ary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the
life-work of the other--making the world the poorer by the loss of
Titian or Tintoretto--can it be doubted for a moment what the choice
would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face
with the mighty genius of the latter?

But to return for a moment to the _Assunta_. The enlargement of
dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group
of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It
carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable,
without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime
beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank
with the finest of those in Raphael's _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in a
higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of
vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is
the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not
always the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhere
adhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overrated
last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. Titian himself
in the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia, and above all in the much-vaunted
masterpiece, _The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_, sins in the
same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his
better self.

Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, and
only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possession
of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.[40]
What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer
opposition at the outset. In this case the public, admitted on the high
festival of St. Bernardino's Day in the year 1518 to see the vast panel,
showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than
the friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de' Frari,
and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology to
the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against
the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian's wonderful
achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.

To the year 1519 belongs the _Annunciation_ in the Cathedral of Treviso,
the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly
overstated. True, the Virgin,