ative Cadore left a permanent impress on his landscape art, and in what
way his descent from a family of mountaineers and soldiers, hardy, yet
of a certain birth and breeding, contributed to shape his individuality
in its development to maturity. It has been almost universally assumed
that Titian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery of
Cadore in the backgrounds to his pictures; and yet, if we except the
great _Battle of Cadore_ itself (now known only in Fontana's print, in a
reduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Uffizi,
and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in a
modified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altar-pieces,
Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawings
of the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we find
the jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. In the
majority of instances, however, the middle distance and foreground to
these is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts,
its monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountain
sides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring, but the richer
vegetation of the Friulan mountains in their lower slopes, or of the
beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian
plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the
play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of Venetian
art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery
of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for
studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and
back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland.
How far Titian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needy
mountaineers, may be taken to account for his excessive eagerness to
reap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for his
unresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to be
got in, must be a matter for individual appreciation. Josiah
Gilbert--quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle[4]--pertinently asks, "Might
this mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewd
Swiss?" In the getting, Titian was certainly all this, but in the
spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and
voluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of his
career. Vasari relate