fter it knew the works of Titian. The
Renaissance, that in the rest of the world worshiped the nude as the
supreme work of Nature, was covered here with the monk's cowl or the
beggar's rags. The shining landscapes were dark and gloomy when they
reached the canvas; under the brush the land of the sun appeared with a
gray sky and grass that was a mournful green; the heads had a monkish
gravity. The artist placed in his pictures not what surrounded him, but
what he had within him, a piece of his soul--and his soul was fettered
by the fear of dangers in the present life and torments in the life to
come; it was black--black with sadness, as if it were dyed in the soot
of the fires of the autos-de-fe.

That naked woman with her curly head resting on her folded arms was the
awakening of an art that had lived in isolation. The slight frame, that
scarcely rested on the green divan and the fine lace cushions, seemed on
the point of rising in the air with the mighty impulse of resurrection.

Renovales thought of the two masters, equally great, and still so
different. One had the imposing majesty of famous monuments--serene,
correct, cold, filling the horizon of history with their colossal mass,
growing old in glory without the centuries opening the least crack in
their marble walls. On all sides the same facade--noble, symmetrical,
calm, without the vagaries of caprice. It was reason--solid,
well-balanced, alien to enthusiasm and weakness, without feverish haste.
The other was as great as a mountain, with the fantastic disorder of
Nature, covered with tortuous inequalities. On one side the wild, barren
cliff; beyond, the glen, covered with blossoming heath; below, the
garden with its perfumes and birds; on the heights, the crown of dark
clouds, heavy with thunder and lightning. It was imagination in
unbridled career, with breathless halts and new flights--its brow in the
infinite and its feet implanted on earth.

The life of Don Diego was summed up in these words: "He had painted."
That was his whole biography. Never in his travels in Spain and Italy
did he feel curious to see anything but pictures. In the court of the
Poet-king, he had vegetated amid gallantries and masquerades, calm as a
monk of painting, always standing before his canvas and model--to-day a
jester, to-morrow a little Infanta--without any other desire than to
rise in rank among the members of the royal household, to see a cross of
red cloth sewed on his black