trong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line and
movement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the true
Giorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanous
drapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and high
lights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that Titian
ever achieved. Only in the late _Venere del Pardo_, which so closely
follows the chief motive of Giorgione's _Venus_, does he approach it in
frankness and purity. Far more genuinely classic is it in spirit,
because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, than
anything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous in
their study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.[19]

[Illustration: _Sacred and Profane Love._]

It is impossible to discuss here in detail all the conjectural
explanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popular
of all Venetian pictures--least of all that strange one brought forward
by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the _Artless and Sated Love_, for which they
have found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves in
an atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show but a languid desire to
solve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the pictures
described by Marcantonio Michiel (the _Anonimo_ of Jacopo Morelli), in
the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the _Inferno with
Aeneas and Anchises_ and _Landscape with the Birth of Paris_, Herr Franz
Wickhoff[20] has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daring
crowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several of
Barbarelli's best known works. The _Three Philosophers_ he calls
_Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas_, the Giovanelli _Tempest with the Gipsy
and the Soldier_ he explains anew as _Admetus and Hypsipyle_.[21] The
subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and
popularly called, or rather miscalled, the _Dream of Raphael_, is
recognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione.
He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, the
commentator of Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleeping
side by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it),
the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained in
peaceful sleep.

Passing over to the Giorgionesque period of Titian, he boldly sets to
work on the world-famous _Sacred and Profane Love_, and shows us the
C