Titian by S.L. Bensusan

This brief and rather hurried review of Titian's life and work has brought us to his middle age and we find him now almost at the zenith of his fame, though his powers have not yet reached their ripest and fullest expression. Venice, Mantua, and Urbino have acknowledged his talent, while if Pope and Sultan have not actually sat to him for their portraits they have sent him other men's work to copy. The great Charles V., who seemed bent upon holding all western and central Europe in the hollow of his hand, was his friend and patron, and we see what manner of man he was from the pictures in the Prado. The first, painted in the very early years of their acquaintance, shows Charles with a great hound by his side. His right hand rests on his dagger, his left on the dog's collar, he wears the chain of the Golden Fleece, and seems a man born to command. Belonging, of course, to a much later date is the other portrait of Charles at the Battle of Muehlburg, perhaps even less a monument of Titian's skill than an enduring record of the terrible craze for repainting that beset Spain until recent years, and is not unknown to-day, though public opinion has had some effect even in Madrid. It is not generally known that there is a Spanish official who has a salaried engagement to assist the old masters whose work shows signs of fading, and without wishing to be hypercritical it is reasonable to remark that these officials in a laudable anxiety to earn their stipend have done irreparable damage to much work that they were not fit to approach.

THE MARRIAGE OF ST. CATHERINE (In the Pitti Palace, Florence)