ece, must have been commissioned to
commemorate a victory or important political event in the annals of the
illustrious family. Search among their archives and papers, if they
still exist, might throw light upon this point, and fix more accurately
the date of the magnificent work. In the open air--it may be outside
some great Venetian church--an altar has been erected, and upon it is
placed a crucifix, on either side of which are church candles, blown
this way and the other by the wind. Three generations of patricians
kneel in prayer and thanksgiving, taking precedence according to age,
six handsome boys, arranged in groups of three on either side of the
canvas, furnishing an element of great pictorial attractiveness but no
vital significance. The act of worship acquires here more reality and a
profounder meaning than it can have in those vast altar-pieces in which
the divine favour is symbolised by the actual presence of the Madonna
and Child. An open-air effect has been deliberately aimed at and
attained, the splendid series of portraits being relieved against the
cloud-flecked blue sky with a less sculptural plasticity than the master
would have given to them in an indoor scheme. This is another admirable
example of the dignity and reserve which Titian combines with sumptuous
colour at this stage of his practice. His mastery is not less but
greater, subtler, than that of his more showy and brilliant
contemporaries of the younger generation; the result is something that
appears as if it must inevitably have been so and not otherwise. The
central figure of the patriarch is robed in deep crimson with grayish
fur, rather black in shadow; the man in the prime of manhood wears a
more positive crimson, trimmed with tawnier fur, browner in shadow; a
lighter sheen is on the brocaded mantle of yet another shade of crimson
worn by the most youthful of the three patricians. Just the stimulating
note to break up a harmony which might otherwise have been of a richness
too cloying is furnished--in the master's own peculiar way--by the
scarlet stockings of one boy in the right hand group, by the cinnamon
sleeve of another.[51]

[Illustration: The Cornaro Family. In the Collection of the Duke of
Northumberland.]

To the year 1561 belongs, according to the elaborate inscription on the
picture, the magnificent _Portrait of a Man_ which is No. 172 in the
Dresden Gallery. It presents a Venetian gentleman in his usual habit,
but bearing