In this same year Titian painted on the ceiling of the ante-chamber to Sansovino’s great Library in the Piazzetta the allegorical figure Wisdom, thus entering into direct competition with young Paolo Veronese, Schiavone, and the other painters who, striving in friendly rivalry, had been engaged a short time before on the ceiling of the great hall in the same building.  This noble design contains a pronounced reminiscence of Raphael’s incomparable allegorical figures in the Camera della Segnatura, but excels them as much in decorative splendour and facile breadth of execution as it falls behind them in sublimity of inspiration.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle are probably right in assigning the great Cornaro Family in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland to the year 1560 or thereabouts.  Little seen of late years, and like most Venetian pictures of the sixteenth century shorn of some of its glory by time and the restorer, this family picture appears to the writer to rank among Titian’s masterpieces in the domain of portraiture, and to be indeed the finest portrait-group of this special type that Venice has produced.  In the simplicity and fervour of the conception Titian rises to heights which he did not reach in the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, where he is hampered by the necessity for combining a votive picture with a series of avowed portraits.  It is pretty clear that this Cornaro picture, like the Pesaro altar-piece, must have been commissioned to commemorate a victory or important political event in the annals of the illustrious family.  Search among their archives and papers, if they still exist, might throw light upon this point, and fix more accurately the date of the magnificent work.  In the open air—­it may be outside some great Venetian church—­an altar has been erected, and upon it is placed a crucifix, on either side of which are church candles, blown this way and the other by the wind.  Three generations of patricians kneel in prayer and thanksgiving, taking precedence according to age, six handsome boys, arranged in groups of three on either side of the canvas, furnishing an element of great pictorial attractiveness but no vital significance.  The act of worship acquires here more reality and a profounder meaning than it can have in those vast altar-pieces in which the divine favour is symbolised by the actual presence of the Madonna and Child.  An open-air effect has been deliberately aimed at and attained, the splendid series of portraits being relieved against the cloud-flecked blue sky with a less sculptural plasticity than the master would have given to them in an indoor scheme.  This is another admirable example of the dignity and reserve which Titian combines with sumptuous colour at this stage of his practice.  His mastery is not less but greater, subtler, than that of his more showy and brilliant contemporaries of the younger generation; the result is something that appears as if it must inevitably have been so and not otherwise.