ist in the Desert_, once in the church of S.M.
Maria Maggiore at Venice, and now in the Accademia there. To the writer
it appears that it would best come in at this stage--that is to say in
or about 1545--not only because the firm close handling in the nude
would be less explicable ten years later on, but because the conception
of the majestic St. John is for once not pictorial but purely
sculptural. Leaving Rome, and immediately afterwards coming into contact
for the first time with the wonders of the earlier Florentine art,
Titian might well have conceived, might well have painted thus. Strange
to say, the influence is not that of Michelangelo, but, unless the
writer is greatly deceived, that of Donatello, whose noble ascetic type
of the _Precursor_ is here modernised, and in the process deprived of
some of its austerity. The glorious mountain landscape, with its
brawling stream, fresher and truer than any torrent of Ruysdael's, is
all Titian. It makes the striking figure of St. John, for all its
majesty, appear not a little artificial.

The little town of Serravalle, still so captivatingly Venetian in its
general aspect, holds one of the most magnificent works of Titian's late
time, a vast _Virgin and Child with St. Peter and St. Andrew_. This
hangs--or did when last seen by the writer--in the choir of the Church
of St. Andrew; there is evidence in Titian's correspondence that it was
finished in 1547, so that it must have been undertaken soon after the
return from Rome. In the distance between the two majestic figures of
the saints is a prospect of landscape with a lake, upon which Titian has
shown on a reduced scale Christ calling Peter and Andrew from their
nets; an undisguised adaptation this, by the veteran master, of the
divine Urbinate's _Miraculous Draught of Fishes_, but one which made of
the borrowed motive a new thing, no excrescence but an integral part of
the conception. In this great work, which to be more universally
celebrated requires only to be better known to those who do not come
within the narrow circle of students, there is evidence that while
Titian, after his stay at the Papal court, remained firm as a rock in
his style and general principles--luckily a Venetian and no
pseudo-Roman,--his imagination became more intense in its glow, gloomier
but grander, than it had been in middle age--his horizon altogether
vaster. To a grand if sometimes too unruffled placidity succeeded a
physical and psychic