Within the years 1532 and 1538, or thereabouts, would appear to fall Titian’s relations with another princely patron, Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, the nephew of the redoubtable Pope Julius II., whose qualities of martial ardour and unbridled passion he reproduced in an exaggerated form.  By his mother, Giovanna da Montefeltro, he descended also from the rightful dynasty of Urbino, to which he succeeded in virtue of adoption.  His life of perpetual strife, of warfare in defence of his more than once lost and reconquered duchy, and as the captain first of the army of the Church, afterwards of the Venetian forces, came to an abrupt end in 1538.  With his own hand he had, in the ardent days of his youth, slain in the open streets of Ravenna the handsome, sinister Cardinal Alidosi, thereby bringing down upon himself the anathemas of his uncle, Julius II., and furnishing to his successor, the Medici pope Leo X., the best possible excuse for the sequestration of the duchy of Urbino in favour of his own house.  He himself died by poison, suspicion resting upon the infamous Pier Luigi Farnese, the son of Paul III.

Francesco Maria had espoused Eleonora Gonzaga, the sister of Titian’s protector, Federigo, and it is probably through the latter that the relations with our master sprang up to which we owe a small group of his very finest works, including the so-called Venus of Urbino of the Tribuna, the Girl in a Fur Cloak of the Vienna Gallery, and the companion portraits of Francesco Maria and Eleonora which are now in the Venetian Gallery at the Uffizi.  The fiery leader of armies had, it should be remembered, been brought up by Guidobaldo of Montefeltro, one of the most amiable and enlightened princes of his time, and, moreover, his consort Eleonora was the daughter of Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, than whom the Renaissance knew no more enthusiastic or more discriminating patron of art.

[Illustration:  The Girl in the Fur Cloak.  Imperial Gallery, Vienna.  From a Photograph by Loewy.]

A curious problem meets us at the outset.  We may assume with some degree of certainty that the portraits of the duke and duchess belong to the year 1537.  Stylistic characteristics point to the conclusion that the great Venus of the Tribuna, the so-called Bella di Tiziano, and the Girl in the Fur Cloak—­to take only undoubted originals—­belong to much the same stage of Titian’s practice as the companion portraits at the Uffizi.  Eleonora Gonzaga, a princess of the highest culture, the daughter of an admirable mother, the friend of Pietro Bembo, Sadolet, and Baldassarre Castiglione, was at this time a matron of some twenty years’ standing; at the date when her avowed portrait was painted she must have been at the very least forty.  By what magic did Titian manage to suggest her type and physiognomy in the famous pictures just now mentioned, and yet to plunge the duchess into a kind of Fontaine de