likeness of Ippolito de’ Medici presently to be described.  He had the bad luck on this occasion to miss the lady Cornelia, who had retired to Nuvolara, indisposed and not in good face.  The letter written by our painter to the Marquess in connection with this incident[5] is chiefly remarkable as affording evidence of his too great anxiety to portray the lady without approaching her, relying merely on the portrait, “che fece quel altro pittore della detta Cornelia”; of his unwillingness to proceed to Nuvolara, unless the picture thus done at second hand should require alteration.  In truth we have lighted here upon one of Titian’s most besetting sins, this willingness, this eagerness, when occasion offers, to paint portraits without direct reference to the model.  In this connection we are reminded that he never saw Francis the First, whose likeness he notwithstanding painted with so showy and superficial a magnificence as to make up to the casual observer for the absence of true vitality;[6] that the Empress Isabella, Charles V.’s consort, when at the behest of the monarch he produced her sumptuous but lifeless and empty portrait, now in the great gallery of the Prado, was long since dead.  He consented, basing his picture upon a likeness of much earlier date, to paint Isabella d’Este Gonzaga as a young woman when she was already an old one, thereby flattering an amiable and natural weakness in this great princess and unrivalled dilettante, but impairing his own position as an artist of supreme rank.[7] It is not necessary to include in this category the popular Caterina Cornaro of the Uffizi, since it is confessedly nothing but a fancy portrait, making no reference to the true aspect at any period of the long-since deceased queen of Cyprus, and, what is more, no original Titian, but at the utmost an atelier piece from his entourage.  Take, however, as an instance the Francis the First, which was painted some few years later than the time at which we have now arrived, and at about the same period as the Isabella d’Este.  Though as a portrait d’apparat it makes its effect, and reveals the sovereign accomplishment of the master, does it not shrink into the merest insignificance when compared with such renderings from life as the successive portraits of Charles the Fifth, the Ippolito de’ Medici, the Francesco Maria della Rovere?  This is as it must and should be, and Titian is not the less great, but the greater, because he cannot convincingly evolve at second hand the true human individuality, physical and mental, of man or woman.

It was in the earlier part of 1531 that Titian painted for Federigo Gonzaga a St. Jerome and a St. Mary Magdalene, destined for the famous Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, who had expressed to the ruler of Mantua the desire to possess such a picture.  Gonzaga writes to the Marchioness on March 11, 1831[8]:—­“Ho subito mandate a Venezia e scritto a Titiano, quale e forse il piu eccellente in quell’ arte che a nostri tempi si ritrovi, ed e tutto mio, ricercandolo con grande instantia a volerne fare una bella lagrimosa piu che si so puo, e farmela haver presto.”  The passage is worth quoting as showing the estimation in which Titian was held at a court which had known and still knew the greatest Italian masters of the art.