s, that natural _espieglerie_
and freedom from artificial control which has its climax in the
unapproached portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds. This is the more curious
when it is remembered how tenderly, with what observant and sympathetic
truth the relation of child to mother, of child to child, was noted in
the innumerable "Madonnas" and "Holy Families" of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries; how both the Italians, and following them the
Netherlanders, relieved the severity of their sacred works by the
delightful roguishness, the romping impudence of their little angels,
their _putti_.

It has already been recorded that Titian, taking up the commission
abandoned by Vasari, undertook a great scheme of pictorial decoration
for the Brothers of Santo Spirito in Isola. All that he carried out for
that church has now found its way into that of the Salute. The three
ceiling pictures, _The Sacrifice of Isaac, Cain and Abel_, and _David
victorious over Goliath_, are in the great sacristy of the church; the
_Four Evangelists_ and _Four Doctors_ are in the ceiling of the choir
behind the altar; the altar-piece, _The Descent of the Holy Spirit_, is
in one of the chapels which completely girdle the circular church
itself. The ceiling pictures, depicting three of the most dramatic
moments in sacred history, have received the most enthusiastic praise
from the master's successive biographers. They were indeed at the time
of their inception a new thing in Venetian art. Nothing so daring as
these foreshortenings, as these scenes of dramatic violence, of physical
force triumphant, had been seen in Venice. The turbulent spirit was an
exaggeration of that revealed by Titian in the _St. Peter Martyr_; the
problem of the foreshortening for the purposes of ceiling decoration was
superadded. It must be remembered, too, that even in Rome, the
headquarters of the grand style, nothing precisely of the same kind
could be said to exist. Raphael and his pupils either disdained, or it
may be feared to approach, the problem. Neither in the ceiling
decorations of the Farnesina nor in the Stanze is there any attempt on a
large scale to _faire plafonner_ the figures, that is, to paint them so
that they might appear as they would actually be seen from below.
Michelangelo himself, in the stupendous decoration of the ceiling to the
Sixtine Chapel, had elected to treat the subjects of the flat surface
which constitutes the centre and climax of the whole, as