Titian's feeblest works, the allegory
_Philip II. offering to Heaven his Son, the Infant Don Ferdinand_, now
No. 470 in the gallery of the Prado. That Sanchez Coello, under special
directions from the king, prepared the sketch which was to serve as the
basis for the definitive picture may well have hampered and annoyed the
aged master. Still this is but an insufficient excuse for the
absurdities of the design, culminating in the figure of the descending
angel, who is represented in one of those strained, over-bold attitudes,
in which Titian, even at his best, never achieved complete success. That
he was not, all the same, a stranger to the work, is proved by some
flashes of splendid colour, some fine passages of execution.

In the four pieces now to be shortly described, the very latest and most
impressionistic form of Titian's method as a painter is to be observed;
all of them are in the highest degree characteristic of this ultimate
phase. In the beautiful _Madonna and Child_ here reproduced,[60] the
hand, though it no longer works with all trenchant vigour of earlier
times, produces a magical effect by means of unerring science and a
certainty of touch justifying such economy of mere labour as is by the
system of execution suggested to the eye. And then this pathetic motive,
the simple realism, the unconventional treatment of which are
spiritualised by infinite tenderness, is a new thing in Venetian, nay in
Italian art. Precisely similar in execution, and equally restrained in
the scheme of colour adopted, is the _Christ crowned with Thorns_ of the
Alte Pinakothek at Munich, a reproduction with important variations of
the better-known picture in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. Less
demonstratively and obviously dramatic than its predecessor, the Munich
example is, as a realisation of the scene, far truer and more profound
in pathos. Nobler beyond compare in His unresisting acceptance of insult
and suffering is the Munich Christ than the corresponding figure, so
violent in its instinctive recoil from pain, of the Louvre picture.

[Illustration: _Christ crowned with Thorns. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
From a Photograph by F. Hanfstaengl_.]

It is nothing short of startling at the very end of Titian's career to
meet with a work which, expressed in this masterly late technique of
his, vies in freshness of inspiration with the finest of his early
_poesie_. This is the _Nymph and Shepherd_[61] of the Imperial Gallery
at Vi