ten years later on, but because the conception of the majestic St. John is for once not pictorial but purely sculptural.  Leaving Rome, and immediately afterwards coming into contact for the first time with the wonders of the earlier Florentine art, Titian might well have conceived, might well have painted thus.  Strange to say, the influence is not that of Michelangelo, but, unless the writer is greatly deceived, that of Donatello, whose noble ascetic type of the Precursor is here modernised, and in the process deprived of some of its austerity.  The glorious mountain landscape, with its brawling stream, fresher and truer than any torrent of Ruysdael’s, is all Titian.  It makes the striking figure of St. John, for all its majesty, appear not a little artificial.

The little town of Serravalle, still so captivatingly Venetian in its general aspect, holds one of the most magnificent works of Titian’s late time, a vast Virgin and Child with St. Peter and St. Andrew.  This hangs—­or did when last seen by the writer—­in the choir of the Church of St. Andrew; there is evidence in Titian’s correspondence that it was finished in 1547, so that it must have been undertaken soon after the return from Rome.  In the distance between the two majestic figures of the saints is a prospect of landscape with a lake, upon which Titian has shown on a reduced scale Christ calling Peter and Andrew from their nets; an undisguised adaptation this, by the veteran master, of the divine Urbinate’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes, but one which made of the borrowed motive a new thing, no excrescence but an integral part of the conception.  In this great work, which to be more universally celebrated requires only to be better known to those who do not come within the narrow circle of students, there is evidence that while Titian, after his stay at the Papal court, remained firm as a rock in his style and general principles—­luckily a Venetian and no pseudo-Roman,—­his imagination became more intense in its glow, gloomier but grander, than it had been in middle age—­his horizon altogether vaster.  To a grand if sometimes too unruffled placidity succeeded a physical and psychical perturbation which belonged both to the man in advanced years and to the particular moment in the century.  Even in his treatment of classic myth, of the nude in goddess and woman, there was, as we shall see presently, a greater unrest and a more poignant sensuality—­there was evidence of a mind and temperament troubled anew instead of being tranquillised by the oncoming of old age.

Are we to place here, as Crowe and Cavalcaselle do, the Venus and Cupid of the Tribuna and the Venus with the Organ Player of the Prado?  The technical execution of these canvases, the treatment of landscape in the former, would lead the writer to place them some years farther on still in the oeuvre of the master.  There are, however, certain reasons for following them in this chronological arrangement.