The Earlier Work of Titian

amilies and Sacred Conversations-Date of the "Cristo della Moneta" Is

lls 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,

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 actu

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 Bartolomm

bs 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 un

hese 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. L

olish, 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 c

ake 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

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

ara 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

epresents 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 ve

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, howe

oso mood his portraits of high-bred English cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest m

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,

hat 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

rtain 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

ame 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 breadt