the exquisite sensitiveness of Lorenzo Lotto, who sees most willingly in his sitters those qualities that are in the closest sympathy with his own highly-strung nature, and loves to present them as some secret, indefinable woe tears at their heart-strings.  A strong element of the Giorgionesque pathos informs still and gives charm to the Sciarra Violin-Player of Sebastiano del Piombo; only that there it is already tempered by the haughty self-restraint more proper to Florentine and Roman portraiture.  There is little or nothing to add after this as to the Jeune Homme au Gant, except that as a representation of aristocratic youth it has hardly a parallel among the master’s works except, perhaps, a later and equally admirable, though less distinguished, portrait in the Pitti.

[Illustration:  From a Photograph by Brauen Clement & Cie.  Walter L. Colls. ph. sc.

Jeune Homme au gant]

[Illustration:  A Concert.  Probably by Titian.  Pitti Palace, Florence.  From a Photograph by Alinari.]

Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of the Venetians, painted in the pensieroso mood his portraits of high-bred English cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest manhood, was this particular aspect of youth in its flower again depicted with the same felicity.[32]

To Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s pages the reader must be referred for a detailed and interesting account of Titian’s intrigues against the venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office of broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi.  We see there how, on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo proposed to Titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the Tenth (Giovanni de’ Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such a step.  Titian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds to petition the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker’s patent for life, on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions as are conceded to Giovanni Bellini.  The petition is presented on the 31st of May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that day moves and carries a resolution accepting Titian’s offer with all the conditions attached.  Though he has arrived at the extreme limit of his splendid career, old Gian Bellino, who has just given new proof of his still transcendent power in the great altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), which is in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit still under the encroachments of his dangerous competitor, younger than himself by half a century.  On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Ten revokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares that Titian is not to receive his broker’s patent on the first vacancy, but must wait his turn.  Seemingly nothing daunted, Titian petitions again, asking for the reversion of the particular broker’s patent which will become