eory, he must have been thirty years old; and he is
actually so called in 1528 (_ibid_. No. 403), after appearing in several
intermediate documents as "maestro" (Nos. 373, 377). If this argument,
however, proves unsound, the last point--viz. that the well-known
petition to the senate in 1513 reads more like that of a man of
twenty-four than one of thirty-seven--must be left to the hypothesis of
individual conjecture.

Must we really close these very long inquiries by confessing they are
beyond our ken? It almost seems so. For, with regard to the testimony
afforded by family documents, Dr. Jacobi (whose labours were utilised by
Crowe and Cavalcaselle) so conscientiously examined all that is left,
that a discovery in this direction is not to be looked for. Is the
statement of Tizianello that Titian's year of birth was 1477 to be
rejected without further question when we remember that, as a relative
of the painter, he could have had in 1622 access to documents possibly
since lost?

Under these circumstances the only thing left to do is to question the
works of Titian. Of these, two can be dated, not indeed with certainty,
but with some degree of probability: the dedicatory painting of the
Bishop of Pesaro with the portrait of Alexander VI. of 1502-03, and the
picture of St. Mark, already mentioned, of the year 1504. Both are, to
judge by the style, clearly early works, and both can be connected with
definite historical events of the years just mentioned. That these
paintings, however, could be the work of a fourteen- to fifteen-year-old
artist Mr. Cook will also admit to be impossible.

Much, far too much, in the story of Venetian painting must, for want of
definite information, be left to conjecture; and however unsatisfactory
it is, we must make the confession that we know as little about the date
of the birth of the greatest of the Venetians as we know of Giorgione's,
Sebastiano's, Palma's, and the rest. But supposing all of a sudden
information turned up giving us the exact date of Titian's birth, would
the picture of the development of Venetian painting be any the different
for it? In no wise. The relation to one another of the individual
artists of the younger generation is so clearly to be read in each man's
work, that no external particulars, however interesting they might be on
other grounds, could make the smallest difference. Titian's relations
with Giorgione especially could not be otherwise represented than