figure of the childlike Virgin, who ascends the mighty flight of stone steps, clad all in shimmering blue, her head crowned with a halo of yellow light, does the artist prove that he has penetrated to the innermost significance of his subject.  Here, at any rate, he touches the heart as well as feasts the eye.  The thoughts of all who are familiar with Venetian art will involuntarily turn to Tintoretto’s rendering of the same moving, yet in its symbolical character not naturally ultra-dramatic, scene.  The younger master lends to it a significance so vast that he may be said to go as far beyond and above the requirements of the theme as Titian, with all his legitimate splendour and serene dignity, remains below it.  With Tintoretto as interpreter we are made to see the beautiful episode as an event of the most tremendous import—­one that must shake the earth to its centre.  The reason of the onlooker may rebel against this portentous version, yet he is dominated all the same, is overwhelmed with something of the indefinable awe that has seized upon the bystanders who are witnesses of the scene.

[Illustration:  The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.  Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice.  From a Photograph by Naya.]

But now to discuss a very curious point in connection with the actual state of Titian’s important canvas.  It has been very generally assumed—­and Crowe and Cavalcaselle have set their seal on the assumption—­that Titian painted his picture for a special place in the Albergo (now Accademia), and that this place is now architecturally as it was in Titian’s time.  Let them speak for themselves.  “In this room (in the Albergo), which is contiguous to the modern hall in which Titian’s Assunta is displayed, there were two doors for which allowance was made in Titian’s canvas; twenty-five feet—­the length of the wall—­is now the length of the picture.  When this vast canvas was removed from its place, the gaps of the doors were filled in with new linen, and painted up to the tone of the original....”

That the pieces of canvas to which reference is here made were new, and not Titian’s original work from the brush, was of course well known to those who saw the work as it used to hang in the Accademia.  Crowe and Cavalcaselle give indeed the name of a painter of this century who is responsible for them.  Within the last three years the new and enterprising director of the Venice Academy, as part of a comprehensive scheme of rearrangement of the whole collection, caused these pieces of new canvas to be removed and then proceeded to replace the picture in the room for which it is believed to have been executed, fitting it into the space above the two doors just referred to.  Many people have declared themselves delighted with the alteration, looking upon it as a tardy act of justice done to Titian, whose work, it is assumed, is now again seen just as he designed it for the Albergo.  The writer must own that he has, from an examination