he found
himself as far on the road as Urbino. His son Orazio was with him, and
Duke Guidobaldo was himself his escort, and sent him on with a band of
men-at-arms from Pesaro. He was received in Rome by Cardinal Bembo; Paul
III. gave him a cordial welcome and Vasari was appointed his cicerone.
It is interesting to inquire what impression Rome, with its treasures of
antique statuary and contemporary painting, made upon Titian. "He is
filled with wonder and glad that he came," writes Bembo. In a letter to
Aretino he regrets that he had not come before. He stayed eight months
in Rome, and was made a Roman citizen. He visits the Stanze of Raphael
in company with Sebastian del Piombo, and Michelangelo comes to see him
at his lodgings, and he receives a long letter from Aretino advising him
to compare Michelangelo with Raphael, and Sansovino and Bramante with
the sculptors and architects of antiquity. Titian was well established
in his own style, and was received as the creator of acknowledged
masterpieces, and he never painted a more magnificent portrait-piece
than that of Paul III., the peevish old Pope, ailing and humorous,
suspicious of the two nephews who are painted with him, and who he
guessed to be conspiring against him. The characteristic attitude of the
old man of eighty, bent down in his chair, his quick, irritable glance,
the steady, determined gaze of the cardinal, the obsequious attitude and
weak, wily face of Ottavio Farnese are all immortalised in a broader,
more careless technique than Titian has hitherto used. Though he does
not seem to have been directly influenced by all he saw in Rome, we
undoubtedly find a change coming over his work between 1540 and 1550,
which may be in part ascribed to a widening of his artistic horizon and
a consciousness of what others were doing, both around him and abroad.
In its whole handling and character his late is different from his early
manner. It begins at this time to take on a blurred, soft, impressionist
character. His delight in rich colouring seems to wane, and he aims at
intensifying the power of light. He reaches that point in the Venetian
School of painting which we may regard as its climax, when there is
little strong local colour, but the canvas seems illumined from within.
There are no clear-cut lines, but the shapes are suggested by sombre
enveloping shades in which the radiant brightness is embedded. His
landscapes alter too; they are no longer blue and smili