[Illustration:  Sacred and Profane Love.]

It is impossible to discuss here in detail all the conjectural explanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popular of all Venetian pictures—­least of all that strange one brought forward by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the Artless and Sated Love, for which they have found so little acceptance.  But we may no longer wrap ourselves in an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show but a languid desire to solve the fascinating problem.  Taking as his starting-point the pictures described by Marcantonio Michiel (the Anonimo of Jacopo Morelli), in the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the Inferno with Aeneas and Anchises and Landscape with the Birth of Paris, Herr Franz Wickhoff[20] has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of Barbarelli’s best known works.  The Three Philosophers he calls Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas, the Giovanelli Tempest with the Gipsy and the Soldier he explains anew as Admetus and Hypsipyle.[21] The subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and popularly called, or rather miscalled, the Dream of Raphael, is recognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione.  He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the commentator of Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it), the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in peaceful sleep.

Passing over to the Giorgionesque period of Titian, he boldly sets to work on the world-famous Sacred and Profane Love, and shows us the Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus—­that wearisome imitation of the similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius.  Medea—­the sumptuously attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)—­sits at the fountain in unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs.  She will not yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love is the most shameful treason to father and people.  But to her comes Venus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea’s father, irresistibly pleading that she shall go to the alien lover, who waits in the wood.  It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in the toils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is the subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible—­in Titian’s realisation of the legend—­to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main theme upon which Titian has built his masterpiece.  Moritz Thausing[22] had already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when he described the Borghese picture