remediable overthrow! It would, however, be foolhardy in those who can
only guess at what the picture may have been to arrogate to themselves
the right of sitting in judgment on Vasari and those contemporaries who,
actually seeing, enthusiastically admired it. What excited their delight
must surely have been Titian's magic power of brush as displayed in
individual figures and episodes, such as that famous one of the knight
armed by his page in the immediate foreground.

Into this period of our master's career there fit very well the two
portraits in which he appears, painted by himself, on the confines of
old age, vigorous and ardent still, fully conscious, moreover, though
without affectation, of pre-eminent genius and supreme artistic rank.
The portraits referred to are those very similar ones, both of them
undoubtedly originals, which are respectively in the Berlin Gallery and
the Painters' Gallery of the Uffizi. It is strange that there should
exist no certain likeness of the master of Cadore done in youth or
earlier manhood, if there be excepted the injured and more than doubtful
production in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, which has pretty generally
been supposed to be an original auto-portrait belonging to this period.
In the Uffizi and Berlin pictures Titian looks about sixty years old,
but may be a little more or a little less. The latter is a half-length,
showing him seated and gazing obliquely out of the picture with a
majestic air, but also with something of combativeness and disquietude,
an element, this last, which is traceable even in some of the earlier
portraits, but not in the mythological _poesie_ or any sacred work. More
and more as we advance through the final period of old age do we find
this element of disquietude and misgiving asserting itself in male
portraiture, as, for instance, in the _Maltese Knight_ of the Prado, the
_Dominican Monk_ of the Borghese, the _Portrait of a Man with a Palm
Branch_ of the Dresden Gallery. The atmosphere of sadness and foreboding
enveloping man is traceable back to Giorgione; but with him it comes
from the plenitude of inner life, from the gaze turned inwards upon the
mystery of the human individuality rather than outwards upon the
inevitable tragedies of the exterior life common to all. This same
atmosphere of passionate contemplativeness enwraps, indeed, all that
Giorgione did, and is the cause that he sees the world and himself
lyrically, not dramatically; the