t helps us to cope with certain
difficulties presented by the picture itself. It may be conceded at the
outset that there are disturbing elements in it, well calculated to give
pause to the student of Titian. The handsome patrician, a little too
proud of his rank, his magnificent garments and accoutrements, his
virile beauty, stands fronting the spectator in a dress of crimson and
gold, wearing a plumed and jewelled hat, which in its elaboration
closely borders on the grotesque, and holding a hunting-spear. Still
more astonishing in its exaggeration of a Venetian mode in
portraiture[44] is the great crimson, dragon-crowned helmet which, on
the left of the canvas, Cupid himself supports. To the right, a rival
even of Love in the affections of our enigmatical personage, a noble
hound rubs himself affectionately against the stalwart legs of his
master. Far back stretches a prospect singularly unlike those rich-toned
studies of sub-Alpine regions in which Titian as a rule revels. It has
an august but more colourless beauty recalling the middle Apennines; one
might almost say that it prefigures those prospects of inhospitable
Sierra which, with their light, delicate tonality, so admirably relieve
and support the portraits of Velazquez. All this is unusual, and still
more so is the want of that aristocratic gravity, of that subordination
of mere outward splendour to inborn dignity, which mark Titian's
greatest portraits throughout his career. The splendid materials for the
picture are not as absolutely digested, as absolutely welded into one
consistent and harmonious whole, as with such authorship one would
expect. But then, on the other hand, take the magnificent execution in
the most important passages: the distinguished silvery tone obtained
notwithstanding the complete red-and-gold costume and the portentous
crimson helmet; the masterly brush-work in these last particulars, in
the handsome virile head of the model and the delicate flesh of the
_amorino_. The dog might without exaggeration be pronounced the best,
the truest in movement, to be found in Venetian art--indeed, in art
generally, until Velazquez appears. Herr Carl Justi's happy conjecture
helps us, if we accept it, to get over some of these difficulties and
seeming contradictions. The Duke of Atri belonged to a great Neapolitan
family, exiled and living at the French court under royal countenance
and protection. The portrait was painted to be sent back to France,