Yet when Titian takes colour itself as his chief motive, he can vie with the most sumptuous of them in splendour, and eclipse them all by the sureness of his taste.  A good example of this is the celebrated Bella di Tiziano of the Pitti Gallery, another work which, like the Venus of Urbino, recalls the features without giving the precise personality of Eleonora Gonzaga.  The beautiful but somewhat expressionless head with its crowning glory of bright hair, a waving mass of Venetian gold, has been so much injured by rubbing down and restoration that we regret what has been lost even more than we enjoy what is left.  But the surfaces of the fair and exquisitely modelled neck and bosom have been less cruelly treated; the superb costume retains much of its pristine splendour.  With its combination of brownish-purple velvet, peacock-blue brocade, and white lawn, its delicate trimmings of gold, and its further adornment with small knots, having in them, now at any rate, but an effaced note of red, the gown of La Bella has remained the type of what is most beautiful in Venetian costume as it was in the earlier half of the sixteenth century.  In richness and ingenious elaboration, chastened by taste, it far transcends the over-splendid and ponderous dresses in which later on the patrician dames portrayed by Veronese and his school loved to array themselves.  A bright note of red in the upper jewel of one earring, now, no doubt, cruder than was originally intended, gives a fillip to the whole, after a fashion peculiar to Titian.

[Illustration:  La Bella di Tiziano.  From a photograph by Aplinari.  Walter L. Cells.  Ph.]

The Girl in the Fur Cloak, No 197 in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna, shows once more in a youthful and blooming woman the features of Eleonora.  The model is nude under a mantle of black satin lined with fur, which leaves uncovered the right breast and both arms.  The picture is undoubtedly Titian’s own, and fine in quality, but it reveals less than his usual graciousness and charm.  It is probably identical with the canvas described in the often-quoted catalogue of Charles I.’s pictures as “A naked woman putting on her smock, which the king changed with the Duchess of Buckingham for one of His Majesty’s Mantua pieces.”  It may well have suggested to Rubens, who must have seen it among the King’s possessions on the occasion of his visit to London, his superb, yet singularly unrefined, Helene Fourment in a Fur Mantle, now also in the Vienna Gallery.

The great portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino in the Uffizi belong, as has already been noted, to 1537.  Francesco Maria, here represented in the penultimate year of his stormy life, assumes deliberately the truculent warrior, and has beyond reasonable doubt made his own pose in a portrait destined to show the leader of armies, and not the amorous spouse or the patron of art and artists.  Praise enthusiastic,