[Illustration:  SKETCH FOR THE MADONNA DI CASA PESARO.  ALBERTINA, VIENNA. From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie.]

[Illustration:  Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican.  From the engraving by Henri Laurent.]

By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the placing of Titian’s world-renowned Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican on the altar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS.  Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one of the most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity.  On the 16th of August 1867—­one of the blackest of days in the calendar for the lover of Venetian art—­the St. Peter Martyr was burnt in the Cappella del Rosario of SS.  Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of Giovanni Bellini’s finest altar-pieces, the Virgin and Child with Saints and Angels, painted in 1472.  Some malign influence had caused the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave.  Now the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their estimate of the St. Peter Martyr from the numerous existing copies and prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the picture was.  Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impression may, under the circumstances, appear over-bold.  Nothing could well be more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world’s greatest colourist by a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has conceived in the myriad hues of nature.  The writer, not having had the good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the marvellously suggestive colour-scheme.  This Crowe and Cavalcaselle minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape, in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above—­with its single startling note of red in the hose of the executioner.  It is, therefore, with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing, notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and unnatural in its most essential elements.  What has been called its Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who, returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had remained there until March in the same year.  All the same, is not the exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it culminated in the Transfiguration?