The Raphael surfaces are as a rule hard, dry, and lustreless, while Rembrandt’s heavy, troubled paint is no mate for the airy touch of the Mercutio of Haarlem.  But Titian’s impasto is lyric.  It sings on the least of his canvases.  No doubt his pictures in the Prado have been “skinned” of their delicate glaze by the iconoclastic restorer; yet they bloom and chant and ever bloom.  The Bacchanal, which bears a faint family resemblance to the Bacchus and Ariadne of the London National Gallery, fairly exults in its joy of life, in its frank paganism.  What rich reverberating tones, what powers of evocation!  The Garden of the Loves is a vision of childhood at its sweetest; the surface of the canvas seems alive with festooned babies.  The more voluptuous Venus or Danae do not so stir your pulse as this immortal choir of cupids.  The two portraits of Charles V—­one equestrian—­are charged with the noble, ardent gravity and splendour of phrasing we expect from the greatest Venetian of them all.  We doubt, however, if the Prado Entombment is as finely wrought as the same subject by Titian in Paris; but it sounds a poignant note of sorrow.  Rembrandt is more dramatic when dealing with a similar theme.  The St. Margaret with its subtle green gown is a figure that is touching and almost tragic.  The Madonna and Child, with St. Bridget and St. Hulfus, has been called Giorgionesque.  St. Bridget is of the sumptuous Venetian type; the modelling of her head is lovely, her colouring rich.

Rubens in the Prado is singularly attractive.  There are over fifty, not all of the best quality, but numbering such works as the Three Graces, the Rondo, the Garden of Love, and the masterly unfinished portrait of Marie de Medicis.  The Brazen Serpent is a Van Dyck, though the catalogue of 1907 credits it to Rubens.  Then there are the Andromeda and Perseus, the Holy Family and Diana and Calista.  The portrait of Marie de Medicis, stout, smiling, amiability personified, has been called one of the finest feminine portraits extant—­which is a slight exaggeration.  It is both mellow and magnificent, and unless history or Rubens lied the lady must have been as mild as mother’s milk.  The Three Graces, executed during the latter years of the Flemish master, is Rubens at his pagan best.  These stalwart and handsome females, without a hint of sleek Italian delicacy, include Rubens’s second wife, Helena Fourment, the ox-eyed beauty.  What blond flesh tones, what solidity of human architecture, what positive beauty of surfaces and nobility of contours!  The Rondo is a mad, whirling dance, the Diana and Calista suggestive of a Turkish bath outdoors, but a picture that might have impelled Walt Whitman to write a sequel to his Children of Adam.  Such women were born not alone to bear children but to rule the destinies of mankind; genuine matriarchs.