he chief of a
romanticism which he would hardly acknowledge, vindicated by works
rather than by words his contention that, if design was indeed art's
conscience, colour was its life-blood, its very being.

The _Danae_, seen and admired with reservations by Buonarroti in the
painting-room of Titian at the Belvedere, is now, with its beauty
diminished in important particulars, to be found with the rest of the
Farnese pictures in the gallery of the Naples Museum. It serves to show
that if the artist was far beyond the stage of imitation or even of
assimilation on the larger scale, he was, at any rate, affected by the
Roman atmosphere in art. For once he here comes nearer to the
realisation of Tintoretto's ideal--the colour of Titian and the design
of Michelangelo--than his impetuous pupil and rival ever did. While
preserving in the _Danae_ his own true warmth and transparency of
Venetian colour--now somewhat obscured yet not effaced--he combines
unusual weightiness and majesty with voluptuousness in the nude, and
successfully strives after a more studied rhythm in the harmony of the
composition generally than the art of Venice usually affected.

[Illustration: _Danae and the Golden Rain. Naples Gallery. From a
Photograph by E. Alinari._]

Titian, in his return from Rome, which he was never to revisit, made a
stay at Florence with an eye, as we may guess, both to business and
pleasure. There, as Vasari takes care to record, our master visited the
artistic sights, and _rimase stupefatto_--remained in breathless
astonishment--as he had done when he made himself acquainted with the
artistic glories of Rome. This is but vague, and a little too much
smacks of self-flattery and adulation of the brother Tuscans. Titian was
received by Duke Cosimo at Poggio a Caiano, but his offer to paint the
portrait of the Medici ruler was not well received. It may be, as Vasari
surmises, that this attitude was taken up by the duke in order not to do
wrong to the "many noble craftsmen" then practising in his city and
dominion. More probably, however, Cosimo's hatred and contempt of his
father's minion Aretino, whose portrait by Titian he had condescended to
retain, yet declined to acknowledge, impelled him to show something less
than favour to the man who was known to be the closest friend and
intimate of this self-styled "Scourge of Princes."

Crowe and Cavalcaselle have placed about the year 1555 the extravagantly
lauded _St. John the Bapt