was set upon, and murderously assaulted by the perfidious host and his servants.  The whole affair is wrapped in obscurity.  It remains uncertain whether vengeance, or hunger after the arrears of Titian’s pension, or both, were the motives which incited Leoni to attempt the crime.  Titian’s passionate reclamations, addressed immediately to Philip II., met with but partial success, since the sculptor, himself a great favourite with the court of Spain, was punished only with fine and banishment, and the affair was afterwards compromised by the payment of a sum of money.

Titian’s letter of September 22, 1559, to Philip II. announces the despatch of the companion pieces Diana and Calisto and Diana and Actaeon, as well as of an Entombment intended to replace a painting of the same subject which had been lost on the way.  The two celebrated canvases,[50] now in the Bridgewater Gallery, are so familiar that they need no new description.  Judging by the repetitions, reductions, and copies that exist in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, the Prado Gallery, the Yarborough Collection, and elsewhere, these mythological poesie have captivated the world far more than the fresher and lovelier painted poems of the earlier time—­the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal, the Bacchus and Ariadne.  At no previous period has Titian wielded the brush with greater maestria and ease than here, or united a richer or more transparent glow with greater dignity of colour.  About the compositions themselves, if we are to take them as the poesie that Titian loved to call them, there is a certain want of significance, neither the divine nor the human note being struck with any depth or intensity of vibration.  The glamour, the mystery, the intimate charm of the early pieces is lost, and there is felt, enwrapping the whole, that sultry atmosphere of untempered sensuousness which has already, upon more than one occasion, been commented upon.  That this should be so is only natural when creative power is not extinguished by old age, but is on the contrary coloured with its passion, so different in quality from that of youth.

The Entombment, which went to Madrid with the mythological pieces just now discussed, serves to show how vivid was Titian’s imagination at this point, when he touched upon a sacred theme, and how little dependent he was in this field on the conceptions of his earlier prime.  A more living passion informs the scene, a more intimate sympathy colours it, than we find in the noble Entombment of the Louvre, much as the picture which preceded it by so many years excels the Madrid example in fineness of balance, in dignity, in splendour and charm of colour.  Here the personages are set free by the master from all academic trammels, and express themselves with a greater spontaneity in grief.  The colour, too, of which the general scheme is far less attractive to the eye than in the Louvre picture, blazes forth in one note of lurid splendour in the red robe of the saint who supports the feet of the dead Christ.