that has appeared since the St. Peter Martyr, with a mise-en-scene more classical than anything else from Titian’s hand that can be pointed to, the picture may be guessed, rather than seen, to be also a curious and subtle study of conflicting lights.  On the one hand we have that of the gruesome martyrdom itself, and of a huge torch fastened to the carved shaft of a pedestal; on the other, that of an effulgence from the skies, celestial in brightness, shedding its consoling beams on the victim.

The Christ crowned with Thorns, which long adorned the church of S. Maria delle Grazie at Milan, and is now in the Long Gallery of the Louvre, may belong to about this time, but is painted with a larger and more generous brush, with a more spontaneous energy, than the carefully studied piece at the Gesuiti.  The tawny harmonies finely express in their calculated absence of freshness the scene of brutal and unholy violence so dramatically enacted before our eyes.  The rendering of muscle, supple and strong under the living epidermis, the glow of the flesh, the dramatic momentariness of the whole, have not been surpassed even by Titian.  Of the true elevation, of the spiritual dignity that the subject calls for, there is, however, little or nothing.  The finely limbed Christ is as coarse in type and as violent in action as his executioners; sublimity is reached, strange to say, only in the bust of Tiberius, which crowns the rude archway through which the figures have issued into the open space.  Titian is here the precursor of the Naturalisti—­of Caravaggio and his school.  Yet, all the same, how immeasurable is the distance between the two!

[Illustration:  Christ crowned with Thorns.  Louvre.  From a Photograph by Neurdein.]

On the 21st of September 1558 died the imperial recluse of Yuste, once Charles V., and it is said his last looks were steadfastly directed towards that great canvas The Trinity, which to devise with Titian had been one of his greatest consolations at a moment when already earthly glories held him no more.  Philip, on the news of his father’s death, retired for some weeks to the monastery of Groenendale, and thence sent a despatch to the Governor of Milan, directing payment of all the arrears of the pensions “granted to Titian by Charles his father (now in glory),” adding by way of unusual favour a postscript in his own hand.[49] Orazio Vecellio, despatched by his father in the spring of 1559 to Milan to receive the arrears of pension, accepted the hospitality of the sculptor Leone Leoni, who was then living in splendid style in a palace which he had built and adorned for himself in the Lombard city.  He was the rival in art as well as the mortal enemy of Benvenuto Cellini, and as great a ruffian as he, though one less picturesque in blackguardism.  One day early in June, when Orazio, having left Leoni’s house, had returned to superintend the removal of certain property, he