eatest masters
then living, simply as it is sketched in by the Aretine biographer. The
noble Venetian representing the alternating radiance and gloom of earth,
its fairest pages as they unfold themselves, the joys and sorrows, the
teeming life of humanity; the mighty Florentine disdainful of the world,
its colours, its pulsations, its pomps and vanities, incurious of
mankind save in its great symbolical figures, soaring like the solitary
eagle into an atmosphere of his own where the dejected beholder can
scarce breathe, and, sick at heart, oppressed with awe, lags far behind!

[Illustration: _Pope Paul III. with Cardinal Farnese and Ottavio
Farnese. Naples Gallery. From a Photograph by E. Alinari._]

Titian the gracious, the serene, who throughout a long life of splendid
and by comparison effortless achievement has openly and candidly drunk
deep of all the joys of life, a man even as others are! Michelangelo the
austere, the scornful, to whom the pleasures of the world, the company
in well-earned leisure of his fellow-man, suggest but the loss of
precious hours which might be devoted to the shaping in solitude of
masterpieces; in the very depths of whose nature lurk nevertheless, even
in old age, the strangest ardours, the fiercest and most insatiate
longings for love and friendship!

Let Vasari himself be heard as to this meeting. "Michelangelo and Vasari
going one day to pay a visit to Titian in the Belvedere, saw, in a
picture which he had then advanced towards completion, a nude female
figure representing _Danae_ as she receives the embrace of Jove
transformed into a rain of gold, and, as the fashion is in people's
presence, praised it much to him. When they had taken leave, and the
discussion was as to the art of Titian, Buonarroti praised it highly,
saying that the colour and handling pleased him much, but that it was a
subject for regret that at Venice they did not learn from the very
beginning to design correctly, and that its painters did not follow a
better method in their study of art." It is the battle that will so
often be renewed between the artist who looks upon colour as merely a
complement and adjunct to design, and the painter who regards it as not
only the outer covering, but the body and soul of art. We remember how
the stiff-necked Ingres, the greatest Raphaelesque of this century,
hurled at Delacroix's head the famous dictum, "Le dessin c'est la
probite de l'art," and how his illustrious rival, t