Aretino himself presented this portrait to Cosimo
I in October 1545, inexplicably explaining that the rendering of the
dress was not perfect.[128]

In another portrait of about the same time, the Young Englishman (92),
we have Titian at his best. The extraordinarily beautiful English face,
fulfilled with some incalculable romance, is to me at least by far the
most delightful portrait in Florence. One seems to understand England,
her charm, her fascination, her extraordinary pride and persistence, in
looking at this picture of one of her sons. All the tragedy of her
kings, the adventure to be met with on her seas, the beauty and culture
of Oxford, and the serenity of her country places, come back to one
fresh and unsullied by memories of the defiling and trumpery cities
that so lately have begun to destroy her. Who this beautiful figure may
be we know not, nor, indeed, where the picture may have come from; for
if it comes from Urbino it is not well described in the inventory of
1631.

After looking upon such a work as this, the Philip II (200), fine though
it is, and only less splendid than the Madrid picture, the Portrait of a
Man (215), both painted in Augsburg in 1548, and even the lovely
portrait of Giulia Varana, Duchess of Urbino, in the royal apartments,
seem to lose something of their splendour. Yet if we compare them with
the work of Raphael or Tintoretto, they assuredly possess an energy and
a vitality that even those masters were seldom able to express. For
Titian seems to have created life with something of the ease and
facility of a natural force; to have desired always Beauty as the only
perfect flower of life; and while he was not content with the mere
truth, and never with beauty divorced from life, he has created life in
such abundance that his work may well be larger than the achievement of
any two other men, even the greatest in painting; yet in his work, in
the work that is really his, you will find nothing that is not living,
nothing that is not an impassioned gesture reaching above and beyond our
vision into the realm of that force which seems to be eternal.

FOOTNOTES:

[127] Gronau, _Titian_ (London, 1904), p. 291, where Dr. Gronau suggests
it may belong to the following year; see also p. 104.

[128] Cf. _Lettere di Pietro Aretino_ (1609), vol. iii. p. 238.

XXV. TO FIESOLE AND SETTIGNANO

How weary one grows of the ways of a city,--yes, even in Florence, where
every street runs in