but not excessive, has ever been and ever will be lavished on the breadth and splendid decision of the painting; on the magnificent rendering of the suit of plain but finely fashioned steel armour, with its wonderful reflections; on the energy of the virile countenance, and the appropriate concentration and simplicity of the whole.  The superb head has, it must be confessed, more grandeur and energy than true individuality or life.  The companion picture represents Eleonora Gonzaga seated near an open window, wearing a sombre but magnificent costume, and, completing it, one of those turbans with which the patrician ladies of North Italy, other than those of Venice, habitually crowned their locks.  It has suffered in loss of freshness and touch more than its companion.  Fine and accurate as the portrait is, much as it surpasses its pendant in subtle truth of characterisation, it has in the opinion of the writer been somewhat overpraised.  For once, Titian approaches very nearly to the northern ideal in portraiture, underlining the truth with singular accuracy, yet with some sacrifice of graciousness and charm.  The daughter of the learned and brilliant Isabella looks here as if, in the decline of her beauty, she had become something of a precieuse and a prude, though it would be imprudent to assert that she was either the one or the other.  Perhaps the most attractive feature of the whole composition is the beautiful landscape so characteristically stretching away into the far blue distance, suggested rather than revealed through the open window.  This is such a picture as might have inspired the Netherlander Antonio Moro, just because it is Italian art of the Cinquecento with a difference, that is, with a certain admixture of northern downrightness and literalness of statement.

About this same time Titian received from the brother of this princess, his patron and admirer Federigo Gonzaga, the commission for the famous series of the Twelve Caesars, now only known to the world by stray copies here and there, and by the grotesquely exaggerated engravings of AEgidius Sadeler.  Giulio Romano having in 1536[20] completed the Sala di Troja in the Castello of Mantua, and made considerable progress with the apartments round about it, Federigo Gonzaga conceived the idea of devoting one whole room to the painted effigies of the Twelve Caesars to be undertaken by Titian.  The exact date when the Caesars were delivered is not known, but it may legitimately be inferred that this was in the course of 1537 or the earlier half of 1538.  Our master’s pictures were, according to Vasari, placed in an anticamera of the Mantuan Palace, below them being hung twelve storie a olio—­histories in oils—­by Giulio Romano.[21] The Caesars were all half-lengths, eleven out of the twelve being done by the Venetian master and the twelfth by Giulio Romano himself.[22] Brought to England with the rest of the Mantua pieces purchased by Daniel Nys for Charles