at Titian began to adopt
Giorgione's manner about the year 1507, and it follows, therefore, that
the portrait of the gentleman of the Barberigo family, if by Titian,
dates from this time, and not 1495.

[Illustration: _Dixon photo. Collection of the Earl of Darnley, Cobham
Hall_

PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN]

Now there is a picture in the Earl of Darnley's Collection at Cobham
Hall which answers pretty closely to Vasari's description. It is a
supposed portrait of Ariosto by Titian, but it is as much unlike the
court poet of Ferrara as the portrait in the National Gallery (No. 636)
which, with equal absurdity, long passed for that of Ariosto, a name now
wisely removed from the label. This magnificent portrait at Cobham was
last exhibited at the Old Masters in 1895, and the suggestion was then
made that it might be the very picture mentioned by Vasari in the
passage quoted above.[87] I believe this ingenious suggestion is
correct, and that we have in the Cobham "Ariosto" the portrait of one of
the Barberigo family said to have been painted by Titian in the manner
of Giorgione. "Thoroughly Giorgionesque," says Mr. Claude Phillips, in
his _Life of Titian_, "is the soberly tinted yet sumptuous picture in
its general arrangement, as in its general tone, and in this respect it
is the fitting companion and the descendant of Giorgione's 'Antonio
Broccardo' at Buda-Pesth, of his 'Knight of Malta' at the Uffizi. Its
resemblance, moreover, is, as regards the general lines of the
composition, a very striking one to the celebrated Sciarra
'Violin-Player,' by Sebastiano del Piombo.... The handsome, manly head
has lost both subtlety and character through some too severe process of
cleaning, but Venetian art has hardly anything more magnificent to show
than the costume, with the quilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin,
which occupies so prominent a place in the picture." Its Giorgionesque
character is therefore recognised by this writer, as also by Dr. Georg
Gronau, in his recent _Life of Titian_ (p. 21), who significantly
remarks, "Its relation to the 'Portrait of a Young Man' by Giorgione, at
Berlin, is obvious."

It is a pity that both these discerning writers of the modern school
have not gone a little further and seen that the picture before them is
not only Giorgionesque, but by Giorgione himself. The mistake of
confusing Titian and Giorgione is as old as Vasari, who, _misled by the
signature_, naively remarks, "It would have b