in the great unfinished group now to be described.[34] This
Titian, which doubtless passed into the Hermitage with the rest of the
Barbarigo pictures, may have been the first foundation for the series of
portraits of the Farnese Pope, and as such would naturally have been
retained by the master for his own use. The portrait-group in the Naples
Museum, showing, with Paul III., Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio
Farnese (afterwards Duke of Parma), is, apart from its extraordinary
directness and swift technical mastery, of exceptional interest as being
unfinished, and thus doubly instructive. The composition, lacking in its
unusual momentariness the repose and dignity of Raphael's _Leo X. with
Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and de' Rossi_ at the Pitti, is not wholly
happy. Especially is the action of Ottavio Farnese, as in reverence he
bends down to reply to the supreme Pontiff, forced and unconvincing; but
the unflattered portrait of the pontiff himself is of a bold and quite
unconventional truth, and in movement much happier. The picture may
possibly, by reason of this unconventional conception less than
perfectly realised, have failed to please the sitters, and thus have
been left in its present state.[35]

Few of Titian's canvases of vast dimensions have enjoyed a higher degree
of popularity than the large _Ecce Homo_ to which the Viennese proudly
point as one of the crowning ornaments of the great Imperial Gallery of
their city. Completed in 1543[36] for Giovanni d'Anna, a son of the
Flemish merchant Martin van der Hanna, who had established himself in
Venice, it was vainly coveted by Henri III. on the occasion of his
memorable visit in 1574, but was in 1620 purchased for the splendid
favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by the English envoy Sir
Henry Wotton. From him the noblest and most accomplished of English
collectors, Thomas, Earl of Arundel, sought to obtain the prize with the
unparalleled offer of L7000, yet even thus failed. At the time of the
great _debacle_, in 1648, the guardians and advisers of his youthful son
and successor were glad enough to get the splendid gallery over to the
Low Countries, and to sell with the rest the _Ecce Homo_, which brought
under these circumstances but a tenth part of what Lord Arundel would
have given for it. Passing into the collection of the Archduke Leopold
William, it was later on finally incorporated with that of the Imperial
House of Austria. From the point