of the Prado.  That Sanchez Coello, under special directions from the king, prepared the sketch which was to serve as the basis for the definitive picture may well have hampered and annoyed the aged master.  Still this is but an insufficient excuse for the absurdities of the design, culminating in the figure of the descending angel, who is represented in one of those strained, over-bold attitudes, in which Titian, even at his best, never achieved complete success.  That he was not, all the same, a stranger to the work, is proved by some flashes of splendid colour, some fine passages of execution.

In the four pieces now to be shortly described, the very latest and most impressionistic form of Titian’s method as a painter is to be observed; all of them are in the highest degree characteristic of this ultimate phase.  In the beautiful Madonna and Child here reproduced,[60] the hand, though it no longer works with all trenchant vigour of earlier times, produces a magical effect by means of unerring science and a certainty of touch justifying such economy of mere labour as is by the system of execution suggested to the eye.  And then this pathetic motive, the simple realism, the unconventional treatment of which are spiritualised by infinite tenderness, is a new thing in Venetian, nay in Italian art.  Precisely similar in execution, and equally restrained in the scheme of colour adopted, is the Christ crowned with Thorns of the Alte Pinakothek at Munich, a reproduction with important variations of the better-known picture in the Long Gallery of the Louvre.  Less demonstratively and obviously dramatic than its predecessor, the Munich example is, as a realisation of the scene, far truer and more profound in pathos.  Nobler beyond compare in His unresisting acceptance of insult and suffering is the Munich Christ than the corresponding figure, so violent in its instinctive recoil from pain, of the Louvre picture.

[Illustration:  Christ crowned with Thorns.  Alte Pinakothek, Munich.  From a Photograph by F. Hanfstaengl.]

It is nothing short of startling at the very end of Titian’s career to meet with a work which, expressed in this masterly late technique of his, vies in freshness of inspiration with the finest of his early poesie.  This is the Nymph and Shepherd[61] of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna, a picture which the world had forgotten until it was added, or rather restored, to the State collection on its transference from the Belvedere to the gorgeous palace which it now occupies.  In its almost monochromatic harmony of embrowned silver the canvas embodies more absolutely than any other, save perhaps the final Pieta, the ideal of tone-harmony towards which the master in his late time had been steadily tending.  Richness and brilliancy of local colour are subordinated, and this time up to the point of effacement, to this luminous monotone, so mysteriously effective in the hands of a master