It is not, indeed, by any means certain that we are justified in seriously criticising as a Venus the great picture of the Tribuna.  Titian himself has given no indication that the beautiful Venetian woman who lies undraped after the bath, while in a sumptuous chamber, furnished according to the mode of the time, her handmaidens are seeking for the robes with which she will adorn herself, is intended to present the love-goddess, or even a beauty masquerading with her attributes.  Vasari, who saw it in the picture-closet of the Duke of Urbino, describes it, no doubt, as “une Venere giovanetta a giacere, con fieri e certi panni sottili attorno.”  It is manifestly borrowed, too—­as is now universally acknowledged—­from Giorgione’s Venus in the Dresden Gallery, with the significant alteration, however, that Titian’s fair one voluptuously dreams awake, while Giorgione’s goddess more divinely reposes, and sleeping dreams loftier dreams.  The motive is in the borrowing robbed of much of its dignity and beauty, and individualised in a fashion which, were any other master than Titian in question, would have brought it to the verge of triviality.  Still as an example of his unrivalled mastery in rendering the glow and semi-transparency of flesh, enhanced by the contrast with white linen—­itself slightly golden in tinge; in suggesting the appropriate atmospheric environment; in giving the full splendour of Venetian colour, duly subordinated nevertheless to the main motive, which is the glorification of a beautiful human body as it is; in all these respects the picture is of superlative excellence, a representative example of the master and of Venetian art, a piece which it would not be easy to match even among his own works.

More and more, as the supreme artist matures, do we find him disdaining the showier and more evident forms of virtuosity.  His colour is more and more marked in its luminous beauty by reticence and concentration, by the search after such a main colour-chord as shall not only be beautiful and satisfying in itself, but expressive of the motive which is at the root of the picture.  Play of light over the surfaces and round the contours of the human form; the breaking-up and modulation of masses of colour by that play of light; strength, and beauty of general tone—­these are now Titian’s main preoccupations.  To this point his perfected technical art has legitimately developed itself from the Giorgionesque ideal of colour and tone-harmony, which was essentially the same in principle, though necessarily in a less advanced stage, and more diversified by exceptions.  Our master became, as time went on, less and less interested in the mere dexterous juxtaposition of brilliantly harmonising and brilliantly contrasting tints, in piquancy, gaiety, and sparkle of colour, to be achieved for its own sake.  Indeed this phase of Venetian sixteenth-century colour belongs rather to those artists who issued from Verona—­to the Bonifazi, and to Paolo Veronese—­who in this respect, as generally in artistic temperament, proved themselves the natural successors of Domenico and Francesco Morone, of Girolamo dai Libri, of Cavazzola.