To the period of Titian’s return from the second visit to Augsburg belongs a very remarkable portrait which of late years there has been some disinclination to admit as his own work.  This is the imposing full-length portrait which stands forth as the crowning decoration of the beautiful and well-ordered gallery at Cassel.  In the days when it was sought to obtain quand meme a striking designation for a great picture, it was christened Alfonso d’Avalos, Marques del Vasto.  More recently, with some greater show of probability, it has been called Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino.  In the Jahrbuch der koeniglich-preussischen Kunstsammlungen,[43] Herr Carl Justi, ever bold and ingenious in hypothesis, strives, with the support of a mass of corroborative evidence that cannot be here quoted, to prove that the splendid personage presented is a Neapolitan nobleman of the highest rank, Giovan Francesco Acquaviva, Duke of Atri.  There is the more reason to accept his conjecture since it helps us to cope with certain difficulties presented by the picture itself.  It may be conceded at the outset that there are disturbing elements in it, well calculated to give pause to the student of Titian.  The handsome patrician, a little too proud of his rank, his magnificent garments and accoutrements, his virile beauty, stands fronting the spectator in a dress of crimson and gold, wearing a plumed and jewelled hat, which in its elaboration closely borders on the grotesque, and holding a hunting-spear.  Still more astonishing in its exaggeration of a Venetian mode in portraiture[44] is the great crimson, dragon-crowned helmet which, on the left of the canvas, Cupid himself supports.  To the right, a rival even of Love in the affections of our enigmatical personage, a noble hound rubs himself affectionately against the stalwart legs of his master.  Far back stretches a prospect singularly unlike those rich-toned studies of sub-Alpine regions in which Titian as a rule revels.  It has an august but more colourless beauty recalling the middle Apennines; one might almost say that it prefigures those prospects of inhospitable Sierra which, with their light, delicate tonality, so admirably relieve and support the portraits of Velazquez.  All this is unusual, and still more so is the want of that aristocratic gravity, of that subordination of mere outward splendour to inborn dignity, which mark Titian’s greatest portraits throughout his career.  The splendid materials for the picture are not as absolutely digested, as absolutely welded into one consistent and harmonious whole, as with such authorship one would expect.  But then, on the other hand, take the magnificent execution in the most important passages:  the distinguished silvery tone obtained notwithstanding the complete red-and-gold costume and the portentous crimson helmet; the masterly brush-work in these last particulars, in the handsome virile head of the model and the delicate flesh of the amorino.