f the martyr and the two lovely
winged boys, bathed in a flood of blue aether, who held aloft the palm of
victory. Many copies of it remain, and we only regret that one which
Rubens executed is not preserved among them.

When we look at the delicious "Madonna del Coniglio" in the Louvre and
our own "Marriage of S. Catherine," the first of which certainly, and
the second probably, was painted about this time, we cannot doubt that
the charm of the idea of motherhood had particularly arrested the
painter. About 1525 his first son, Pomponio, was born, and was followed
by another son and a daughter. In the S. Catherine he paints that
passion of mother-love with an intensity and reality that can only be
drawn from life, and on the wheel at her feet he has inscribed his name,
Ticianus, F. His feeling for landscape is increasing, and the landscape
in these pictures equals the figures in importance and has engrossed the
painter quite as much. Every year Titian paid a visit to Cadore, and in
the rich woodlands, the distant villages, the great white villa on the
hill-side, and, above all, in the far-off blue mountains and the glooms
and gleams of storm and sunshine, the sudden dart of rays through the
summer clouds, which he has painted here, we see how constant was his
study of his native country, and how profoundly he felt its poetry and
its charm. He had married Cecilia, the daughter of a barber belonging
to Perarolo, a little town near Cadore. In 1530 she died, and he
mourned her deeply. He went on working and planning for his children's
future, and his sister came from Cadore to take charge of the motherless
household; but his friends' letters speak of his being ill from
melancholy, and he could not go on living in the old house at San
Samuele, which had been his home for sixteen years. He took a new house
on the north side of the city, in the parish of San Canciano. The Casa
Grande, as it was called, was a building of importance, which the
painter first hired and finally bought, letting off such apartments as
he did not need. The first floor had a terrace, and was entered by a
flight of steps from the garden, which overlooked the lagoons, and had a
view of the Cadore mountains. It has been swept away by the building of
the Fondamenta Nuove, but the documents of the leases are preserved, and
the exact site is well established. Here his children grew up, and he
worked for them unceasingly. Pomponio, his eldest son, was idle and