The altar-piece, The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St. Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor, now in San Domenico, but formerly in San Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature “Titianus Cadorinus pinsit,” this being about the first instance in which the later spelling “Titianus” appears.  If as a pictorial achievement it cannot rank with the San Niccolo and the Pesaro altar-pieces, it presents some special points of interest which make it easily distinguishable from these.  The conception is marked by a peculiar intensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, and hardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type.  It reveals a passionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which one expects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in Titian, whose dramatic force is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well under control.  The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter was acquainted with Raphael’s Madonna di Foligno; but it is dramatic and real where the Urbinate’s masterpiece was lofty and symbolical.  Still Titian’s St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in steadfastness and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a master of the full Renaissance.  An improved version of the upper portion of the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in the clouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccolo altar-piece.

[Illustration:  St. Sebastian.  Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS.  Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia.  From a Photograph by Alinari.]

Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the Papal Legate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Church of SS.  Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style and sentiment.  The St. Sebastian presently to be referred to, constituting the right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,[43] and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent of Duke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure the much-talked-of piece for his master.  Titian succumbed to an offer of sixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first nor the last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side of his character.  But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemy of the Legate, drew back and left to Titian the discredit without the profit of the transaction.  The central compartment of the Brescia altar-piece presents The Resurrection, the upper panels on the left and right show together the Annunciation, the lower left panel depicts the patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor, Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous St. Sebastian[44] in the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel