The Venus and Cupid which hangs in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, as the pendant to the more resplendent but more realistic Venus of Urbino, is a darker and less well-preserved picture than its present companion, but a grander if a more audacious presentment of the love-goddess.  Yet even here she is not so much the Cytherean as an embodiment of the Venetian ideal of the later time, an exemplification of the undisguised worship of fleshly loveliness which then existed in Venice.  It has been pointed out that the later Venus has the features of Titian’s fair daughter Lavinia, and this is no doubt to a certain extent true.  The goddesses, nymphs, and women of this time bear a sort of general family resemblance to her and to each other.  This piece illustrates the preferred type of Titian’s old age, as the Vanitas, Herodias, and Flora illustrate the preferred type of his youth; as the paintings which we have learnt to associate with the Duchess of Urbino illustrate that of his middle time.  The dignity and rhythmic outline of Eros in the Danae of Naples have been given up in favour of a more naturalistic conception of the insinuating urchin, who is in this Venus and Cupid the successor of those much earlier amorini in the Worship of Venus at Madrid.  The landscape in its sweeping breadth is very characteristic of the late time, and would give good reason for placing the picture later than it here appears.  The difficulty is this.  The Venus with the Organ Player[39] of Madrid, which in many essential points is an inferior repetition of the later Venus of the Tribuna, contains the portrait of Ottavio Farnese, much as we see him in the unfinished group painted, as has been recorded, at Rome in 1546.  This being the case, it is not easy to place the Venus and Cupid, or its subsequent adaptation, much later than just before the journey to Augsburg.  The Venus with the Organ Player has been overrated; there are things in this canvas which we cannot without offence to Titian ascribe to his own brush.  Among these are the tiresome, formal landscape, the wooden little dog petted by Venus, and perhaps some other passages.  The goddess herself and the amorous Ottavio, though this last is not a very striking or successful portrait, may perhaps be left to the master.  He vindicates himself more completely than in any other passage of the work when he depicts the youthful, supple form of the Venetian courtesan, as in a merely passive pose she personates the goddess whose insignificant votary she really is.  It cannot be denied that he touches here the lowest level reached by him in such delineations.  What offends in this Venus with the Organ Player, or rather Ottavio Farnese with his Beloved, is that its informing sentiment is not love, or indeed any community of sentiment, but an ostentatious pride in the possession of covetable beauty subdued like that of Danae herself by gold.