and Cavalcaselle have defined as “Palmesque.”  The St. Bridget and the St. Ulphus are both types frequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamasque painter, and it has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model with hair of wavy gold must have sat to Giorgione, Titian, and Palma.  This can only be true, however, in a modified sense, seeing that Giorgione did not, so much as his contemporaries and followers, affect the type of the beautiful Venetian blond, “large, languishing, and lazy.”  The hair of his women—­both the sacred personages and the divinities nominally classic or wholly Venetian—­is, as a rule, of a rich chestnut, or at the most dusky fair, and in them the Giorgionesque oval of the face tempers with its spirituality the strength of physical passion that the general physique denotes.  The polished surface of this panel at Madrid, the execution, sound and finished without being finicking, the high yellowish lights on the crimson draperies, are all very characteristic of this, the first manner of Vecelli.  The green hangings at the back of the picture are such as are very generally associated with the colour-schemes of Palma.  An old repetition, with a slight variation in the Bambino, is in the royal collection at Hampton Court, where it long bore—­indeed it does so still on the frame—­the name of Palma Vecchio.

It will be remembered that Vasari assigns to the Tobias and the Angel in the Church of S. Marciliano at Venice the exact date 1507, describing it, moreover, with greater accuracy than he does any other work by Titian.  He mentions even “the thicket, in which is a St. John the Baptist kneeling as he prays to heaven, whence comes a splendour of light.”  The Aretine biographer is followed in this particular by Morelli, usually so eagle-eyed, so little bound by tradition in tracing the beginnings of a great painter.  The gifted modern critic places the picture among the quite early works of our master.  Notwithstanding this weight of authority, the writer feels bound to dissent from the view just now indicated, and in this instance to follow Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who assign to the Tobias and the Angel a place much later on in Titian’s long career.  The picture, though it hangs high in the little church for which it was painted, will speak for itself to those who interrogate it without parti pris.  Neither in the figures—­the magnificently classic yet living archangel Raphael and the more naive and realistic Tobias—­nor in the rich landscape with St. John the Baptist praying is there anything left of the early Giorgionesque manner.  In the sweeping breadth of the execution, the summarising power of the brush, the glow from within of the colour, we have so many evidences of a style in its fullest maturity.  It will be safe, therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian’s middle period.[17]