[26] In connection with this group of works, all of them belonging to the quite early years of the sixteenth century, there should also be mentioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet little known Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist by Sebastiano Luciani, bearing the date 1510.  This has recently passed into the rich collection of Mr. George Salting.  It shows the painter admirably in his purely Giorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing witness that it was painted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco master.  It groups therefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at S. Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook’s injured but still lovely Venetian Lady as the Magdalen (the same ruddy blond model), and with the four Giorgionesque Saints in the Church of S. Bartolommeo al Rialto.

[27] Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden, p. 74.

[28] The Christ of the Pitti Gallery—­a bust-figure of the Saviour, relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most solemn beauty—­must date a good many years after the Cristo della Moneta.  In both works the beauty of the hand is especially remarkable.  The head of the Pitti Christ in its present state might not conclusively proclaim its origin; but the pathetic and intensely significant landscape is one of Titian’s loveliest.

[29] Last seen in public at the Old Masters’ Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1895.

[30] An ingenious suggestion was made, when the Ariosto was last publicly exhibited, that it might be that Portrait of a Gentleman of the House of Barbarigo which, according to Vasari, Titian painted with wonderful skill at the age of eighteen.  The broad, masterly technique of the Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with Vasari’s description, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no boy of eighteen, not even Titian, could have attained.  And then Vasari’s “giubbone di raso inargentato” is not the superbly luminous steel-grey sleeve of this Ariosto, but surely a vest of satin embroidered with silver.  The late form of signature, “Titianus F.,” on the stone balustrade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of the portrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition.  It seems likely that the balustrade bore originally only the “V” repeated, which curiously enough occurs also on the similar balustrade of the beautiful Portrait of a young Venetian, by Giorgione, first cited as such by Morelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it passed from the collection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P.  Richter.  The signature “Ticianus” occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the first period.  The works in the earlier half of this first period do not appear to have been signed, the “Titiano F.” of the Baffo inscription being admittedly of later date.  Thus that the Cristo della Moneta bears the “Ticianus