years later than the end of the fifteenth century.”  But even he fell into line with Crowe and Cavalcaselle in ascribing the picture to Titian, failing to see that all difficulties of chronology and discrepancies of judgment between himself and the older historians could be reconciled on the hypothesis of Giorgione’s authorship.  For Giorgione, as Morelli rightly saw, developed far more rapidly than Titian, so that a Titian landscape of, say, 1506-8 (if any such exist!) would correspond with one by Giorgione of, say, 1500.  I agree with Crowe and Cavalcaselle and those writers who date back the “Gipsy Madonna” to the end of the fifteenth century, but I must emphatically support Signor Venturi in his claim that Giorgione is the author.

Before, however, looking at internal evidence to prove this contention, we may note that another example of the same composition exists in the Gallery of Rovigo, identical save for a cartellino on which is inscribed TITIANVS.  To Crowe and Cavalcaselle this was evidence to confirm Titian’s claim to be the painter of what they considered the original work—­viz. the Vienna picture, of which the Rovigo example was, in their opinion, a later copy.  A careful examination, however, of the latter picture has convinced me that they were curiously right and curiously wrong.  That the Rovigo work is posterior to the Vienna one is, I think, patent to anyone conversant with Venetian painting, but why should the one bear Titian’s name on an apparently authentic cartellino, and not the other?  The simple and straightforward explanation appears the best—­viz. that the Rovigo picture is actually by Titian, who has taken the Vienna picture (which I attribute to Giorgione) as his model and directly repeated it.  The qualities of the work are admirable, and worthy of Titian, and I venture to think this “Madonna” would long ago have taken its rightful place among the pictures of the master had it not hung in a remote provincial gallery little visited by travellers, and in such a dark corner as to escape detection.  The form TITIANVS points to a period after 1520,[127] when Giorgione had been some years dead, so that it was not unnatural that in after times the credit of invention rested with the author of the signed picture, and that his name came gradually to be attached also to the earlier example.  The engraving of Meyssen (circa 1640) thus bears Titian’s name, and both engraving and the repetition at Rovigo are now adduced as evidence of Titian’s authorship of the Vienna “Gipsy Madonna.”

But is there any proof that Titian ever copied or repeated any other work of Giorgione?  There is, fortunately, one great and acknowledged precedent, the “Venus” in the Tribune of the Uffizi, which is directly taken from Giorgione’s Dresden “Venus,” The accessories, it is true, are different, but the nude figures are line for line identical.[128] Other painters, Palma, Cariarli, and Titian, elsewhere, derived inspiration from Giorgione’s prototype, but Titian actually repeats the very figure in this “Venus”; so that there is nothing improbable in my contention that Titian also repeated Giorgione’s “Gipsy Madonna,” adding his signature thereto, to the confusion and confounding of later generations.