aglow with the delights
of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his
imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic
harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the
sake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those
Veronese transformed into Venetians--Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari;
or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the
more violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the
mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With Titian the
highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment,
are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in
the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be
considered the supreme exponent.

The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carre of the Louvre now known as
_Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti_, but in the collection of
Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, _Titian's
Mistress after the Life_, comes in very well at this stage. The
exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound
hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities
inspired by Giorgione--the loveliest of all in some respects, the most
consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still
to the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue,
myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole
enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here
and there with gleams of light. Vasari described how Titian painted,
_ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d' artiglieria_, the
Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who
afterwards became the wife of the duke, _che e opera stupenda_. It is
upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between
the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid
_donna_ and the _Alfonso of Ferrara_ of the Museo del Prado, that the
popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably,
like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a
lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, the
accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,[42] comes forward
with convincing arguments to show that the handsome _insouciant_
personage, with the crisply curling dark