P. 99.  Tribolo was 65 years old (in reality only 50). 
P. 209.  Bugiardini died at 75 (really 79). 
P. 288.  Pontormo at 65 (he died actually in his 63rd year). 
P. 564.  Giovanni da Udine at 70 (really 77).

A still more glaring instance is to be found when Vasari not only makes misstatements about his own life but is actually out by several years in giving his own age.  One and the same event—­viz. his journey with Cardinal Passerini to Florence—­is given in his own autobiography to the year 1524, in the “Life of Salviati,” to the year 1523, and in the “Life of Michael Angelo” to 1525.  When he speaks of himself in the same passage in the “Life of Salviati” as the “putto, che allora non aveva piu di nove anni,” he is making a mistake of at least three years in his own age.  And not less delightful is it to read in the “Life of Giovanni da Udine”:  “Giorgio Vasari, giovinetto di diciotto anni, quando serviva il duca Alessandro de’ Medici suo primo signore l’anno 1535.”  We are obviously not dealing with Messer Giorgio’s strongest point, for, as a matter of fact, he was at that time twenty-four years of age!  The same false statement of age is found again in his own biography (vii. p. 656, with the variation, “poco piu di diciotto anni").

But I think these instances suffice to prove how little one dare build on such assertions of Vasari.  Who dare say if Titian was really only seventy-six in 1566 when the Aretine visited him?

And now a few remarks on the other points raised by Mr. Cook.  As a fact, it is an astonishing thing that we have no documentary evidence about Titian before 1511; but does he not share this fate with very many of his great countrymen, with Bellini, Giorgione, Sebastiano, and others?  An unfriendly chance has left us entirely in the dark as to the early years of nearly all the great Venetian painters.  That Duerer makes no mention of Titian’s name in his letters gives no cause for surprise, for even the most celebrated of the younger artists, Giorgione, is not alluded to, and of all those with Bellini, whose fame outshone even then that of all others, only Barbari is mentioned.  That Titian’s name does not occur in the documents about the Fondaco frescoes may be due to the fact that Giorgione alone was commissioned to undertake the frescoes for the magistrates, and that the latter painter in his turn brought his associate Titian into the work.

Mr. Cook says that Titian still signed himself in 1511 “Dipintore” instead of “Maestro.”  I am not aware whether in this respect definite regulations or customs were usual in Venice.[166] At any rate, the painter is still described in official documents as late as 1518 as “ser Tizian depentor” (Lorenzi, “Monumenti,” No. 366), when, even according to Mr. Cook’s theory, he must have been thirty years old; and he is actually so called in 1528 (ibid.  No. 403), after appearing in several intermediate documents as “maestro” (Nos. 373, 377).  If this argument, however, proves unsound, the last point—­viz. that the well-known petition to the senate in 1513 reads more like that of a man of twenty-four than one of thirty-seven—­must be left to the hypothesis of individual conjecture.