the portraits to know we are face to face with one of the greatest and most universal of painters.  Consider, then, La Donna Velata (245), or the Pope Julius II (79), or the Leo X with the two Cardinals (40), how splendid they are, how absolutely characterised and full of life, life seen in the tranquillity of the artist, who has understood everything, and with whom truth has become beauty.  In the Leo X with the Cardinals, Giulio de’ Medici and Lorenzo dei Rossi, how tactfully Raphael has contrived the light and shadow so that the fat heavy face of the Pope is not over emphasised, and you discern perfectly the beauty of the head, the delicacy of the nostrils, the clever, sensual, pathetic, witty mouth.  And the hands seem to be about to move, to be a little tremulous with life, to be on the verge of a gesture, to have only just become motionless on the edge of the book.  It is in these portraits that the art of Raphael is at its greatest, becomes universal, achieves immortality.

There remains to be considered the splendid ever-living work of Titian.  The early work of the greatest painter of Italy, of the world, greatest in the variety, number, and splendour of his pictures, is represented in the Pitti, happily enough by one of the most lovely of all Italian paintings, the Concert (185), so long given to Giorgone.  A monk in cowl and tonsure touches the keys of a harpsichord, while beside him stands an older man, a clerk and perhaps a monk too, who grasps the handle of a viol; in the background, a youthful, ambiguous figure, with a cap and plume, waits, perhaps on some interval, to begin a song.  Yet, indeed, that is not the picture, which, whatever its subject may be, would seem to be more expressive than any other in the world.  Some great joy, some great sorrow, seems about to declare itself.  What music does he hear, that monk with the beautiful sensitive hands, who turns away towards his companion?  Something has awakened in his soul, and he is transfigured.  Perhaps for the first time, in some rhythm of the music, he has understood everything, the beauty of life which passeth like a sunshine, now that it is too late, that his youth is over and middle age is upon him.  His companion, on the threshold of old age, divines his trouble and lays a hand on his shoulder quietly, as though to still the tumult of his heart.  Like a vision youth itself, ambiguous, about to possess everything, waits, like a stranger, as though invoked by the music, on an interval that will never come again, that is already passed.

If Titian is really the sole painter of this picture, how loyal he has been to his friend, to that new spirit which lighted Venetian art as the sun makes beautiful the world.  But indeed one might think that, even with Morelli, Crowe, and Cavalcaselle, and Berenson against us, not to name others who have done much for the history of painting in Italy, we might still believe, not altogether without reason, that Giorgone