The Education of Cupid, popularly but erroneously known as The Three Graces[59] is one of the pearls of the Borghese Gallery.  It is clearly built in essentials on the master’s own d’Avalos Allegory, painted many years before.  This later allegory shows Venus binding the eyes of Love ere he sallies forth into the world, while his bow and his quiver well-stocked with arrows are brought forward by two of the Graces.  In its conception there is no great freshness or buoyancy, no pretence at invention.  The aged magician of the brush has interested himself more in the execution than in the imagining of his picture.  It is a fine and typical specimen of the painting di macchia, which Vasari has praised in a passage already quoted.  A work such as this bears in technique much the same relation to the productions of Titian’s first period that the great Family Picture of Rembrandt at Brunswick does to his work done some thirty-five or forty years before.  In both instances it is a life-time of legitimate practice that has permitted the old man to indulge without danger in an abridgment of labour, a synthetic presentment of fact, which means no abatement, but in some ways an enhancement of life, breadth, and pictorial effect.  To much about the same time, judging from the handling and the types, belongs the curious allegory, Religion succoured by Spain—­otherwise La Fe—­now No. 476 in the gallery of the Prado.  This canvas, notwithstanding a marked superficiality of invention as well as of execution, is in essentials the master’s own; moreover it can boast its own special decorative qualities, void though it is of any deep significance.  The showy figure of Spain holding aloft in one hand a standard, and with the other supporting a shield emblazoned with the arms of the realm, recalls the similar creations of Paolo Veronese.  Titian has rarely been less happily inspired than in the figure of Religion, represented as a naked female slave newly released from bondage.

[Illustration:  The Education of Cupid.  Gallery of the Villa Borghese, Rome.  From a Photograph by E. Alinari.]

When Vasari in 1566 paid the visit to Venice, of which a word has already been said, he noted, among a good many other things then in progress, the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, based upon that now at the Gesuiti in Venice.  This was despatched nearly two years later to the Escorial, where it still occupies its place on the high altar of the mighty church dedicated to St. Lawrence.  The Brescian ceiling canvases appeared, too, in his list as unfinished.  They were sent to their destination early in 1568, to be utterly destroyed, as has been told, by fire in 1575.