[Illustration:  "Noli me tangere.”  National Gallery.  From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company.]

A convenient date for the magnificent St. Mark enthroned, with SS.  Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas, and Damianus, is 1512, when Titian, having completed his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned to Venice.  True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in the truculent St. Mark; but, then, as essentially so were the frescoes just terminated.  The noble altar-piece[25] symbolises, or rather commemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with the terrors of the League of Cambrai:—­on the one side St. Sebastian, standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, St. Roch for plague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, SS.  Cosmas and Damianus, suggesting the healing of these evils.  The colour is Giorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli’s own is so to be described.  Especially does it show points of contact with that of the so-called Three Philosophers, which, on the authority of Marcantonio Michiel (the Anonimo), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of the last works of the Castelfranco master.  That is to say, it is both sumptuous and boldly contrasted in the local hues, the sovereign unity of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, by any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate Giorgionesques.  Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints.  These last are among the most admirable portrait-figures in the life-work of Titian.  In them a simplicity, a concentration akin to that of Giovanni Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and flexibility of Barbarelli.  The St. Sebastian is the most beautiful among the youthful male figures, as the Venus of Giorgione and the Venus of the Sacred and Profane Love are the most beautiful among the female figures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which such presentments of youth in its flower abounded.  There is something androgynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the strength and pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in its suavity, yet not offensively effeminate.  It should be noted that a delight in portraying the fresh comeliness, the elastic beauty of form proper to the youth just passing into the man was common to many Venetian painters at this stage, and coloured their art as it had coloured the whole art of Greece.