such as Titian.  In the solemn twilight which descends from the heavens, just faintly flushed with rose, an amorous shepherd, flower-crowned, pipes to a nude nymph, who, half-won by the appealing strain, turns her head as she lies luxuriously extended on a wild beast’s hide, covering the grassy knoll; in the distance a strayed goat browses on the leafage of a projecting branch.  It may not be concealed that a note of ardent sensuousness still makes itself felt, as it does in most of the later pieces of the same class.  But here, transfigured by a freshness of poetic inspiration hardly to be traced in the master’s work in pieces of this order, since those early Giorgionesque days when the sixteenth century was in its youth, it offends no more than does an idyll of Theocritus.  Since the Three Ages of Bridgewater House, divided from the Nymph and Shepherd by nearly seventy years of life and labour, Titian had produced nothing which, apart from the question of technical execution, might so nearly be paralleled with that exquisite pastoral.  The early poesia gives, wrapped in clear even daylight, the perfect moment of trusting, satisfied love; the late one, with less purity, but, strange to say, with a higher passion, renders, beautified by an evening light more solemn and suggestive, the divine ardours fanned by solitude and opportunity.

And now we come to the Pieta,[62] which so nobly and appropriately closes a career unexampled for duration and sustained achievement.  Titian had bargained with the Franciscan monks of the Frari, which contained already the Assunta and the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, for a grave in the Cappella del Crocifisso, offering in payment a Pieta, and this offer had been accepted.  But some misunderstanding and consequent quarrel having been the ultimate outcome of the proposed arrangements, he left his great canvas unfinished, and willed that his body should be taken to Cadore, and there buried in the chapel of the Vecelli.

[Illustration:  Pieta.  By Titian and Palma Giovine.  Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice.  From a Photograph by E. Alinari.]

The well-known inscription on the base of the monumental niche which occupies the centre of the Pieta, “Quod Titianus inchoatum reliquit, Palma reverenter absolvit, Deoque dicavit opus,” records how what Titian had left undone was completed as reverently as might be by Palma Giovine.  At this stage—­the question being much complicated by subsequent restorations—­the effort to draw the line accurately between the work of the master on one hand and that of his able and pious assistant on the other, would be unprofitable.  Let us rather strive to appreciate what is left of a creation unique in the life-work of Titian, and in some ways his most sublime invention.  Genius alone could have triumphed over the heterogeneous and fantastic surroundings in which he has chosen to enframe his great central group.  And yet even