The dog might without exaggeration be pronounced the best, the truest in movement, to be found in Venetian art—­indeed, in art generally, until Velazquez appears.  Herr Carl Justi’s happy conjecture helps us, if we accept it, to get over some of these difficulties and seeming contradictions.  The Duke of Atri belonged to a great Neapolitan family, exiled and living at the French court under royal countenance and protection.  The portrait was painted to be sent back to France, to which, indeed, its whole subsequent history belongs.  Under such circumstances the young nobleman would naturally desire to affirm his rank and pretensions as emphatically as might be; to outdo in splendour and prestance all previous sitters to Titian; to record himself apt in war, in the chase, in love, and more choice in the fashion of his appointments than any of his compeers in France or Italy.

An importance to which it is surely not entitled in the life-work of the master is given to the portrait of the Legate Beccadelli, executed in the month of July 1552, and included among the real and fancied masterpieces of the Tribuna in the Uffizi.  To the writer it has always appeared the most nearly tiresome and perfunctory of Titian’s more important works belonging to the same class.  Perhaps the elaborate legend inscribed on the paper held by the prelate, including the unusual form of signature “Titianus Vecellius faciebat Venetiis MDLII, mense Julii,” may have been the cause that the canvas has attracted an undue share of attention.[45] At p. 218 of Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s second volume we get, under date the 11th of October 1552, Titian’s first letter to Philip of Spain.  There is mention in it of a Queen of Persia, which the artist does not expressly declare to be his own work, and of a Landscape and St. Margaret previously sent by Ambassador Vargas ("... il Paesaggio et il ritratto di Sta.  Margarita mandatovi per avanti").  The comment of the biographers on this is that “for the first time in the annals of Italian painting we hear of a picture which claims to be nothing more than a landscape, etc.”  Remembering, however, that when in 1574, at the end of his life, our master sent in to Philip’s secretary, Antonio Perez, a list of paintings delivered from time to time, but not paid for, he described the Venere del Pardo, or Jupiter and Antiope, as “La nuda con il paese con el satiro,” would it not be fair to assume that the description Il Paesaggio et il ritratto di Sta.  Margarita means one and the same canvas—­The Figure of St. Margaret in a Landscape?  Thus should we be relieved from the duty of searching among the authentic works of the master of Cadore for a landscape pure and simple, and in the process stumbling across a number of spurious and doubtful things.  The St. Margaret is evidently the picture which, having been many years at the Escorial, now hangs in the Prado Gallery.  Obscured and darkened though it is by the irreparable