lly painted vestments of the _St.
Nicholas_,[46] the mansuetude of the _St. Francis_, the Venetian
loveliness of the _St. Catherine_, the palpitating life of the _St.
Sebastian_. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump
young gondolier stripped and painted as he was--contemplating, if
anything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, _ritratto
dal' vivo e senza artificio niuno_. The royal saint of Alexandria is a
sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning
elaboration of coiffure, to the _St. Catherine_ of the _Madonna del
Coniglio_, and the not dissimilar figure in our own _Holy Family with
St. Catherine_ at the National Gallery.

The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with the
infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in the
Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge's private apartments to the Senate
Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as we
know, Titian's first performance as a _frescante_ since the completion,
twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of Padua.
As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and
brilliant in colour for a fresco, very fairly preserved--deserving, in
fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and
Cavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, the
rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the subject
is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of
personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly
transforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is
greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened
with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.
Even the colossal, half-effaced _St. Christopher with the Infant
Christ_, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the Town
Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.

[Illustration: _St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the
Doge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]

Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the
_Entombment_ of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other than
altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded
which belongs to the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ among purely secular
subjects? It was in 1523 that Titian acquired