At the Belle d’ Arte at Venice is that grand picture, “The Assumption,” which for more than two hundred years was in the Church of Santa Maria de’ Frari.  When Napoleon appointed a commission to select the paintings in Venice that were considered best worth preserving and protecting, and take them to the Belle d’ Arte, this picture was included in the list.  It was then removed from its place, where it had so long hung, above the grave of the man who executed it.

I have several large photographs of this picture, showing different portions of it.  One of these pictures reveals simply the form of the Virgin.  She rises from the earth, caught up in the clouds, the drapery streaming in soft folds, and on the upturned face is a look of love and tenderness and trust, combined with womanly strength, that hushes us into tears.

Surely there is an upward law of gravitation as well as a gravitation that pulls things down.  Titian has shown us this.  And as he drew over and over again in his pictures the forms and faces of the men and women he knew, so I imagine that this woman was a woman he knew and loved.  She is not a far-off, tenuous creature, born of dreams:  she is a woman who has lived, suffered, felt, mayhap erred, and now turns to a Power, not herself, eternal in the heavens.  Into this picture the artist infused his own exalted spirit, for the mood we behold manifest in others is usually but the reflection of our own spirit.

In some far-off eon, ere this earth-journey began, some woman looked at me that way once, just as Titian has this woman look, with the same melting eyes and half-parted lips, and it made an impression on my soul that subsequent incarnations have not effaced.

I bought the photograph in Venice, at Ongania’s, and paid three dollars for it.  Then I framed it in simple, unplaned, unstained cedar, and it hangs over my desk now as I write.

When I am tired and things go wrong, and the round blocks all seem to be getting into the square holes, and remembrances of the lawyer who cheated me out of a hundred pounds come stealing like a blight over my spirit, I look up at the face of this woman who is not only angelic but human.  I behold the steady upward flight and the tender look of pity, and my soul reaches out, grasping the hem of the garment of Her who we are told was the Mother of God, and with Her I leave the old sordid earth far beneath and go on, and on, and up, and up, and up, until my soaring spirit mingles and communes with the great Infinite.

ANTHONY VAN DYCK

    His pieces so with live objects strive,
    That both or pictures seem, or both alive. 
    Nature herself, amaz’d, does doubting stand,
    Which is her own and which the painter’s hand,
    And does attempt the like with less success,
    When her own work in twins she would express. 
    His all-resembling pencil