Giorgione and the Venus of
the _Sacred and Profane Love_ are the most beautiful among the female
figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such
presentments of youth in its flower abounded. There is something
androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the strength
and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its
suavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that a
delight in portraying the fresh comeliness, the elastic beauty of form
proper to the youth just passing into the man was common to many
Venetian painters at this stage, and coloured their art as it had
coloured the whole art of Greece.

Hereabouts the writer would like to place the singularly attractive, yet
a little puzzling, _Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd_,
which is No. 4 in the National Gallery. The type of the landscape is
early, and even for that time the execution in this particular is, for
Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially the
projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against
the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. The
noble type and the stilted attitude of the _St. Joseph_ suggest the _St.
Mark_ of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of
the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of
Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the
Salute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, by
a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no
means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly
in the _St. Anthony causing a new-born Infant to speak_, of the Scuola.
Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of
the early time before complete freedom of design was attained.

[Illustration: _St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria della
Salute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson_.]

[Illustration: _The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
From a Photograph by Loewy_.]

The splendidly beautiful _Herodias with the head of St. John the
Baptist_, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but by
Morelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian,
belongs to about the same time as the _Sacred and Profane Love_, and
would therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Padua
and Vicenza. The