ld age, but is
on the contrary coloured with its passion, so different in quality from
that of youth.

The _Entombment_, which went to Madrid with the mythological pieces just
now discussed, serves to show how vivid was Titian's imagination at this
point, when he touched upon a sacred theme, and how little dependent he
was in this field on the conceptions of his earlier prime. A more living
passion informs the scene, a more intimate sympathy colours it, than we
find in the noble _Entombment_ of the Louvre, much as the picture which
preceded it by so many years excels the Madrid example in fineness of
balance, in dignity, in splendour and charm of colour. Here the
personages are set free by the master from all academic trammels, and
express themselves with a greater spontaneity in grief. The colour, too,
of which the general scheme is far less attractive to the eye than in
the Louvre picture, blazes forth in one note of lurid splendour in the
red robe of the saint who supports the feet of the dead Christ.

In this same year Titian painted on the ceiling of the ante-chamber to
Sansovino's great Library in the Piazzetta the allegorical figure
_Wisdom_, thus entering into direct competition with young Paolo
Veronese, Schiavone, and the other painters who, striving in friendly
rivalry, had been engaged a short time before on the ceiling of the
great hall in the same building. This noble design contains a pronounced
reminiscence of Raphael's incomparable allegorical figures in the Camera
della Segnatura, but excels them as much in decorative splendour and
facile breadth of execution as it falls behind them in sublimity of
inspiration.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle are probably right in assigning the great
_Cornaro Family_ in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland to the
year 1560 or thereabouts. Little seen of late years, and like most
Venetian pictures of the sixteenth century shorn of some of its glory by
time and the restorer, this family picture appears to the writer to rank
among Titian's masterpieces in the domain of portraiture, and to be
indeed the finest portrait-group of this special type that Venice has
produced. In the simplicity and fervour of the conception Titian rises
to heights which he did not reach in the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, where
he is hampered by the necessity for combining a votive picture with a
series of avowed portraits. It is pretty clear that this _Cornaro_
picture, like the Pesaro altar-pi