To the year 1542 belongs, as the authentic signature and date on the picture affirm, that celebrated portrait, The Daughter of Roberto Strozzi, once in the splendid palace of the family at Florence, but now, with some other priceless treasures having the same origin, in the Berlin Museum.  Technically, the picture is one of the most brilliant, one of the most subtly exquisite, among the works of the great Cadorine’s maturity.  It well serves to show what Titian’s ideal of colour was at this time.  The canvas is all silvery gleam, all splendour and sober strength of colour—­yet not of colours.  These in all their plentitude and richness, as in the crimson drapery and the distant landscape, are duly subordinated to the main effect; they but set off discreetly the figure of the child, dressed all in white satin with hair of reddish gold, and contribute without fanfare to the fine and harmonious balance of the whole.  Here, as elsewhere, more particularly in the work of Titian’s maturity, one does not in the first place pause to pick out this or the other tint, this or the other combination of colours as particularly exquisite; and that is what one is so easily led to do in the contemplation of the Bonifazi and of Paolo Veronese.

[Illustration:  The Infant Daughter of Roberto Strozzi.  Royal Gallery, Berlin.  From a Photograph by F. Hanfstaengl.]

As the portrait of a child, though in conception it reveals a marked progress towards the intimite of later times, the Berlin picture lacks something of charm and that quality which, for want of a better word, must be called loveableness.  Or is it perhaps that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have spoilt us in this respect?  For it is only in these latter days that to the child, in deliberate and avowed portraiture, is allowed that freakishness, that natural espieglerie and freedom from artificial control which has its climax in the unapproached portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds.  This is the more curious when it is remembered how tenderly, with what observant and sympathetic truth the relation of child to mother, of child to child, was noted in the innumerable “Madonnas” and “Holy Families” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; how both the Italians, and following them the Netherlanders, relieved the severity of their sacred works by the delightful roguishness, the romping impudence of their little angels, their putti.

It has already been recorded that Titian, taking up the commission abandoned by Vasari, undertook a great scheme of pictorial decoration for the Brothers of Santo Spirito in Isola.  All that he carried out for that church has now found its way into that of the Salute.  The three ceiling pictures, The Sacrifice of Isaac, Cain and Abel, and David victorious over Goliath, are in the great sacristy of the church; the Four Evangelists and Four Doctors are in the ceiling of the choir behind