ainted six or eight years later than the end of the
fifteenth century." But even he fell into line with Crowe and
Cavalcaselle in ascribing the picture to Titian, failing to see that all
difficulties of chronology and discrepancies of judgment between himself
and the older historians could be reconciled on the hypothesis of
Giorgione's authorship. For Giorgione, as Morelli rightly saw, developed
far more rapidly than Titian, so that a Titian landscape of, say, 1506-8
(if any such exist!) would correspond with one by Giorgione of, say,
1500. I agree with Crowe and Cavalcaselle and those writers who date
back the "Gipsy Madonna" to the end of the fifteenth century, but I must
emphatically support Signor Venturi in his claim that Giorgione is the
author.

Before, however, looking at internal evidence to prove this contention,
we may note that another example of the same composition exists in the
Gallery of Rovigo, identical save for a cartellino on which is inscribed
TITIANVS. To Crowe and Cavalcaselle this was evidence to confirm
Titian's claim to be the painter of what they considered the original
work--viz. the Vienna picture, of which the Rovigo example was, in their
opinion, a later copy. A careful examination, however, of the latter
picture has convinced me that they were curiously right and curiously
wrong. That the Rovigo work is posterior to the Vienna one is, I think,
patent to anyone conversant with Venetian painting, but why should the
one bear Titian's name on an apparently authentic cartellino, and not
the other? The simple and straightforward explanation appears the
best--viz. that the Rovigo picture is actually by Titian, who has taken
the Vienna picture (which I attribute to Giorgione) as his model and
directly repeated it. The qualities of the work are admirable, and
worthy of Titian, and I venture to think this "Madonna" would long ago
have taken its rightful place among the pictures of the master had it
not hung in a remote provincial gallery little visited by travellers,
and in such a dark corner as to escape detection. The form TITIANVS
points to a period after 1520,[127] when Giorgione had been some years
dead, so that it was not unnatural that in after times the credit of
invention rested with the author of the signed picture, and that his
name came gradually to be attached also to the earlier example. The
engraving of Meyssen (_circa_ 1640) thus bears Titian's name, and both
engraving and the repet