[Illustration:  The Worship of Venus.  Prado Gallery, Madrid.  From a Photograph by Braun, Clement, & Cie.]

In the Worship of Venus and the Bacchanal we have left behind already the fresh morning of Titian’s genius, represented by the Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its bright noon.  Another forward step has been taken, but not without some evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more delicate flowers of genius of the first period.  The Worship of Venus might be more appropriately named Games of the Loves in Honour of Venus.  The subject is taken from the Imagines[36] of Philostratus, a renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the Hellenistic mode of conception.  The theme is supplied by a series of paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the author’s fertile brain.  Before a statue of Venus more or less of the Praxitelean type—­a more earthly sister of those which have been named the “Townley Venus” and the “Venus d’Arles”—­myriads of Loves sport, kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer is made with the flinging of apples.  Incomparable is the vigour, the life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner) dimmed it.  These delicious pagan amorini are the successors of the angelic putti of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly beings than their predecessors had imagined.  Such painters of the North, in touch with the South, as Albrecht Duerer, Mabuse, and Jacob Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy.  To say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.[37]

The sumptuous Bacchanal, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave the commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a less delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion.  From certain points of analogy with an Ariadne described by Philostratus, it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation of the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus, whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance.  No Dionysus is, however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do