[Illustration:  The Three Ages.  Bridgewater Gallery.  From the Plate in Lafenestre’s “Vie et Oeuvre du Titien” (May, Paris.)]

The Sacred and Profane Love of the Borghese Gallery is one of the world’s pictures, and beyond doubt the masterpiece of the early or Giorgionesque period.  To-day surely no one will be found to gainsay Morelli when he places it at the end of that period, which it so incomparably sums up—­not at the beginning, when its perfection would be as incomprehensible as the less absolute achievement displayed in other early pieces which such a classification as this would place after the Borghese picture.  The accompanying reproduction obviates all necessity for a detailed description.  Titian painted afterwards perhaps more wonderfully still—­with a more sweeping vigour of brush, with a higher authority, and a play of light as brilliant and diversified.  He never attained to a higher finish and perfection of its kind, or more admirably suited the technical means to the thing to be achieved.  He never so completely gave back, coloured with the splendour of his own genius, the rays received from Giorgione.  The delicious sunset landscape has all the Giorgionesque elements, with more spaciousness, and lines of a still more suave harmony.  The grand Venetian donna who sits sumptuously robed, flower-crowned, and even gloved, at the sculptured classic fount is the noblest in her pride of loveliness, as she is one of the first, of the long line of voluptuous beauties who will occupy the greatest brushes of the Cinquecento.  The little love-god who, insidiously intervening, paddles in the water of the fountain and troubles its surface, is Titian’s very own, owing nothing to any forerunner.  The divinely beautiful Profane Love—­or, as we shall presently see, Venus—­is the most flawless presentment of female loveliness unveiled that modern art has known up to this date, save only the Venus of Giorgione himself (in the Dresden Gallery), to which it can be but little posterior.  The radiant freshness of the face, with its glory of half-unbound hair, does not, indeed, equal the sovereign loveliness of the Dresden Venus or the disquieting charm of the Giovanelli Zingarella (properly Hypsipyle).  Its beauty is all on the surface, while theirs stimulates the imagination of the beholder.  The body with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high lights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that Titian ever achieved.  Only in the late Venere del Pardo, which so closely follows the chief motive of Giorgione’s Venus, does he approach it in frankness and purity.  Far more genuinely classic is it in spirit, because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, than anything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous in their study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.[19]