of the canvas itself, the writer feels strongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years or thereabouts—­that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closely following upon that in which the Worship of Venus and the Bacchanal were painted.  Mature as Titian’s art here is, it reveals, not for the last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were saturated.  The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest.  The Joseph of Arimathea has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the Assunta, the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such as we meet with in the Bacchanal.  The Magdalen, with her features distorted by grief, resembles—­allowing for the necessary differences imposed by the situation—­the women making offering to the love-goddess in the Worship of Venus.  The figure of the Virgin, on the other hand, enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a type which would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and his school.  To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the Entombment, without by dissection killing it, is a task of difficulty.  What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye and enthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, is perhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, of informing sentiment.  Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection of the two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace—­the well-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to accentuate the mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, bound together by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from them communicates itself, as it were, to the beholder.  In the colouring, while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a whole, each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily asserting, its own splendour and its own special significance.  And yet the yellow of the Magdalen’s dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier the embrowned flesh of sturdy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson of Nicodemus’s garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling white of the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of the Virgin’s robe, combine less to produce the impression of great pictorial magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous tragedy.

Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge’s chapel in 1524 no trace now remains.  They consisted of a lunette about the altar,[48] with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.

[Illustration:  The Madonna di Casa Pesaro.  Church of S. Maria de’ Frari, Venice.  From a Photograph by Naya.]