do. From this profound and almost touching portrait we come to
the joy of the Bella (18). It is a hymn to Physical Beauty. There is
nothing in the world more splendid or more glad than this portrait,
perhaps of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino. How often Titian has
painted her!--once as it might seem as the Venus of the Tribune (1117),
and again in her own character in the portrait now in the Uffizi (599),
where certainly she is not so fair as she we see here as Bella and there
as Venus. If this, indeed, be the Duchess of Urbino, then the Venus is
also her portrait, for the Bella is described in the list of fine
pictures which were brought to Florence in 1631 as a portrait of the
same person we know as the Venus of the Tribune. But the first we hear
of the Bella is in a letter of the Duke of Urbino in 1536, while the
portrait in the Uffizi of Eleonora Gonzaga was painted in Venice in that
year; and since the Duchess is certainly an older woman than the Bella,
we must conclude either that the Bella was painted many years earlier,
which seems impossible, or that it is not a portrait of Eleonora
Gonzaga. And, indeed, the latter conclusion seems likely, for who can
believe that the Duke would have cared for a nude portrait of his wife
as Venus? It seems probable that the Bella is a portrait of his mistress
rather than his wife, a mistress whom, since she was so fair, he did not
scruple to ask Titian to paint as Venus herself. A harmony in blue and
gold, Dr. Gronau calls the picture; adding that, "in spite of its faults
or of the restorations which have made it a mere shadow of its former
splendour, it remains an immortal example of what the art of the
Renaissance at its zenith regarded as the ideal of feminine beauty."

If it is beauty and joy we find in the Bella, it is a profound force and
confidence that we come upon in the portrait of Aretino painted before
1545,--and life above all. Here is one of the greatest blackguards of
history, the "Scourge of Princes," the blackmailer of Popes, the
sensualist of the Sonnetti Lussuriosi, the witty author of the
_Ragionamenti_. We seem to see his vulgarity, his immense ability, his
splendour, and his baseness, and to understand why Titian was wise
enough to take him for his friend. What energy, almost bestial in its
brutality, you find in those coarse features and over-eloquent lips, and
yet the head is powerful, really intellectual too, though without any
delicacy or fineness.