the St. Catherine, the palpitating life of the St. Sebastian.  The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plump young gondolier stripped and painted as he was—­contemplating, if anything, himself.  The figure is just as Vasari describes it, ritratto dal’ vivo e senza artificio niuno.  The royal saint of Alexandria is a sister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunning elaboration of coiffure, to the St. Catherine of the Madonna del Coniglio, and the not dissimilar figure in our own Holy Family with St. Catherine at the National Gallery.

The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with the infant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in the Palazzo Ducale leading from the Doge’s private apartments to the Senate Hall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524.  It is, so far as we know, Titian’s first performance as a frescante since the completion, twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of Padua.  As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich and brilliant in colour for a fresco, very fairly preserved—­deserving, in fact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe and Cavalcaselle have made for it.  The movement is broad and true, the rugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the subject is not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit of personal interpretation which can transfigure truth without unduly transforming it.  In grandeur of design and decorative character, it is greatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightened with white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.  Even the colossal, half-effaced St. Christopher with the Infant Christ, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the Town Hall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.

[Illustration:  St. Christopher with the Infant Christ.  Fresco in the Doge’s Palace, Venice.  From a Photograph by Alinari.]

Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the Entombment of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other than altar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accorded which belongs to the Bacchus and Ariadne among purely secular subjects?  It was in 1523 that Titian acquired a new and illustrious patron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son of that most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara.  The Entombment being a “Mantua piece,"[47] Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally assumed that it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as some correspondence published by them goes to show, it must have been painted at, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523.  Judging entirely by the style and technical execution