There is no greater name in Italian art—­therefore no greater in art—­than that of Titian.  If the Venetian master does not soar as high as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the poet-painter of the world and the world’s fairest creatures, than any one of these.  Titian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, nor the most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, even of his time and country.  Yet is it possible, remembering the Entombment of the Louvre, the Assunta, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, the St. Peter Martyr, to say that he has, take him all in all, been surpassed in this the highest branch of his art?  Certainly nowhere else have the pomp and splendour of the painter’s achievement at its apogee been so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly ever overstepping the bounds of nature.  The sacred art of no other painter of the full sixteenth century—­not even that of Raphael himself—­has to an equal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of the world, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred passion must perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is not necessarily a distortion of truth.

And then as a portraitist—­we are dealing, be it remembered, with Italian art only—­there must be conceded to him the first place, as a limner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner in his secret heart for some other master.  One will remember the disquieting power, the fascination in the true sense of the word, of Leonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism on occasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, the Raphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano del Piombo.  Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistic truth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation of Lorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjective and objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate the other.  Yet another will cite the lofty melancholy, the aristocratic charm of the Brescian Moretto, or the marvellous power of the Bergamasque Moroni to present in their natural union, with no indiscretion of over-emphasis, the spiritual and physical elements which go to make up that mystery of mysteries, the human individuality.  There is, however, no advocate of any of these great masters who, having vaunted the peculiar perfections in portraiture of his own favourite, will not end—­with a sigh perhaps—­by according the palm to Titian.