n of letters. As they were already, fortunately for themselves, too
well acquainted with the business of their own art to be taken in tow by
learning or even by poetry, the relation of the man of letters to the
painter became on the whole a stimulating and at any rate a profitable
one, as in the instance of two of the greatest, where it took the form
of a partnership for mutual advantage. It is not to our purpose to speak
of Aretino's gain, but Titian would scarcely have acquired such fame in
his lifetime if that founder of modern journalism, Pietro Aretino, had
not been at his side, eager to trumpet his praises and to advise him
whom to court.

The overwhelming triumph of Spain entailed still another consequence. It
brought home to all Italians, even to the Venetians, the sense of the
individual's helplessness before organized power--a sense which, as we
have seen, the early Renaissance, with its belief in the omnipotence of
the individual, totally lacked. This was not without a decided influence
on art. In the last three decades of his long career, Titian did not
paint man as if he were as free from care and as fitted to his
environment as a lark on an April morning. Rather did he represent man
as acting on his environment and suffering from its reactions. He made
the faces and figures show clearly what life had done to them. The great
"Ecce Homo" and the "Crowning with Thorns" are imbued with this feeling
no less than the equestrian portrait of Charles the Fifth. In the "Ecce
Homo" we see a man with a godlike personality, humbled by the imperial
majesty, broken by the imperial power, and utterly unable to hold out
against them. In the "Crowning with Thorns" we have the same godlike
being almost brutalised by pain and suffering. In the portrait of the
Emperor we behold a man whom life has enfeebled, and who has to meet a
foe who may crush him.

Yet Titian became neither soured nor a pessimist. Many of his late
portraits are even more energetic than those of his early maturity. He
shows himself a wise man of the world. "Do not be a grovelling
sycophant," some of them seem to say, "but remember that courtly manners
and tempered elegance can do you no harm." Titian, then, was ever ready
to change with the times, and on the whole the change was toward a
firmer grasp of reality, necessitating yet another advance in the
painter's mastery of his craft. Titian's real greatness consists in the
fact that he was as able to prod