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Titian was born one hundred years before Rubens, and died just six months before Rubens’ birth.

On the one hundred twenty-second anniversary of the birth of Titian, Rubens knelt at his grave, there in the church of Santa Maria de’ Frari, and vowed he would follow in the footsteps of the illustrious master.  And the next day he wrote to his mother describing the incident.  Thousands of other sentimental and impulsive youth have stood before that little slab of black marble on which is carved the simple legend, “Tiziano Vecellio,” and vowed as Rubens did, but out of the throng not one rendered such honor to the master as did the brilliant Fleming.  The example of Titian was a lifelong inspiration to Rubens; and to all his pupils he held up Titian as the painter par excellence.  In the Rubens studio Titian was the standard by which all art was gauged.

When Rubens returned to Flanders from Italy he carried with him twenty-one pictures done by the hand of the master.

Titian was born at the little village of Cadore, a few miles north of Venice.  When ten years of age his father took him down to the city and apprenticed him to a worker in mosaic, the intent of the fond parent probably being to get the youngster out of the way, more than anything else.

The setting together of the little bits of colored glass, according to a pattern supplied, is a task so simple that children can do it about as well as grown folks.  They do the work there today just exactly as they did four hundred years ago, when little Tiziano Vecellio came down from Cadore and worked, getting his ears pinched when he got sleepy, or carelessly put in the red glass when he should have used the blue.

An inscription on a tomb at Beni Hassan, dating from the reign of Osortasen the First, who lived three thousand years before Christ, represents Theban glassblowers at work.  I told Enrico of this one day when we were on our way to a glass-factory.

“That’s nothing,” said Enrico; “it was the glassblowers of Venice who taught them how,” and not a ghost of a smile came across his fine, burnt-umber face.

There is a story by Pliny about certain Phenician mariners landing on the shores of a small river in Palestine and making a fire to cook their food, and afterward discovering that the soda and sand under their pots had fused into glass.  No one now seriously considers that the first discovery of glass, and for all I know Enrico may be right in his flat statement that the first glass was made at Venice, “for Venice always was.”

The art of glassmaking surely goes back to the morning of the world.  The glassblower is a classic, like the sower who goes forth to sow, the potter at his wheel, and the grinding of grain with mortar and pestle.  Thus, too, the art of the mosaicist—­who places bright bits of stone and glass in certain positions so as to form a picture—­goes back to the dawn.  The exquisite work in mosaic at Pompeii is the first thing that impresses the visitor to that silent city.  Much of the work there was done long before the Christian era, and must have then been practised many centuries to bring it to such perfection.