sorrow. He had
loved a beautiful Venetian girl, and was just about to marry her when a
friend, whom he also loved, carried her off and left him robbed of love
and friendship. Nothing could comfort him for his loss, the light
seemed to have faded from his life, and soon life itself began to wane.
A very little while after and he closed his eyes upon all the beauty
and promise which had once filled his world. But though we have so few
of his pictures, those few alone are enough to show that it was more
than an idle jest which made his companions give him the nickname of
George the Great.

TITIAN

We have seen how most of the great painters loved to paint into their
pictures those scenes which they had known when they were boys, and
which to the end of their lives they remembered clearly and vividly. A
Giotto never forgets the look of his sheep on the bare hillside of
Vespignano, Fra Angelico paints his heavenly pictures with the colours
of spring flowers found on the slopes of Fiesole, Perugino delights in
the wide spaciousness of the Umbrian plains with the winding river and
solitary cypresses.

So when we come to the great Venetian painter Titian we look first with
interest to see in what manner of a country he was born, and what were
the pictures which Nature mirrored in his mind when he was still a boy.'

At the foot of the Alps, three days' journey from Venice, lies the
little town of Cadore on the Pieve, and here it was that Titian was
born. On every side rise great masses of rugged mountains towering up
to the sky, with jagged peaks and curious fantastic shapes. Clouds
float around their summits, and the mist will often wrap them in gloom
and give them a strange and awesome look. At the foot of the craggy
pass the mountain-torrent of the Pieve roars and tumbles on its way.
Far-reaching forests of trees, with weather-beaten gnarled old trunks,
stand firm against the mountain storms. Beneath their wide-spreading
boughs there is a gloom almost of twilight, showing peeps here and
there of deep purple distances beyond.

Small wonder it was that Titian should love to paint mountains, and
that he should be the first to paint a purely landscape picture. He
lived those strange solemn mountains and the wild country round, the
deep gloom of the woods and the purple of the distance beyond.

The boy's father, Gregorio Vecelli, was one of the nobles of Cadore,
but the family was not rich, and when Titian was ten year