tion is
full of flaws and incongruities, and I am fully persuaded the future
historian will have to begin _de novo_ in any attempt at a chronological
reconstruction of Titian's career. The gap of thirty-five years down to
1511 may prove after all less by twelve or thirteen years than people
think, so that the young Titian naturally enough first emerges into view
at the age of twenty-two and not thirty-five.

But we must not anticipate results, for there is still the evidence of
the later writers of the seventeenth century to consider. Two of these
declare that Titian was born in 1477. The first of these, Tizianello, a
collateral descendant of the great painter, published his little
_Compendio_ in 1622, wherein he gives a sketchy and imperfect biography;
the other, Ridolfi, repeats the date in his _Meraviglie dell' Arte_,
published in 1648. The latter writer is notoriously unreliable in other
respects, and it is quite likely this is merely an instance of copying
from Tizianello, whose unsupported statement is chiefly of value as
showing that the "centenarian" theory had started within fifty years of
Titian's death. But again we ask: Why should the evidence of a
seventeenth-century writer be preferred to the personal testimony of
those who actually knew Titian himself, especially when Vasari gives us
precise information with which Dolce's independent account is in perfect
agreement? No doubt the great age to which Titian certainly attained was
exaggerated in the next generation after his death, but it is a
remarkable fact that the contemporary eulogies, mostly in poetic form,
which appeared on the occasion of his decease, do not allude to any such
phenomenal longevity.[161]

Nevertheless, Ridolfi's statement that Titian was born in 1477 is
commonly quoted as if there were no better and earlier evidence in
existence, and, indeed, it is a matter of surprise that conscientious
modern biographers have not looked more carefully at the original
authorities instead of being content to follow tradition, and I must
earnestly plead for a reconsideration of the question of Titian's age by
the future historians of Venetian painting.[162]

If, as I believe, Titian was born in or about 1489 instead of 1476-7,
it follows that he must have been Giorgione's junior by at least twelve
years--a most important deduction--and it also follows that he cannot
have produced any work of consequence before, say, 1505, at the age of
sixteen, and h