The Baptism of Christ, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the Gallery of the Capitol at Rome, had been by Crowe and Cavalcaselle taken away from Titian and given to Paris Bordone, but the keen insight of Morelli led him to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to Titian.  Internal evidence is indeed conclusive in this case that the picture must be assigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.[15] Here Titian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christ more in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemn hieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries.  The luxuriant landscape is in the main Giorgionesque, save that here and there a naked branch among the leafage—­and on one of them the woodpecker—­strongly recalls Giovanni Bellini.  The same robust, round-limbed young Venetian, with the inexpressive face, does duty here as St. John the Baptist, who in the Three Ages, presently to be discussed, appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd.  The Christ, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxuriant hair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine Cristo della Moneta.  The question at once arises here, Did Titian in the type of this figure derive inspiration from Giovanni Bellini’s splendid Baptism of Christ, finished in 1510 for the Church of S. Corona at Vicenza, but which the younger artist might well have seen a year or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in the workshop of the venerable master?  Apart from its fresh naivete, and its rare pictorial charm, how trivial and merely anecdotic does the conception of Titian appear by the side of that of Bellini, so lofty, so consoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunset colour![16] Alone in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram, placed in the picture with an awkwardness attractive in its naivete, but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standing alone.

The beautiful Virgin and Child with SS.  Ulfo and Brigida, placed in the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now at last officially restored to Titian, after having been for years innumerable ascribed to Giorgione, whose style it not more than generally recalls.  Here at any rate all the rival wise men are agreed, and it only remains for the student of the old masters, working to-day on the solid substructure provided for him by his predecessors, to wonder how any other attribution could have been accepted.  But then the critic of the present day is a little too prone to be wise and scornful a ban marche, forgetting that he has been spared three parts of the road, and that he starts for conquest at the high point, to reach which the pioneers of scientific criticism in art have devoted a lifetime of noble toil.  It is in this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early art of the Cadorine which Crowe