effort which produced the dreamy, passionate expression of the young
monk, borne far out of himself by his own melody, and half recalled to
life by the touch on his shoulder. Titian, like Giorgione, was a
musician, and the fascination of music is felt by many masters of the
Italian schools. In one picture the player feels vaguely after the
melody, in another we are asked to anticipate the song that is just
about to begin, or the last chords of that just finished vibrate upon
the ear, but nowhere else in all art has any one so seized the melody of
an instant and kept its fulness and its passion sounding in our ears as
this musician does.

Though we cannot say that Titian was the pupil of any one master, the
fifteen years, more or less, that he spent with Giorgione left an
indelible impression upon him. We have only to look at such a picture
as the "Madonna and Child with SS. John Baptist and Antony Abate,"
in the Uffizi, an early work, to recollect that in 1503 Giorgione at
Castelfranco had taken the Madonna from her niche in the sanctuary
and had enthroned her on high in a bright and sunny landscape with
S. Liberale standing sentinel at her feet, like a knight guarding
his liege lady.

Titian in this early group casts every convention aside; a beautiful
woman and lovely children are placed in surroundings whose charm is
devoid of hieratic and religious significance. The same easy unfettered
treatment appears in the "Madonna with the Cherries" at Vienna, and the
"Madonna with St. Bridget and S. Ulfus" at Madrid, and while it has been
surmised that the example of the precise Albert Duerer, who paid his
first visit to Venice in 1506, was not without its effect in preserving
Titian from falling into laxity of treatment and in inciting him to fine
finish, it is interesting to find that Titian was, in fact, discarding
the use of the carefully traced and transferred cartoon, and was
sketching his design freely on panel or canvas with a brush dipped in
brown pigment, and altering and modifying it as he went on.

The last years of Titian's first period in Venice must have been anxious
ones. The Emperor Maximilian was attacking the Venetian possessions on
the mainland, in anger at a refusal to grant his troops a free passage
on their way to uphold German supremacy in Central Italy. Cadore was
the first point of his invasion, and from 1507 Titian's uncle and
great-uncle were in the Councils of the State, his father held an
imp