The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carre of the Louvre now known as Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti, but in the collection of Charles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, Titian’s Mistress after the Life, comes in very well at this stage.  The exuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unbound hair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinities inspired by Giorgione—­the loveliest of all in some respects, the most consummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest still to the realities of life.  The chief harmony is here one of dark blue, myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the whole enframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through here and there with gleams of light.  Vasari described how Titian painted, ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d’ artiglieria, the Duke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, who afterwards became the wife of the duke, che e opera stupenda.  It is upon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance between the cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid donna and the Alfonso of Ferrara of the Museo del Prado, that the popular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably, like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with a lover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty.  Now, however, the accomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,[42] comes forward with convincing arguments to show that the handsome insouciant personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in Titian’s picture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has hitherto been almost universally assumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be his son, Ercole II.  This alone invalidates the favourite designation of the Louvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the “stupendous” portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari.  A comparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called Giorgio Cornaro of Castle Howard—­a famous portrait by Titian of a gentleman holding a hawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at the recent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery—­results in something like certainty that in both is the same personage portrayed.  It is not only that the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are the same in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree exceedingly well; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same impression of splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused.  This means that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the gracious Ercole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the Castle Howard picture is Alfonso’s son and successor portrayed.  In the latter canvas, which bears, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the later signature “Titianus F.,” the personage is, it may be, a year or two older.  Let it be borne in mind that only on the back of the canvas is, or rather was, to be found the inscription:  “Georgius Cornelius, frater Catterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (sic),” upon the authority of which it bears its present designation.