ided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and
unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation
to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous
eccentricity.

[Illustration: _The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a
Photograph by Braun, Clement, & Cie_.]

In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behind
already the fresh morning of Titian's genius, represented by the
Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its
bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some
evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more
delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_
might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of
Venus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, a
renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman
Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the
Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of
paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but
by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the
author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the
Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named
the "Townley Venus" and the "Venus d'Arles"--myriads of Loves sport,
kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them
shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer
is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the
life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the
splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner)
dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of the
angelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the
Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly
beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North,
in touch with the South, as Albrecht Duerer, Mabuse, and Jacob
Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred
works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier
and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To
say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish
sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van