Vasari, who, as will be seen, visited Venice in 1566, when he was preparing that new and enlarged edition of the Lives which was to appear in 1568, had then an opportunity of renewing his friendly acquaintance with the splendid old man whom he had last seen, already well stricken in years, twenty-one years before in Rome.  It must have been at this stage that he formed the judgment as to the latest manner of Titian which is so admirably expressed in his biography of the master.  Speaking especially of the Diana and Actaeon, the Rape of Europa, and the Deliverance of Andromeda,[58] he delivers himself as follows:—­“It is indeed true that his technical manner in these last is very different from that of his youth.  The first works are, be it remembered, carried out with incredible delicacy and pains, so that they can be looked at both at close quarters and from afar.  These last ones are done with broad coarse strokes and blots of colour, in such wise that they cannot be appreciated near at hand, but from afar look perfect.  This style has been the cause that many, thinking therein to play the imitators and to make a display of practical skill, have produced clumsy, bad pictures.  This is so, because, notwithstanding that to many it may seem that Titian’s works are done without labour, this is not so in truth, and they who think so deceive themselves.  It is, on the contrary, to be perceived that they are painted at many sittings, that they have been worked upon with the colours so many times as to make the labour evident; and this method of execution is judicious, beautiful, astonishing, because it makes the pictures seem living.”

No better proof could be given of Vasari’s genuine flair and intuition as a critic of art than this passage.  We seem to hear, not the Tuscan painter bred to regard the style of Michelangelo as an article of faith, to imitate his sculptural smoothness of finish and that of Angelo Bronzino, but some intelligent exponent of impressionistic methods, defending both from attack and from superficial imitation one of the most advanced of modernists.

Among the sacred works produced in this late time is a Crucifixion, still preserved in a damaged state in the church of S. Domenico at Ancona.  To a period somewhat earlier than that at which we have arrived may belong the late Madonna and Child in a Landscape which is No. 1113 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich.  The writer follows Giovanni Morelli in believing that this is a studio picture touched by the master, and that the splendidly toned evening landscape is all his.  He cannot surely be made wholly responsible for the overgrown and inflated figure of the divine Bambino, so disproportionate, so entirely wanting in tenderness and charm.