Hereabouts the writer would like to place the singularly attractive, yet a little puzzling, Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd, which is No. 4 in the National Gallery.  The type of the landscape is early, and even for that time the execution in this particular is, for Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth.  Especially the projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes.  The noble type and the stilted attitude of the St. Joseph suggest the St. Mark of the Salute.  The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the Salute picture.  The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, by a certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by no means in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedly in the St. Anthony causing a new-born Infant to speak, of the Scuola.  Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds of the early time before complete freedom of design was attained.

[Illustration:  St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints.  S. Maria della Salute, Venice.  From a Photograph by Anderson.]

[Illustration:  The Madonna with the Cherries.  Imperial Gallery, Vienna.  From a Photograph by Loewy.]

The splendidly beautiful Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but by Morelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian, belongs to about the same time as the Sacred and Profane Love, and would therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Padua and Vicenza.  The intention has been not so much to emphasise the tragic character of the motive as to exhibit to the highest advantage the voluptuous charm, the languid indifference of a Venetian beauty posing for Herod’s baleful consort.  Repetitions of this Herodias exist in the Northbrook Collection and in that of Mr. R.H.  Benson.  The latter, which is presumably from the workshop of the master, and shows variations in one or two unimportant particulars from the Doria picture, is here, failing the original, reproduced with the kind permission of the owner.  A conception traceable back to Giorgione would appear to underlie, not only this Doria picture, but that Herodias which at Dorchester House is, for not obvious reasons, attributed to Pordenone, and another similar one by Palma Vecchio, of which a late copy exists in the collection of the Earl of Chichester.  Especially is this community of origin noticeable in the head of St. John on the charger, as it appears in each of these works.  All of them again show a family resemblance in this particular respect to the interesting full-length Judith at the Hermitage, now ascribed