wonder that all the leading personages of Italy wished to be
painted by Titian. His are the portraits of a man of intellect. They
show the subject at his best; grave, cultivated, stately, as he appeared
and wished to appear; not taken off his guard in any way. What can be
more sympathetic as a personality than the Ariosto of the National
Gallery? We can enter into his mind and make a friend of him, and yet
all the time he has himself in hand; he allows us to divine as much as
he chooses, and draws a thin veil over all that he does not intend us to
discover. The painter himself is impersonal and not over-sensitive; he
does not paint in his own fancies about his sitter--probably he had
none; he saw what he was meant to see. There was what Mr. Berenson calls
"a certain happy insensibility" about him, which prevented him from
taking fantastic flights, or from looking too deep below the surface.

[Illustration: _Titian._
ARIOSTO.
_London._
(_Photo, Mansell and Co._)]

CHAPTER XVIII

TITIAN (_continued_)

With the "Assumption," finished in 1518 for the Church of the Frari,
Titian rose to the very highest among Renaissance painters. The
"Glorious S. Mary" was his theme, and he concentrated all his efforts on
the realisation of that one idea. The central figure is, as it were, a
collective rather than an individual type. Well proportioned and elastic
as it is, it has the abundance of motherhood. Harmonious and serene, it
combines dramatic force and profound feeling. Exultant Humanity, in its
hour of triumph, rises with her, borne up lightly by that throbbing
company of child angels and followed by full recognition and awestruck
satisfaction in the adoring gaze of the throng below, yet Titian has
contrived to keep some touch of the loving woman hurrying to meet her
son. The flood of colour, the golden vault above, the garment of glowing
blues and crimsons, have a more than common share in that spirit of
confident joy and poured-out life which envelops the whole canvas. In
the worthy representation of a great event, the visible assumption of
Humanity to the Throne of God, Titian puts forth all his powers and
steeps us in that temper of sanguine emotion, of belief in life and
confidence in the capacity of man, which was so characteristic of the
ripe Renaissance. In looking at this splendid canvas, we must call to
mind the position for which Titian painted it. Hung in