by the music, on
an interval that will never come again, that is already passed.

If Titian is really the sole painter of this picture, how loyal he has
been to his friend, to that new spirit which lighted Venetian art as the
sun makes beautiful the world. But indeed one might think that, even
with Morelli, Crowe, and Cavalcaselle, and Berenson against us, not to
name others who have done much for the history of painting in Italy, we
might still believe, not altogether without reason, that Giorgone had
some part in the Concert, which, after all, passed as his altogether for
two hundred and fifty years; was bought, indeed, as his in 1654, only
seventy-eight years after Titian's death, by Cardinal Leopoldo de'
Medici from Paolo del Sera, the Florentine collector in Venice. That
figure of a youth, ambiguous in its beauty--could any other hand than
Giorgone's have painted it; does it ever appear in Titian's innumerable
masterpieces at all? Dying as he did at the age of thirty-three,
Giorgone must have left many pictures unfinished, which Titian, his
friend and disciple almost, may well have completed, and even signed, in
an age when works, almost wholly untouched by a master, were certainly
sold as his.

Titian's other pictures here, with the exception of the Head of Christ
(228) and the Magdalen (67), are portraits, all, save the so-called
Tommaso Mosti, painted certainly before 1526, of his great middle
period. The Magdalen comes from Urbino, where Vasari saw it in the
Guardaroba of the great palace. The quality of the picture is one of
sheer colour; there is here no other "subject" than a beautiful nude
woman,--it is called a Magdalen because it is not called a Venus.
Consider, then, the harmony of the gold hair and the fair flesh and the
blue of the sky: it is a harmony in gold and rose and blue.

The earliest of the great portraits is the Ippolito de' Medici (201); it
was painted in Venice in October 1532.[127] Vasari saw this picture in
the Guardaroba of Cosimo I. It is a half-length portrait of a
distinguished man, still very young, that we see. The Cardinal is not
dressed as a Churchman, but as a grandee of Hungary. In the sad and
cunning face we seem to foresee the fate that awaited him at Gaeta
scarcely three years later, where he was imprisoned and poisoned. The
beautiful dull red of the tunic reminds one of the unforgetable red of
the cloth on the table beside which Philip II stands in the picture in
the Pra