To the year 1519 belongs the Annunciation in the Cathedral of Treviso, the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly overstated.  True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely ill-placed donor go far to mar it.  Putting aside for the moment the beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to the Florentines and the Sienese—­both sculptors and painters—­south of the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in the Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto’s pathetic Annunciation at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appear dignified by comparison.  Titian’s own Annunciation, bequeathed to the Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better known picture.

[Illustration:  The Annunciation.  Cathedral at Treviso.  From a Photograph by Alinari.]

Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso’s Duchess,—­the passive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,—­our master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we are told, the finished Bacchanal, already described above.  He appears to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early part of 1523.  On which of these visits he took with him and completed at Ferrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our Bacchus and Ariadne, is not quite clear.  It will not be safe to put the picture too late in the earlier section of Vecelli’s work, though, with all its freshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a further advance on the Worship of Venus and the Bacchanal, and must be deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the Feast of the Gods of Gian Bellino.  To the two superb fantasies of Titian already described our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time has not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of the golden time, it is in far better condition than they are.  In the Worship of Venus and the Bacchanal the allegiance to Giorgiono has been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the naivete remains, but not the infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces.  In the Bacchus and Ariadne Titian’s genius flames up with an intensity of passion such as will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of this class.  Certainly, with all the beauties of the Venuses, of the Diana and Actaeon, the Diana and Calisto, the Rape