Opstal at
their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in
similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.[37]

The sumptuous _Bacchanal_, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave the
commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a less
delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From
certain points of analogy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus,
it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation of
the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus,
whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus is,
however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honour
to the god, Ariadne's new lover. The revel in a certain audacious
abandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists have
retired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certain
agreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of the
Bacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic statues
then, and until lately, entitled _The Sleeping Ariadne_, does not lead
the writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus so
lately won back from despair. The undraped figure,[38] both in its
attitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-draped
Bacchante, or goddess, in Bellini's _Bacchanal_ at Alnwick. Titian's
lovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio's
dazzling _Antiope_ in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's _Venus_ or
Titian's own _Antiope_, in which a certain feminine dignity
spiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwise
defenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively Titianesque
colour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbed
dancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to the
spectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we find
again in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture,
and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the _Entombment_.

The charming little _Tambourine Player_, which is No. 181 in the Vienna
Gallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works just
now described, but rather before than after them.

What that is new remains to be said about the _Assunta_, or _Assumption
of the Virgin_, which was ordered of Titian as early as 1516, but not
shown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until the
20t