e
hospitality of the sculptor Leone Leoni, who was then living in splendid
style in a palace which he had built and adorned for himself in the
Lombard city. He was the rival in art as well as the mortal enemy of
Benvenuto Cellini, and as great a ruffian as he, though one less
picturesque in blackguardism. One day early in June, when Orazio, having
left Leoni's house, had returned to superintend the removal of certain
property, he was set upon, and murderously assaulted by the perfidious
host and his servants. The whole affair is wrapped in obscurity. It
remains uncertain whether vengeance, or hunger after the arrears of
Titian's pension, or both, were the motives which incited Leoni to
attempt the crime. Titian's passionate reclamations, addressed
immediately to Philip II., met with but partial success, since the
sculptor, himself a great favourite with the court of Spain, was
punished only with fine and banishment, and the affair was afterwards
compromised by the payment of a sum of money.

Titian's letter of September 22, 1559, to Philip II. announces the
despatch of the companion pieces _Diana and Calisto_ and _Diana and
Actaeon_, as well as of an _Entombment_ intended to replace a painting of
the same subject which had been lost on the way. The two celebrated
canvases,[50] now in the Bridgewater Gallery, are so familiar that they
need no new description. Judging by the repetitions, reductions, and
copies that exist in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, the Prado Gallery,
the Yarborough Collection, and elsewhere, these mythological _poesie_
have captivated the world far more than the fresher and lovelier painted
poems of the earlier time--the _Worship of Venus_, the _Bacchanal_, the
_Bacchus and Ariadne_. At no previous period has Titian wielded the
brush with greater _maestria_ and ease than here, or united a richer or
more transparent glow with greater dignity of colour. About the
compositions themselves, if we are to take them as the _poesie_ that
Titian loved to call them, there is a certain want of significance,
neither the divine nor the human note being struck with any depth or
intensity of vibration. The glamour, the mystery, the intimate charm of
the early pieces is lost, and there is felt, enwrapping the whole, that
sultry atmosphere of untempered sensuousness which has already, upon
more than one occasion, been commented upon. That this should be so is
only natural when creative power is not extinguished by o