originality.[33] This is by no means identical in design with the Naples picture, but appears much less studied, much more directly taken from the life.  The astute Farnese Pope has here the same simiesque type, the same furtive distrustful look, as in the great unfinished group now to be described.[34] This Titian, which doubtless passed into the Hermitage with the rest of the Barbarigo pictures, may have been the first foundation for the series of portraits of the Farnese Pope, and as such would naturally have been retained by the master for his own use.  The portrait-group in the Naples Museum, showing, with Paul III., Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio Farnese (afterwards Duke of Parma), is, apart from its extraordinary directness and swift technical mastery, of exceptional interest as being unfinished, and thus doubly instructive.  The composition, lacking in its unusual momentariness the repose and dignity of Raphael’s Leo X. with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and de’ Rossi at the Pitti, is not wholly happy.  Especially is the action of Ottavio Farnese, as in reverence he bends down to reply to the supreme Pontiff, forced and unconvincing; but the unflattered portrait of the pontiff himself is of a bold and quite unconventional truth, and in movement much happier.  The picture may possibly, by reason of this unconventional conception less than perfectly realised, have failed to please the sitters, and thus have been left in its present state.[35]

Few of Titian’s canvases of vast dimensions have enjoyed a higher degree of popularity than the large Ecce Homo to which the Viennese proudly point as one of the crowning ornaments of the great Imperial Gallery of their city.  Completed in 1543[36] for Giovanni d’Anna, a son of the Flemish merchant Martin van der Hanna, who had established himself in Venice, it was vainly coveted by Henri III. on the occasion of his memorable visit in 1574, but was in 1620 purchased for the splendid favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by the English envoy Sir Henry Wotton.  From him the noblest and most accomplished of English collectors, Thomas, Earl of Arundel, sought to obtain the prize with the unparalleled offer of L7000, yet even thus failed.  At the time of the great debacle, in 1648, the guardians and advisers of his youthful son and successor were glad enough to get the splendid gallery over to the Low Countries, and to sell with the rest the Ecce Homo, which brought under these circumstances but a tenth part of what Lord Arundel would have given for it.  Passing into the collection of the Archduke Leopold William, it was later on finally incorporated with that of the Imperial House of Austria.  From the point of view of scenic and decorative magnificence combined with dramatic propriety, though not with any depth or intensity of dramatic passion, the work is undoubtedly imposing.  Yet it suffers somewhat, even in this respect, from the fact that the figures