dicious, beautiful,
astonishing, because it makes the pictures seem living."

No better proof could be given of Vasari's genuine _flair_ and intuition
as a critic of art than this passage. We seem to hear, not the Tuscan
painter bred to regard the style of Michelangelo as an article of faith,
to imitate his sculptural smoothness of finish and that of Angelo
Bronzino, but some intelligent exponent of impressionistic methods,
defending both from attack and from superficial imitation one of the
most advanced of modernists.

Among the sacred works produced in this late time is a _Crucifixion_,
still preserved in a damaged state in the church of S. Domenico at
Ancona. To a period somewhat earlier than that at which we have arrived
may belong the late _Madonna and Child in a Landscape_ which is No.
1113 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich. The writer follows Giovanni
Morelli in believing that this is a studio picture touched by the
master, and that the splendidly toned evening landscape is all his. He
cannot surely be made wholly responsible for the overgrown and inflated
figure of the divine _Bambino_, so disproportionate, so entirely wanting
in tenderness and charm.

The power of vivid conception, the spontaneous fervour which mark
Titian's latest efforts in the domain of sacred art, are very evident in
the great _St. Jerome_ of the Brera here reproduced. Cima, Basaiti, and
most of the Bellinesques had shown an especial affection for the
subject, and it had been treated too by Lotto, by Giorgione, by Titian
himself; but this is surely as noble and fervent a rendering as Venetian
art in its prime has brought forth. Of extraordinary majesty and beauty
is the landscape, with its mighty trees growing out of the abrupt
mountain slope, close to the naked rock.

In the autumn of 1564 we actually find the venerable master, then about
eighty-seven years of age, taking a journey to Brescia in connection
with an important commission given to him for the decoration of the
great hall in the Palazzo Pubblico at Brescia, to which the Vicentine
artist Righetto had supplied the ceiling, and Palladio had added columns
and interior wall-decorations. The three great ceiling-pictures, which
were afterwards, as a consequence of the contract then entered upon,
executed by the master, or rather by his assistants, endured only until
1575, when in the penultimate year of Titian's life they perished in a
great fire.

The correspondence shows that