portraits, Eleonora Gonzaga and Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke and Duchess of Urbino, were painted in Venice in 1536 or 1538, and came into the Uffizi with the other Urbino pictures, with the Venus of Urbino (1117), for instance, where Titian has painted the Bella of the Pitti Palace naked on a couch, a little dog at her feet, and in her hand a chaplet of roses.  In the background two maids search for a gown in a great chest under a loggia.  This picture, first mentioned in a letter of 1538, was painted for Duke Guidobaldo della Rovere.  The Venus with the little Amor (1108) appears to have been painted about 1545.  It is not from Urbino.  Dr. Gronau thinks it may be identical with the Venus “shortly described in a book of the Guardaroba of Grand Duke Cosimo II in the year 1621.”  The Portrait of Bishop Beccadelli (1116) was painted in July 1552, and is signed by Titian.  It was bought, with the other Venetian pictures, by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici in 1654.  I say nothing of Titian here:  preferring to speak of him in dealing with his more various and numerous work in the Pitti Palace.  Other pupils of Giovanni Bellini, beside Giorgione and Titian, are found here—­Palma Vecchio for instance—­in a poor picture of Judith with the Head of Holofernes (619); Rondinelli in a Portrait of a Man (354) and a Madonna and two Saints (384); Sebastiano del Piombo in the Farnesina (1123), long given to Raphael, and the Death of Adonis (592).  All these men, whose work is so full of splendour, came under the influence of Giorgione after passing through Bellini’s bottega.  Nor did Lorenzo Lotto, the pupil of Alvise Vivarini, escape the authority of that serene and perfect work, whose beauty lingered so quietly over the youth of the greatest painter of Italy, Tiziano Vecelli:  his Holy Family (575) seems to be a work of Giorgione himself almost, that has suffered some change; that change was Lotto.

Titian’s own pupils, Paris Bordone, Tintoretto, and Schiavone, may also be found here; the first in a Portrait of a Young Man (607), full of confidence and force.  Tintoretto has five works here, beside the portrait of himself (378):  the Bust of a Young Man (577), the Portrait of Admiral Vernier (601), the Portrait of an Old Man (615), the Portrait of Jacopo Sansovino (638), and a Portrait of a Man (649).  His portraits are full of an immense splendour; they sum up often rhetorically enough all that was superficial in the subject, representing him as we may suppose he hardly hoped to see himself.  Without the subtle distinction of Titian’s art, or the marvellous power of characterisation and expression that he possessed with the earlier men, Tintoretto’s work is noble, and almost lyrical in its confidence and beauty.  In his day Venice seems to have been the capital of the world, peopled by a race of men splendid and strong, beside whom the men of our time, even the best of them, seem a little vulgar, a little wanting in dignity and life.

Two pictures by Paolo Veronese, the early Martyrdom of S. Giustina (589), and the Holy Family and St. Catherine (1136), bring the period to a close.  It is a different school of painting altogether that we see in the Piazzetta of Canaletto (1064), perhaps the last picture painted by a Venetian in the gallery.