Virgen de los Dolores ostensibly by Titian, and the Ecce Homo already mentioned, formed afterwards part of the small collection of devotional paintings taken by Charles to his monastic retreat at Yuste, and appropriated after his death by Philip.  If the picture styled La Dolorosa, and now No. 468 in the gallery of the Prado, is indeed the one painted for the great monarch who was so sick in body and spirit, so fast declining to his end, the suspicion is aroused that the courtly Venetian must have acted with something less than fairness towards his great patron, since the Addolorata cannot be acknowledged as his own work.  Still less can we accept as his own that other Virgen de los Dolores, now No. 475 in the same gallery.

[Illustration:  Landscape drawing in pen and bistre by Titian.]

It is very different with the Trinity, called in Spain La Gloria, and now No. 462 in the same gallery.  Though the master must have been hampered by the express command that the Emperor should be portrayed as newly arisen from the grave and adoring the Trinity in an agony of prayer, and with him the deceased Empress Isabel, Queen Mary of Hungary, and Prince Philip, also as suppliants, he succeeded in bringing forth not indeed a complete masterpiece, but a picture all aspiration and fervent prayer—­just the work to satisfy the yearnings of the man who, once the mightiest, was then the loneliest and saddest of mortals on earth.  The crown and climax of the whole is the group of the Trinity itself, awful in majesty, dazzling in the golden radiance of its environment, and, beautifully linking it with mortality, the blue-robed figure of the Virgin, who stands on a lower eminence of cloud as she intercedes for the human race, towards whom her pitying gaze is directed.  It would be absurd to pretend that we have here a work entitled, in virtue of the perfect achievement of all that has been sought for, to rank with such earlier masterpieces as the Assunta or the St. Peter Martyr.  Yet it represents in one way sacred art of a higher, a more inspired order, and contains some pictorial beauties—­such as the great central group—­of which Titian would not in those earlier days have been equally capable.

There is another descent, though not so marked a one as in the case of the Danae, with the Venus and Adonis painted for Philip, the new King-Consort of England, and forwarded by the artist to London in the autumn of 1554.  That the picture now in the Sala de la Reina Isabel at Madrid is this original is proved, in the first place, by the quality of the flesh-painting, the silvery shimmer, the vibration of the whole, the subordination of local colour to general tone, yet by no means to the point of extinction—­all these being distinctive qualities of this late time.  It is further proved by the fact that it still shows traces of the injury of which Philip complained when