power of perturbing the spirit and placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in art.  All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between the two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, even though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive the supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth?  A not dissimilar comparison might be instituted between the portraits of Lorenzo Lotto and those of our master.  No Venetian painter of the golden prime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him, while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individuality submitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his own tremulous sensitiveness and charm.  In this way no portraits of the sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles.  Yet in deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar temperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical and mental characteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.[2]

Yet where is the critic bold enough to place even the finest of these exquisite productions on the same level as Le Jeune Homme au Gant and L’Homme en Noir of the Louvre, the Ippolito de’ Medici, the Bella di Tiziano, the Aretino of the Pitti, the Charles V. at the Battle of Muehlberg and the full-length Philip II. of the Prado Museum at Madrid?

Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that Titian has serious rivals in those Veronese developed into Venetians, the two elder Bonifazi and Paolo Veronese; that is, there will be found lovers of painting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours in frank juxtaposition to a palette relatively restricted, used with an art more subtle, if less dazzling than theirs, and resulting in a deeper, graver richness, a more significant beauty, if in a less stimulating gaiety and variety of aspect.  No less a critic than Morelli himself pronounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliant colourist of the Venetian school; and the Dives and Lazarus of the Venice Academy, the Finding of Moses at the Brera are at hand to give solid support to such an assertion.

In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be the greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be found in the whole range of Italian art.  Starting from the cardinal principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors—­painters such as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri, Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci—­Caliari dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar.  Unlike