are not more than small life-size.  With passages of Titianesque splendour there are to be noted others, approaching to the acrid and inharmonious, which one would rather attribute to the master’s assistants than to himself.  So it is, too, with certain exaggerations of design characteristic rather of the period than the man—­notably with the two figures to the left of the foreground.  The Christ in His meekness is too little divine, too heavy and inert;[37] the Pontius Pilate not inappropriately reproduces the features of the worldling and viveur Aretino.  The mounted warrior to the extreme right, who has been supposed to represent Alfonso d’Este, shows the genial physiognomy made familiar by the Madrid picture so long deemed to be his portrait, but which, as has already been pointed out, represents much more probably his successor Ercole II. d’Este, whom we find again in that superb piece by the master, the so-called Giorgio Cornaro of Castle Howard.  The Ecce Homo of Vienna is another of the works of which both the general ordonnance and the truly Venetian splendour must have profoundly influenced Paolo Veronese.

[Illustration:  Ecce Homo.  Imperial Gallery, Vienna.  From a Photograph by Loewy.]

[Illustration:  Aretino.  Pitti Palace, Florence.  From a Photograph by E. Alinari.]

To this period belongs also the Annunciation of the Virgin now in the Cathedral of Verona—­a rich, harmonious, and appropriate altar-piece, but not one of any special significance in the life-work of the painter.

Shall we not, pretty much in agreement with Vasari, place here, just before the long-delayed visit to Rome, the Christ with the Pilgrims at Emmaus of the Louvre?  A strong reason for dating this, one of the noblest, one of the most deeply felt of all Titian’s works, before rather than after the stay in the Eternal City, is that in its naivete, in its realistic episodes, in its fulness of life, it is so entirely and delightfully Venetian.  Here again the colour-harmony in its subdued richness and solemnity has a completeness such as induces the beholder to accept it in its unity rather than to analyse those infinite subtleties of juxtaposition and handling which, avoiding bravura, disdain to show themselves on the surface.  The sublime beauty of the landscape, in which, as often elsewhere, the golden radiance of the setting sun is seen battling with masses of azure cloud, has not been exceeded by Titian himself.  With all the daring yet perfectly unobtrusive and unconscious realism of certain details, the conception is one of the loftiest, one of the most penetrating in its very simplicity, of Venetian art at its apogee.  The divine mansuetude, the human and brotherly sympathy of the Christ, have not been equalled since the early days of the Cristo della Moneta.  Altogether the Pilgrims at Emmaus well marks that higher and more far-reaching conception of sacred art which reveals itself in the productions of Titian’s old age, when we compare them with the untroubled serenity and the conventional assumptions of the middle time.[38]