The power of vivid conception, the spontaneous fervour which mark Titian’s latest efforts in the domain of sacred art, are very evident in the great St. Jerome of the Brera here reproduced.  Cima, Basaiti, and most of the Bellinesques had shown an especial affection for the subject, and it had been treated too by Lotto, by Giorgione, by Titian himself; but this is surely as noble and fervent a rendering as Venetian art in its prime has brought forth.  Of extraordinary majesty and beauty is the landscape, with its mighty trees growing out of the abrupt mountain slope, close to the naked rock.

In the autumn of 1564 we actually find the venerable master, then about eighty-seven years of age, taking a journey to Brescia in connection with an important commission given to him for the decoration of the great hall in the Palazzo Pubblico at Brescia, to which the Vicentine artist Righetto had supplied the ceiling, and Palladio had added columns and interior wall-decorations.  The three great ceiling-pictures, which were afterwards, as a consequence of the contract then entered upon, executed by the master, or rather by his assistants, endured only until 1575, when in the penultimate year of Titian’s life they perished in a great fire.

The correspondence shows that the vast Last Supper painted for the Refectory of the Escorial, and still to be found there, was finished in October 1564, and that there was much haggling and finessing on the part of the artist before it was despatched to Spain, the object being to secure payment of the arrears of pension still withheld by the Milanese officials.  When the huge work did arrive at the Escorial the monks perpetrated upon it one of those acts of vandalism of which Titian was in more than one instance the victim.  Finding that the picture would not fit the particular wall of their refectory for which it had been destined, they ruthlessly cut it down, slicing off a large piece of the upper part, and throwing the composition out of balance by the mutilation of the architectural background.

[Illustration:  St. Jerome in the Desert.  Gallery of the Brera, Milan.  From a Photograph by Anderson.]

Passing over the Transfiguration on the high altar of San Salvatore at Venice, we come to the Annunciation in the same church with the signature “Titianus fecit fecit,” added by the master, if we are to credit the legend, in indignation that those who commissioned the canvas should have shown themselves dissatisfied even to the point of expressing incredulity as to his share in the performance.  Some doubt has been cast upon this story, which may possibly have been evolved on the basis of the peculiar signature.  It is at variance with Vasari’s statement that Titian held the picture in slight esteem in comparison with his other works.  It is not to be contested that for all the fine passages of colour and execution, the general tone is paler in its silveriness, less vibrant and effective on the whole, than in many of the masterpieces which have been mentioned in their turn.  But the conception is a novel and magnificent one, contrasting instructively in its weightiness and majesty with the more naive and pathetic renderings of an earlier time.