e
picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground with
its small pebbles.[34] Even the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a
castle sunset-lit--so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and
its castle--is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution. By
Titian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that might be taken to
betray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, the
cloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, the
upper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to the
right. If it is Titian that we have here, as certainly appears most
probable, he cannot be deemed to have exerted his full powers in
completing or developing the Bellinesque landscape. The task may well,
indeed, have presented itself to him as an uninviting one. There is
nothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the
exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacred
and Profane Love_, while the broader handling suggests rather the
technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which
opens out in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_.

CHAPTER III

The "Worship of Venus" and "Bacchanal" Place in Art of the
"Assunta"--The "Bacchus and Ariadne"--So-called Portraits of Alfonso of
Ferrara and Laura Dianti--The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia--Altar-pieces
at Ancona and in the Vatican--The "Entombment" of the Louvre--The
"Madonna di Casa Pesaro"--Place among Titian's works of "St. Peter
Martyr."

In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosto
brought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_.[35] A
greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters
been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's career,
when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being
as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that
in the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, we
have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who
infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian
Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in
their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very
pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process
of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from a
broad groundwork prov