to the Herodias of the Doria Gallery, to the Flora of the Uffizi.  Here, even when the beautiful Venetian courtesan is represented or suggested, what the master gives is less the mere votary than the priestess of love.  Of this power of domination, this feminine royalty, the Venus Anadyomene still retains a measure, but the Venus of Urbino and the splendid succession of Venuses and Danaes, goddesses, nymphs, and heroines belonging to the period of the fullest maturity, show woman in the phase in which, renouncing her power to enslave, she is herself reduced to slavery.

These glowing presentments of physical attractiveness embody a lower ideal—­that of woman as the plaything of man, his precious possession, his delight in the lower sense.  And yet Titian expresses this by no means exalted conception with a grand candour, an absence of arriere-pensee such as almost purges it of offence.  It is Giovanni Morelli who, in tracing the gradual descent from his recovered treasure, the Venus of Giorgione in the Dresden Gallery,[17] through the various Venuses of Titian down to those of the latest manner, so finely expresses the essential difference between Giorgione’s divinity and her sister in the Tribuna.  The former sleeping, and protected only by her sovereign loveliness, is safer from offence than the waking goddess—­or shall we not rather say woman?—­who in Titian’s canvas passively waits in her rich Venetian bower, tended by her handmaidens.  It is again Morelli[18] who points out that, as compared with Correggio, even Giorgione—­to say nothing of Titian—­is when he renders the beauty of woman or goddess a realist.  And this is true in a sense, yet not altogether.  Correggio’s Danae, his Io, his Leda, his Venus, are in their exquisite grace of form and movement farther removed from the mere fleshly beauty of the undraped model than are the goddesses and women of Giorgione.  The passion and throb of humanity are replaced by a subtler and less easily explicable charm; beauty becomes a perfectly balanced and finely modulated harmony.  Still the allurement is there, and it is more consciously and more provocatively exercised than with Giorgione, though the fascination of Correggio’s divinities asserts itself less directly, less candidly.  Showing through the frankly human loveliness of Giorgione’s women there is after all a higher spirituality, a deeper intimation of that true, that clear-burning passion, enveloping body and soul, which transcends all exterior grace and harmony, however exquisite it may be in refinement of voluptuousness.[19]