At the base of the picture, the apostles are grouped in happily-contrasted attitudes of rapture and surprise.  Two or three little angels, who link them to the intermediary zone of the composition, seem to be explaining to them the miracle that is taking place.  The heads of the apostles, who are of various ages and characters, are painted with a surprising force of vitality and reality.  The draperies are of that fullness and abundant flow that characterize Titian as the richest and at the same time the simplest of all painters.

In studying this Virgin and mentally comparing her with other Virgins of different masters, we reflected what a marvellous and ever new thing is art.  What Catholic painting has embroidered with variations upon this theme of the Madonna, without ever exhausting it, astonishes and confuses the imagination; but, in reflecting, we comprehend that under the conventional type each painter conveyed secretly, at the same time, his dream of love and the personification of his talent.

The Madonna of Albrecht Duerer in her sad and somewhat constrained gracefulness, with her tired features, interesting rather than beautiful, her air of a matron rather than a Virgin, her German and bourgeoise frankness, her tight garments and her symmetrically broken folds, almost always accompanied by a rabbit, an owl, or an ape, through some vague memory of Germanic pantheism, may she not be the woman whom he would have loved and preferred to all others, and does she not also exceedingly well represent the very genius of the artist?  As she is his Madonna, she might easily be his Muse.

The same resemblance exists in Raphael.  The type of his Madonna, in whom, mingled with old memories, the features of the Fornarina are always found, sometimes suggested, sometimes copied, most frequently idealized, is she not the most perfect symbol of his talent,—­elegant, graceful, and penetrated throughout with a chaste voluptuousness?  The Christian nourished on Plato and Greek Art, the friend of Leo X., the dilettante Pope, the artist who died of love while painting the Transfiguration, did he not live entirely in these modest Venuses holding on their knees a child who is Love?  If we wished to symbolize the genius of every painter in an allegorical picture, would it be any other than the angel of Urbino?

The Virgin of the Assunta, big, strong, highly-coloured, with her robust and beautiful grace, her fine bearing, and her simple and natural beauty,—­is she not Titian’s painting with all its qualities?  We might carry our researches still further; but we have said enough as a suggestion.

Thanks to the dusty shroud which covered it for so long, the Assunta glows with a quite youthful brilliancy; the centuries have not elapsed for it, and we enjoy the supreme pleasure of seeing a picture of Titian’s just it came fresh from the palette.

    Voyage en Italie (new ed., Paris, 1884).