soul of art.  We remember how the stiff-necked Ingres, the greatest Raphaelesque of this century, hurled at Delacroix’s head the famous dictum, “Le dessin c’est la probite de l’art,” and how his illustrious rival, the chief of a romanticism which he would hardly acknowledge, vindicated by works rather than by words his contention that, if design was indeed art’s conscience, colour was its life-blood, its very being.

The Danae, seen and admired with reservations by Buonarroti in the painting-room of Titian at the Belvedere, is now, with its beauty diminished in important particulars, to be found with the rest of the Farnese pictures in the gallery of the Naples Museum.  It serves to show that if the artist was far beyond the stage of imitation or even of assimilation on the larger scale, he was, at any rate, affected by the Roman atmosphere in art.  For once he here comes nearer to the realisation of Tintoretto’s ideal—­the colour of Titian and the design of Michelangelo—­than his impetuous pupil and rival ever did.  While preserving in the Danae his own true warmth and transparency of Venetian colour—­now somewhat obscured yet not effaced—­he combines unusual weightiness and majesty with voluptuousness in the nude, and successfully strives after a more studied rhythm in the harmony of the composition generally than the art of Venice usually affected.

[Illustration:  Danae and the Golden Rain.  Naples Gallery.  From a Photograph by E. Alinari.]

Titian, in his return from Rome, which he was never to revisit, made a stay at Florence with an eye, as we may guess, both to business and pleasure.  There, as Vasari takes care to record, our master visited the artistic sights, and rimase stupefatto—­remained in breathless astonishment—­as he had done when he made himself acquainted with the artistic glories of Rome.  This is but vague, and a little too much smacks of self-flattery and adulation of the brother Tuscans.  Titian was received by Duke Cosimo at Poggio a Caiano, but his offer to paint the portrait of the Medici ruler was not well received.  It may be, as Vasari surmises, that this attitude was taken up by the duke in order not to do wrong to the “many noble craftsmen” then practising in his city and dominion.  More probably, however, Cosimo’s hatred and contempt of his father’s minion Aretino, whose portrait by Titian he had condescended to retain, yet declined to acknowledge, impelled him to show something less than favour to the man who was known to be the closest friend and intimate of this self-styled “Scourge of Princes.”

Crowe and Cavalcaselle have placed about the year 1555 the extravagantly lauded St. John the Baptist in the Desert, once in the church of S.M.  Maria Maggiore at Venice, and now in the Accademia there.  To the writer it appears that it would best come in at this stage—­that is to say in or about 1545—­not only because the firm close handling in the nude would be less explicable