Rosenkranzfest, painted some eight years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo, adjacent to the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi.  This particularity, noted by the author of the Vite, and, in some passages, a certain hardness and opacity of colour, give rise to the surmise that, even in the parts of the picture which belong to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti may be traced.  It was he who most probably painted the background and the figure of St. Jerome in the master’s altar-piece finished in the preceding year for S. Giovanni Crisostomo; it was he, too, who to a great extent executed, though he cannot have wholly devised, the Bellinesque Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints in the Church of San Pietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period.  Even in the Madonna of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian Bellino’s finest landscape of the late time, certain hardnesses of colour in the main group suggest the possibility of a minor co-operation by Basaiti.  Some passages of the Bacchanal, however—­especially the figures of the two blond, fair-breasted goddesses or nymphs who, in a break in the trees, stand relieved against the yellow bands of a sunset sky—­are as beautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase has produced up to the date of the picture’s appearance.  Very suggestive of Bellini is the way in which the hair of some of the personages is dressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced by artificial means.  These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in his earliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid.  Still this coiffure—­for as such it must be designated—­is to be found more or less throughout the master’s career.  It is very noticeable in the Allegories just mentioned.

[Illustration:  Alessandro de’ Medici (so called).  Hampton Court.  From a Photograph by Spooner & Co.]

Infinitely pathetic is the old master’s vain attempt to infuse into the chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires.  An atmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously betraying life-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like fire through the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and Titian.  The audacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rustic festival, in which the gods unbend and, after the homelier fashion of mortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, it would seem, only pour la forme.  A careful examination of the picture substantially confirms Vasari’s story that the Feast of the Gods was painted upon by Titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in many passages a Titianesque hand.  It may well be, at the same time, that Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what the younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left unfinished by him.