fact, in these portraits the least apparent object was the
likeness, the real purpose being to please the eye and to turn the mind
toward pleasant themes. This no doubt helps to account for the great
popularity of portraits in Venice during the sixteenth century. Their
number, as we shall see, only grows larger as the century advances.

=X. The Young Titian.=--Giorgione's followers had only to exploit the vein
their master hit upon to find ample remuneration. Each, to be sure,
brought a distinct personality into play, but the demand for the
Giorgionesque article, if I may be allowed the phrase, was too strong to
permit of much deviation. It no longer mattered what the picture was to
represent or where it was going to be placed; the treatment had to be
always bright, romantic, and joyous. Many artists still confined
themselves to painting ecclesiastical subjects chiefly, but even among
these, such painters as Lotto and Palma, for example, are fully as
Giorgionesque as Titian, Bonifazio, or Paris Bordone.

Titian, in spite of a sturdier, less refined nature, did nothing for a
generation after Giorgione's death but work on his lines. A difference
in quality between the two masters shows itself from the first, but the
spirit that animated each is identical. The pictures Titian was painting
ten years after his companion's death have not only many of the
qualities of Giorgione's, but something more, as if done by an older
Giorgione, with better possession of himself, and with a larger and
firmer hold on the world. At the same time, they show no diminution of
spontaneous joy in life, and even an increased sense of its value and
dignity. What an array of masterpieces might be brought to witness! In
the "Assumption," for example, the Virgin soars heavenward, not helpless
in the arms of angels, but borne up by the fulness of life within her,
and by the feeling that the universe is naturally her own, and that
nothing can check her course. The angels seem to be there only to sing
the victory of a human being over his environment. They are embodied
joys, acting on our nerves like the rapturous outburst of the orchestra
at the end of "Parsifal." Or look at the "Bacchanals" in Madrid, or at
the "Bacchus and Ariadne" in the National Gallery. How brimful they are
of exuberant joy! you see no sign of a struggle of inner and outer
conditions, but life so free, so strong, so glowing, that it almost
intoxicates. They are truly Dionysiac,