If we are to assume with Crowe and Cavalcaselle that the single figure Ecce Homo of the Prado Gallery was the piece taken by the master to Charles V. when, at the bidding of the Emperor, he journeyed to Augsburg, we can only conclude that his design was carried out by pupils or assistants.  The execution is not such as we can ascribe to the brush which is so shortly to realise for the monarch a group of masterpieces.

It was in January 1548 that Titian set forth to obey the command of the Emperor, “per far qualche opera,” as Count Girolamo della Torre has it in a letter of recommendation given to Titian for the Cardinal of Trent at Augsburg.  It is significant to find the writer mentioning the painter, not by any of the styles and titles which he had a right to bear, especially at the court of Charles V., but extolling him as “Messer Titiano Pittore et il primo huomo della Christianita."[40]

It might be imagined that it would be a terrible wrench for Titian, at the age of seventy, to transplant himself suddenly, and for the first time, into a foreign land.  But then he was not as other men of seventy are.  The final years of his unexampled career will conclusively show that he preserved his mental and physical vigour to the end.  Further, the imperial court with its Spanish etiquette, its Spanish language and manners, was much the same at Augsburg as he had known it on previous occasions at Bologna.  Moreover, Augsburg and Nuremberg[41] had, during the last fifty years, been in close touch with Venice in all matters appertaining to art and commerce.  Especially the great banking house of the Fuggers had the most intimate relations with the queen-city of the Adriatic.  Yet art of the two great German cities would doubtless appeal less to the Venetian who had arrived at the zenith of his development than it would and did to the Bellinis and their school at the beginning of the century.  The gulf had become a far wider one, and the points of contact were fewer.

The trusted Orazio had been left behind, notwithstanding the success which he had achieved during the Roman tour, and it may be assumed that he presided over the studio and workshop at Biri Grande during his father’s absence.  Titian was accompanied to Augsburg by his second cousin, Cesare Vecellio,[42] who no doubt had a minor share in very many of the canvases belonging to the period of residence at Augsburg.  Our master’s first and most grateful task must have been the painting of the great equestrian portrait of the Emperor at the Battle of Muehlberg, which now hangs in the Long Gallery of the Prado at Madrid.  It suffered much injury in the fire of the Pardo Palace, which annihilated so many masterpieces, but is yet very far from being the “wreck” which, with an exaggeration not easily pardonable under the circumstances, Crowe and Cavalcaselle have described it.  In the presence of one of the world’s masterpieces criticism may for once remain silent,