had some part in the Concert, which, after all, passed as his altogether for two hundred and fifty years; was bought, indeed, as his in 1654, only seventy-eight years after Titian’s death, by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici from Paolo del Sera, the Florentine collector in Venice.  That figure of a youth, ambiguous in its beauty—­could any other hand than Giorgone’s have painted it; does it ever appear in Titian’s innumerable masterpieces at all?  Dying as he did at the age of thirty-three, Giorgone must have left many pictures unfinished, which Titian, his friend and disciple almost, may well have completed, and even signed, in an age when works, almost wholly untouched by a master, were certainly sold as his.

Titian’s other pictures here, with the exception of the Head of Christ (228) and the Magdalen (67), are portraits, all, save the so-called Tommaso Mosti, painted certainly before 1526, of his great middle period.  The Magdalen comes from Urbino, where Vasari saw it in the Guardaroba of the great palace.  The quality of the picture is one of sheer colour; there is here no other “subject” than a beautiful nude woman,—­it is called a Magdalen because it is not called a Venus.  Consider, then, the harmony of the gold hair and the fair flesh and the blue of the sky:  it is a harmony in gold and rose and blue.

The earliest of the great portraits is the Ippolito de’ Medici (201); it was painted in Venice in October 1532.[127] Vasari saw this picture in the Guardaroba of Cosimo I. It is a half-length portrait of a distinguished man, still very young, that we see.  The Cardinal is not dressed as a Churchman, but as a grandee of Hungary.  In the sad and cunning face we seem to foresee the fate that awaited him at Gaeta scarcely three years later, where he was imprisoned and poisoned.  The beautiful dull red of the tunic reminds one of the unforgetable red of the cloth on the table beside which Philip II stands in the picture in the Prado.  From this profound and almost touching portrait we come to the joy of the Bella (18).  It is a hymn to Physical Beauty.  There is nothing in the world more splendid or more glad than this portrait, perhaps of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino.  How often Titian has painted her!—­once as it might seem as the Venus of the Tribune (1117), and again in her own character in the portrait now in the Uffizi (599), where certainly she is not so fair as she we see here as Bella and there as Venus.  If this, indeed, be the Duchess of Urbino, then the Venus is also her portrait, for the Bella is described in the list of fine pictures which were brought to Florence in 1631 as a portrait of the same person we know as the Venus of the Tribune.  But the first we hear of the Bella is in a letter of the Duke of Urbino in 1536, while the portrait in the Uffizi of Eleonora Gonzaga was painted in Venice in that year; and since the Duchess is certainly an older woman than the Bella, we must conclude either that the Bella