Bacchanalian triumphs--the
triumph of life over the ghosts that love the gloom and chill and hate
the sun.

The portraits Titian painted in these years show no less feeling of
freedom from sordid cares, and no less mastery over life. Think of "The
Man with the Glove" in the Louvre, of the "Concert," and "Young
Englishman" in Florence, and of the Pesaro family in their altar-piece
in the Frari at Venice--call up these portraits, and you will see that
they are true children of the Renaissance whom life has taught no
meannesses and no fears.

=XI. Apparent Failure of the Renaissance.=--But even while such pictures
were being painted, the spirit of the Italian Renaissance was proving
inadequate to life. This was not the fault of the spirit, which was the
spirit of youth. But youth cannot last more than a certain length of
time. No matter how it is spent, manhood and middle age will come. Life
began to show a sterner and more sober face than for a brief moment it
had seemed to wear. Men became conscious that the passions for
knowledge, for glory, and for personal advancement were not at the
bottom of all the problems that life presented. Florence and Rome
discovered this suddenly, and with a shock. In the presence of
Michelangelo's sculptures in San Lorenzo, or of his "Last Judgment," we
still hear the cry of anguish that went up as the inexorable truth
dawned upon them. But Venice, although humiliated by the League of
Cambrai, impoverished by the Turk, and by the change in the routes of
commerce, was not crushed, as was the rest of Italy, under the heels of
Spanish infantry, nor so drained of resource as not to have some wealth
still flowing into her coffers. Life grew soberer and sterner, but it
was still amply worth the living, although the relish of a little
stoicism and of earnest thought no longer seemed out of place. The
spirit of the Renaissance had found its way to Venice slowly; it was
even more slow to depart.

We therefore find that toward the middle of the sixteenth century, when
elsewhere in Italy painting was trying to adapt itself to the hypocrisy
of a Church whose chief reason for surviving as an institution was that
it helped Spain to subject the world to tyranny, and when portraits were
already exhibiting the fascinating youths of an earlier generation
turned into obsequious and elegant courtiers,--in Venice painting kept
true to the ripened and more reflective spirit which succeeded to the
most glo