dpoint which had obtained in Rome, but from the closer
contact with a world which at its centre was beginning to take a deeper,
a more solemn and gloomy view of religion and life. It should not be
forgotten that this was the year when the great Council of Trent first
met, and that during the next twenty years or more the whole of Italy,
nay, the whole of the Catholic world, was overshadowed by its
deliberations.

Titian's friend and patron of that time, Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino,
had at first opposed Titian's visit to the Roman court, striving to
reserve to himself the services of the Venetian master until such time
as he should have carried out for him the commissions with which he was
charged. Yielding, however, to the inevitable, and yielding, too, with a
good grace, he himself escorted his favourite with his son Orazio from
Venice through Ferrara to Pesaro, and having detained him a short while
there, granted him an escort through the Papal States to Rome. There he
was well received by the Farnese Pope, and with much cordiality by
Cardinal Bembo. Rooms were accorded to him in the Belvedere section of
the Vatican Palace, and there no doubt he painted the unfinished
portrait-group _Paul III. with Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio
Farnese_, which has been already described, and with it other pieces of
the same type, and portraits of the Farnese family and circle now no
longer to be traced. Vasari, well pleased no doubt to renew his
acquaintance with the acknowledged head of the contemporary Venetian
painters, acted as his cicerone in the visits to the antiquities of
Rome, to the statues and art-treasures of the Vatican, while Titian's
fellow-citizen Sebastiano del Piombo was in his company when he studied
the Stanze of Raphael.

It was but three years since Michelangelo's _Last Judgment_ had been
uncovered in the Sixtine, and it would have been in the highest degree
interesting to read his comments on this gigantic performance, towards
which it was so little likely that his sympathies would spontaneously go
out. Memorable is the visit paid by Buonarroti, with an unwonted regard
for ceremonious courtesy, to Titian in his apartments at the Belvedere,
as it is recalled by Vasari with that naive touch, that power of
suggestion, which gives such delightful colour to his unstudied prose.
No _Imaginary Conversation_ among those that Walter Savage Landor has
devised equals in significance this meeting of the two gr