lead him, without
further carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and, criticism
notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who,
perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower
rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be
discovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la piu compiuta, la
piu celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, la
quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor mai_.

[Illustration: _Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From a
Photograph by Anderson_.]

It was after a public competition between Titian, Palma, and Pordenone,
instituted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the great
commission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at the
end of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. Of
Pordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finished
drawing of the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_ in the Uffizi, which is either
by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any
rate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem in
some respects, as compared with Titian's astonishing performance, it
represents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime in
its gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitely
touching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, still
asserts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to be
preliminary sketches for the _St. Peter Martyr_ are: a pen-and-ink
sketch in the Louvre showing the assassin chasing the companion of the
victim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at the
saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet
thumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actual
massacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is the
drawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives the
impression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by Titian
for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, _A Nobleman murdering his Wife_,
which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
of Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writer
feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of Titian
himself.[50]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's Bilder zu
Roemischen