hould be remembered, been brought up by Guidobaldo of Montefeltro, one
of the most amiable and enlightened princes of his time, and, moreover,
his consort Eleonora was the daughter of Isabella d'Este Gonzaga, than
whom the Renaissance knew no more enthusiastic or more discriminating
patron of art.

[Illustration: _The Girl in the Fur Cloak. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.
From a Photograph by Loewy._]

A curious problem meets us at the outset. We may assume with some degree
of certainty that the portraits of the duke and duchess belong to the
year 1537. Stylistic characteristics point to the conclusion that the
great _Venus_ of the Tribuna, the so-called _Bella di Tiziano_, and the
_Girl in the Fur Cloak_--to take only undoubted originals--belong to
much the same stage of Titian's practice as the companion portraits at
the Uffizi. Eleonora Gonzaga, a princess of the highest culture, the
daughter of an admirable mother, the friend of Pietro Bembo, Sadolet,
and Baldassarre Castiglione, was at this time a matron of some twenty
years' standing; at the date when her avowed portrait was painted she
must have been at the very least forty. By what magic did Titian manage
to suggest her type and physiognomy in the famous pictures just now
mentioned, and yet to plunge the duchess into a kind of _Fontaine de
Jouvence_, realising in the divine freshness of youth and beauty beings
who nevertheless appear to have with her some kind of mystic and
unsolved connection? If this was what he really intended--and the
results attained may lead us without temerity to assume as much--no
subtler or more exquisite form of flattery could be conceived. It is
curious to note that at the same time he signally failed with the
portrait of her mother, Isabella d'Este, painted in 1534, but showing
the Marchioness of Mantua as a young woman of some twenty-five years,
though she was then sixty. Here youth and a semblance of beauty are
called up by the magic of the artist, but the personality, both physical
and mental, is lost in the effort. But then in this last case Titian was
working from an early portrait, and without the living original to refer
to.

But, before approaching the discussion of the _Venus of Urbino_, it is
necessary to say a word about another _Venus_ which must have been
painted some years before this time, revealing, as it does, a
completely different and, it must be owned, a higher ideal. This is the
terribly ruined, yet still beautiful,