the
environing nature. It is Nature herself that in these true painted poems
mysteriously responds, that interprets to the beholder the moods of man,
much as a mighty orchestra--Nature ordered and controlled--may by its
undercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the very
personages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so we
may be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his new interpretations,
not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first
acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old
ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from
another and a more prosaic, because a more precise and literal,
standpoint.

[Illustration: _Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by
Hanfstaengl_.]

CHAPTER II

Frescoes of the Scuola del Santo--The "Herodias" type of picture--Holy
Families and Sacred Conversations--Date of the "Cristo della Moneta" Is
the "Concert" of the Pitti by Titian?--The "Bacchanal" of Alnwick
Castle.

It has been pointed out by Titian's biographers that the wars which
followed upon the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing all
over North Italy the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation.
It was not long after this--on the death of his master Giorgione--that
Sebastiano Luciani migrated to Rome and, so far as he could, shook off
his allegiance to the new Venetian art; it was then that Titian
temporarily left the city of his adoption to do work in fresco at Padua
and Vicenza. If the date 1508, given by Vasari for the great frieze-like
wood-engraving, _The Triumph of Faith_, be accepted, it must be held
that it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi[23] cites
painted compositions of the _Triumph_ as either the originals or the
repetitions of the wood-engravings, for which Titian himself drew the
blocks. The frescoes themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out on
the walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished;
but that they ever came into existence there would not appear to be any
direct evidence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in the
process of translation into wood-engraving, are not materially at
variance with those in the frescoes of the Scuola del Santo. But the
movement, the spirit of the whole is essentially different. This mighty,
onward-sweeping procession, with Adam and Eve, the Patriarchs, the
Prophets and Sibyls, th