of a work which cannot be said to have had any precursor in the art of Venice.  There was in existence one altar-piece dealing with the same subject from which Titian might possibly have obtained a hint.  This was the Assumption of the Virgin painted by Duerer in 1509 for Jacob Heller, and now only known by Paul Juvenel’s copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort.  The group of the Apostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father and the Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in its fine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art.  Without exercising a too fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contact between this group and the corresponding one in the Assunta.  But Titian could not at that time have seen the original of the Heller altar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where it remained for a century.[39] He no doubt did see the Assumption in the Marienleben completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands in a definite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and more formal—­much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore.  The Assunta was already in Vasari’s time much dimmed, and thus difficult to see in its position on the high altar.  Joshua Reynolds, when he visited the Frari in 1752, says that “he saw it near; it was most terribly dark but nobly painted.”  Now, in the Accademia delle Belle Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, but sufficiently restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the greatest productions of Italian art at its highest.  The sombre, passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and awaited by the Eternal.  This last is a figure the divine serenity of which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with awe.  The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and not without some reason.  Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the climax, to substitute for Titian’s conception anything more diaphanous, more ethereal?  It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure in the mind’s eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.

[Illustration:  The Assunta.  Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice.]