of Europa, we descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance, though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its power to summarise and subordinate.  Only in those later pieces, the Venere del Pardo of the Louvre and the Nymph and Shepherd of Vienna, is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier times, with its exquisite naivete and mitigated sensuousness.

[Illustration:  Bacchus and Ariadne.  National Gallery.  From a Photograph published by the Autotype Company.]

The Bacchus and Ariadne is a Titian which even the Louvre, the Museum of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in our master’s works, may envy us.  The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are interested in Italian art.  This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos he followed with a closeness which did not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of the subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that had animated the original.  How is it possible to better express the At parte ex alia florens volitabat Iacchus....  Te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoque incensus amore of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager movement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian?  Or to paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines:  Horum pars tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant?  Ariadne’s crown of stars—­the Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona of the poem—­shines in Titian’s sky with a sublime radiance which corresponds perfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, of Catullus.  The splendour of the colour in this piece—­hardly equalled in its happy audacity, save by the Madonna del Coniglio or Vierge au Lapin of the Louvre,[41] would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, did the prescribed limits of space admit of such an indulgence.  Even here, however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the delights of sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain his imagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromatic harmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for the sake of conquering them.  This is not the sparkling brilliancy of those Veronese transformed into Venetians—­Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari; or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or the more violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or the mysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi.  With Titian the highest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment, are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation in the use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance be considered the supreme exponent.