[16] This picture having been brought to completion in 1510, and Cima’s great altar-piece with the same subject, behind the high-altar in the Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being dated 1494, the inference is irresistible that in this case the head of the school borrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has always been looked upon as one of his close followers.  In size, in distribution, in the arrangement and characterisation of the chief groups, the two altar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a merely accidental and family resemblance must be dismissed.  This type of Christ, then, of a perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness tempering majesty, dates back, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima.  The preferred type of the elder master is more passionate, more human.  Our own Incredulity of St. Thomas, by Cima, in the National Gallery, shows, in a much more perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the beautiful Man of Sorrows in the same collection, still nominally ascribed to Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima’s own hand, is at any rate from that of an artist dominated by his influence.  When the life-work of the Conegliano master has been more closely studied in connection with that of his contemporaries, it will probably appear that he owes very much less to Bellini than it has been the fashion to assume.  The idea of an actual subordinate co-operation with the caposcuola, like that of Bissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so many others, must be excluded.  The earlier and more masculine work of Cima bears a definite relation to that of Bartolommeo Montagna.

[17] The Tobias and the Angel shows some curious points of contact with the large Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John by Titian, in the Louvre—­a work which is far from equalling the S. Marciliano picture throughout in quality.  The beautiful head of the St. Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John, though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type and movement of the head.  There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice a kind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano Titian, assigned by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini to Santo Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432).  Here the adapter has ruined Titian’s great conception by substituting his own trivial archangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copy of this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich).  A reproduction of the Titian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of the present monograph (p. 99).

[18] Vasari places the Three Ages after the first visit to Ferrara, that is almost as much too late as he places the Tobias of S. Marciliano too early.  He describes its subject as “un pastore ignudo ed una forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni.”