Bacchus and Ariadne.  In the exquisite Shepherd and Nymph of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna—­a masterpiece in monotone of quite the last period—­the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque time reappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, as in the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by that solemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the final years of Titian’s old age.

Thus, though there cannot be claimed for Titian that universality in art and science which the lovers of Leonardo’s painting must ever deplore, since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of scope of Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht Duerer; it must be seen that as a painter he covered more ground than any first-rate master of the sixteenth century.  While in more than one branch of the painter’s art he stood forth supreme and without a rival, in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorial decorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his younger rivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves more practised and more successfully daring in this particular branch.

To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, such parallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must go to Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or had been, the great merchant city of the South.  Rubens, who might fairly be styled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was during the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle of supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer period during the Renaissance.  He, too, was without a rival in the creation of those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned them; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as an accessory to the human figure.  Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who, in his greatest efforts—­those sumptuous and almost truculent portraits d’apparat of princes, nobles, and splendid dames—­knew no superior, though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Velazquez.  Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more demonstrative, a seemingly closer embrace, drawing from the contact a more exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness some of the stain of earth.  Titian, though he was at least as genuine a realist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mere outsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which was everywhere—­in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home of his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings.  His art had ever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion, that distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art that is not Italian.