The central figure of the patriarch is robed in deep crimson with grayish fur, rather black in shadow; the man in the prime of manhood wears a more positive crimson, trimmed with tawnier fur, browner in shadow; a lighter sheen is on the brocaded mantle of yet another shade of crimson worn by the most youthful of the three patricians.  Just the stimulating note to break up a harmony which might otherwise have been of a richness too cloying is furnished—­in the master’s own peculiar way—­by the scarlet stockings of one boy in the right hand group, by the cinnamon sleeve of another.[51]

[Illustration:  The Cornaro Family.  In the Collection of the Duke of Northumberland.]

To the year 1561 belongs, according to the elaborate inscription on the picture, the magnificent Portrait of a Man which is No. 172 in the Dresden Gallery.  It presents a Venetian gentleman in his usual habit, but bearing a palm branch such as we associate with saints who have endured martyrdom.  Strangely sombre and melancholy in its very reserve is this sensitive face, and the tone of the landscape echoes the pathetic note of disquiet.  The canvas bears the signature “Titianus Pictor et Aeques (sic) Caesaris.”  There group very well with this Dresden picture, though the writer will not venture to assert positively that they belong to exactly the same period, the St. Dominic of the Borghese Gallery and the Knight of Malta of the Prado Gallery.  In all three—­in the two secular portraits as in the sacred piece which is also a portrait—­the expression given, and doubtless intended, is that of a man who has withdrawn himself in his time of fullest physical vigour from the pomps and vanities of the world, and sadly concentrates his thoughts on matters of higher import.

On the 1st of December 1561 Titian wrote to the king to announce the despatch of a Magdalen, which had already been mentioned more than once in the correspondence.  According to Vasari and subsequent authorities, Silvio Badoer, a Venetian patrician, saw the masterpiece on the painter’s easel, and took it away for a hundred scudi, leaving the master to paint another for Philip.  This last has disappeared, while the canvas which remained in Venice cannot be identified with any certainty.  The finest extant example of this type of Magdalen is undoubtedly that which from Titian’s ne’er-do-well son, Pompinio, passed to the Barbarigo family, and ultimately, with the group of Titians forming part of the Barbarigo collection, found its way into the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg.  This answers in every respect to Vasari’s eloquent description of the magna peccatrix, lovely still in her penitence.  It is an embodiment of the favourite subject, infinitely finer and more moving than the much earlier Magdalen of the Pitti, in which the artist’s sole preoccupation has been the alluring portraiture of exuberant feminine charms.  This later Magdalen, as Vasari