r_, with a _mise-en-scene_
more classical than anything else from Titian's hand that can be pointed
to, the picture may be guessed, rather than seen, to be also a curious
and subtle study of conflicting lights. On the one hand we have that of
the gruesome martyrdom itself, and of a huge torch fastened to the
carved shaft of a pedestal; on the other, that of an effulgence from the
skies, celestial in brightness, shedding its consoling beams on the
victim.

The _Christ crowned with Thorns_, which long adorned the church of S.
Maria delle Grazie at Milan, and is now in the Long Gallery of the
Louvre, may belong to about this time, but is painted with a larger and
more generous brush, with a more spontaneous energy, than the carefully
studied piece at the Gesuiti. The tawny harmonies finely express in
their calculated absence of freshness the scene of brutal and unholy
violence so dramatically enacted before our eyes. The rendering of
muscle, supple and strong under the living epidermis, the glow of the
flesh, the dramatic momentariness of the whole, have not been surpassed
even by Titian. Of the true elevation, of the spiritual dignity that the
subject calls for, there is, however, little or nothing. The finely
limbed Christ is as coarse in type and as violent in action as his
executioners; sublimity is reached, strange to say, only in the bust of
Tiberius, which crowns the rude archway through which the figures have
issued into the open space. Titian is here the precursor of the
_Naturalisti_--of Caravaggio and his school. Yet, all the same, how
immeasurable is the distance between the two!

[Illustration: _Christ crowned with Thorns. Louvre. From a Photograph by
Neurdein_.]

On the 21st of September 1558 died the imperial recluse of Yuste, once
Charles V., and it is said his last looks were steadfastly directed
towards that great canvas _The Trinity_, which to devise with Titian had
been one of his greatest consolations at a moment when already earthly
glories held him no more. Philip, on the news of his father's death,
retired for some weeks to the monastery of Groenendale, and thence sent
a despatch to the Governor of Milan, directing payment of all the
arrears of the pensions "granted to Titian by Charles his father (now in
glory)," adding by way of unusual favour a postscript in his own
hand.[49] Orazio Vecellio, despatched by his father in the spring of
1559 to Milan to receive the arrears of pension, accepted th