ministering to St. Roch.  The St. Sebastian is neither more nor less than the magnificent academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his splendidly developed body.  There is neither in the figure nor in the beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom.  A wide gulf indeed separates the mood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposeful charm of the Giorgionesque saint in the St. Mark of the Salute, or the healthy realism of the unconcerned St. Sebastian in the S. Niccolo altar-piece.  Here, as later on with the St. Peter Martyr, those who admire in Venetian art in general, and in that of Titian in particular, its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature, must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by a conception in its very essence artificial.  Yet, brought face to face with the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, and against their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth and richness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling and painting.[45] Analogies have been drawn between the Medicean Faun and the St. Sebastian, chiefly on account of the strained position of the arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue and the painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance, notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laocoon in the world-famous group of the Vatican.  Of this a model had been made by Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast was kept in Titian’s workshop, from which he is said to have studied.

[Illustration:  DESIGN FOR A HOLY FAMILY.  CHATSWORTH. From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie.]

[Illustration:  La Vierge au Lapin.  Louvre.  From a Photograph by Neurdein.]

In the Madonna di S. Niccolo, which was painted or rather finished in the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccolo de’ Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not extravagance of technique.  The composition must have had much greater unity before the barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of the circular top which it had in common with the Assunta, the Ancona, and the Pesaro altar-pieces.  Technically superior to the second of these great works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action and sentiment, by no such passionate identification of the artist with his subject.  It is only in passing from one of its beauties to another that its artistic worth can be fully appreciated.  Then we admire the rapt expression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the St. Nicholas,[46] the mansuetude of the St. Francis, the Venetian loveliness of