in the
+characterisation of a sinister personage whose true name has not yet
+been discovered.
+
+[33] The fifth _Allegory_, representing a sphinx or chimaera--now framed
+with the rest as the centre of an ensemble--is from another and far
+inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called
+_Venus_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding the
+signature of Bellini and the date (MDXV.), by Bissolo.
+
+[34] In Bellini's share in the landscape there is not a little to remind
+the beholder of the _Death of St. Peter Martyr_ to be found in the
+Venetian room of the National Gallery, where it is still assigned to the
+great master himself, though it is beyond reasonable doubt by one of his
+late pupils or followers.
+
+[35] The enlarged second edition, with the profile portrait of Ariosto
+by Titian, did not appear until 1532. Among the additions then made were
+the often-quoted lines in which the poet, enumerating the greatest
+painters of the time, couples Titian with Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna,
+Gian Bellino, the two Dossi, Michelangelo, Sebastiano, and Raffael (33rd
+canto, 2nd ed.).
+
+[36] [Greek: Philostratou Eikonon Erotes.]
+
+[37] Let the reader, among other things of the kind, refer to Rubens's
+_Jardin a Amour_, made familiar by so many repetitions and
+reproductions, and to Van Dyck's _Madone aux Perdrix_ at the Hermitage
+(see Portfolio: _The Collections of Charles I._). Rubens copied, indeed,
+both the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, some time between 1601
+and 1608, when the pictures were at Rome. These copies are now in the
+Museum at Stockholm. The realistic vigour of the _Bacchanal_ proved
+particularly attractive to the Antwerp master, and he in more than one
+instance derived inspiration from it. The ultra-realistic _Bacchus
+seated on a Barrel_, in the Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg,
+contains in the chief figure a pronounced reminiscence of Titian's
+picture; while the unconventional attitude of the amorino, or Bacchic
+figure, in attendance on the god, is imitated without alteration from
+that of the little toper whose action Vasari so explicitly describes.
+
+[38] Vasari's simple description is best: "Una donna nuda che dorme,
+tanto bella che pare viva, insieme con altre figure."
+
+[39] Moritz Thausing's _Albrecht Duerer_, Zweiter Band, p. 14.
+
+[40] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 212.
+
+[41] It appears to the writer that this masterpiece of colour and
+reposeful charm, with its wonderful gleams of orange, pale turquoise,
+red, blue, and golden white, with its early signature, "Ticianus F.,"
+should be placed not later than this period. Crowe and Cavalcaselle
+assign it to the year 1530, and hold it to be the _Madonna with St.
+Catherine_, mentioned in a letter of that year written by Giacomo
+Malatesta to Federigo Gonzaga at Mantua. Should not this last picture be
+more properly identified with our own superb _Madonna and Child with St.
+John and St. Catherine_, No. 635 in the National Gallery, the style of
+which, notwithstanding the rather Giorgionesque type of the girlish
+Virgin, shows further advance in a more sweeping breadth and a larger
+generalisation? The latter, as has already been noted, is signed
+"Tician."
+
+[42] "Tizian und Alfons von Este," _Jahrbuch der Koeniglich Preussischen
+Kunstsammlungen_, Fuenfzehnter Band, II. Heft, 1894.
+
+[43] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.
+237-240.
+
+[44] On the circular base of the column upon which the warrior-saint
+rests his foot is the signature "Ticianus faciebat MDXXII." This, taken
+in conjunction with the signature "Titianus" on the Ancona altar-piece
+painted in 1520, tends to show that the line of demarcation between the
+two signatures cannot be absolutely fixed.
+
+[45] Lord Wemyss possesses a repetition, probably from Titian's
+workshop, of the _St. Sebastian_, slightly smaller than the Brescia
+original. This cannot have been the picture catalogued by Vanderdoort as
+among Charles I.'s treasures, since the latter, like the earliest
+version of the _St. Sebastian_, preceding the definitive work, showed
+the saint tied not to a tree, but to a column, and in it the group of
+St. Roch and the Angel was replaced by the figures of two archers
+shooting.
+
+[46] Ridolfi, followed in this particular by Crowe and Cavalcaselle,
+sees in the upturned face of the _St. Nicholas_ a reflection of that of
+Laocoon in the Vatican group.
+
+[47] It passed with the rest of the Mantua pictures into the collection
+of Charles I., and was after his execution sold by the Commonwealth to
+the banker and dealer Jabach for L120. By the latter it was made over to
+Louis XIV., together with many other masterpieces acquired in the same
+way.
+
+[48] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.
+298, 299.
+
+[49] The victory over the Turks here commemorated was won by Baffo in
+the service of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI., some twenty-three years
+before. This gives a special significance to the position in the picture
+of St. Peter, who, with the keys at his feet, stands midway between the
+Bishop and the Virgin. We have seen Baffo in one of Titian's earliest
+works (_circa_ 1503) recommended to St. Peter by Alexander VI. just
+before his departure for this same expedition.
+
+[50] It has been impossible in the first section of these remarks upon
+the work of the master of Cadore to go into the very important question
+of the drawings rightly and wrongly ascribed to him. Some attempt will
+be made in the second section, to be entitled _The Later Work of
+Titian_, to deal summarily with this branch of the subject, which has
+been placed on a more solid basis since Giovanni Morelli disentangled
+the genuine landscape drawings of the master from those of Domenico
+Campagnola, and furnished a firm basis for further study.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+"Alfonso d'Este and Laura Dianti" (Louvre)
+Altar-piece at Brescia
+"Annunciation, The" (Treviso)
+"Annunciation, The" (Venice)
+"Aretino, Portrait of" (Florence)
+"Ariosto, Portrait of" (Cobham Hall)
+"Assumption of the Virgin, The,"
+"Bacchanal, A,"
+"Bacchus and Ariadne" (National Gallery),
+"Baptism of Christ, The" (Rome),
+"Battle of Cadore, The"
+"Bella, La" (Florence)
+"Bishop of Paphos recommended by Alexander VI. to St. Peter, The" (Antwerp)
+
+
+"Christ at Emmaus"
+"Christ bearing the Cross" (Venice)
+"Christ between St. Andrew and St. Catherine" (Venice)
+"Charles V. at Muehlberg" (Madrid)
+"Concert, A" (Florence)
+"Cornaro, Portrait of" (Castle Howard)
+"Cristo della Moneta, Il" (Dresden)
+
+
+"Death of St. Peter Martyr, The"
+"Diana and Actaeon"
+"Diana and Calisto"
+
+
+"Entombment, The" (Louvre)
+
+
+"Feast of the Gods, The" (Alnwick Castle)
+"Flora" (Florence)
+Fresco of St. Christopher in the Doge's Palace
+Frescoes in the Scuola del Santo, Padua
+Frescoes on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, Venice
+
+
+"Herodias"
+"Holy Family" (Bridgewater Gallery)
+"Holy Family with St. Catherine" (National Gallery)
+
+
+"Jupiter and Antiope" (Louvre)
+
+
+"Madonna di Casa Pesaro, The" (Venice)
+"Madonna di San Niccolo, The" (Rome)
+"Man, Portrait of a" (Munich)
+"Man in Black, The" (Louvre)
+"Man of Sorrows, The" (Venice)
+"Man with the Glove, The" (Louvre)
+"Medici, Portrait of Ippolito de'"
+
+
+"Noli me tangere" (National Gallery)
+"Nymph and Shepherd" (Vienna)
+
+
+"Philip II., Portrait of"
+"Pieta" (Milan)
+
+
+"Rape of Europa, The"
+
+
+"Sacred and Profane Love" (Rome)
+"Sacred Conversation, A" (Chantilly)
+"Sacred Conversation, A" (Florence)
+"St. Mark enthroned, with four other Saints" (Venice)
+"St. Sebastian": see _Altar-piece at Brescia_
+
+
+"Tambourine-Player, The" (Vienna)
+"Three Ages, The" (Bridgewater Gallery)
+"Tobias and the Angel" (Venice)
+"Tribute-Money, The": see _Cristo della Moneta_
+"Triumph of Faith, The"
+
+
+"Vanitas" (Munich)
+"Venere del Pardo": see _Jupiter and Antiope_
+"Virgin and Child" (Mr. R.H. Benson)
+"Virgin and Child" (Florence)
+"Virgin and Child" (St. Petersburg)
+"Virgin and Child" (Vienna): see _Zingarella, La_
+"Virgin and Child with Saints" (Captain Holford)
+"Virgin and Child with four Saints" (Dresden)
+"Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot"
+   (Florence)
+"Virgin and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd" (National Gallery)
+"Virgin and Child with Saints, Angels, and a Donor" (Ancona)
+"Virgin and Child with SS. Stephen, Ambrose, and Maurice" (Louvre)
+"Virgin and Child with SS. Ulphus and Bridget" (Madrid)
+"Virgin with the Cherries, The" (Vienna)
+"Virgin with the Rabbit, The" (Louvre)
+
+
+"Worship of Venus, The" (Madrid)
+
+
+"Zingarella, La" (Vienna)
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN***
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+*** END: FULL LICENSE ***
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