adorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned
humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the
_Argonautica_ of Valerius Flaccus--that wearisome imitation of the
similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea--the sumptuously
attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)--sits at the fountain in
unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and
holding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will not
yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love
is the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comes
Venus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea's father,
irresistibly pleading that she shall go to the alien lover, who waits in
the wood. It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in the
toils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is the
subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible--in Titian's realisation
of the legend--to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main theme
upon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing[22] had
already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when he
described the Borghese picture as _The Maiden with Venus and Amor at the
Well_. The _vraisemblance_ of Herr Wickhoff's brilliant interpretation
becomes the greater when we reflect that Titian at least twice
afterwards borrowed subjects from classical antiquity, taking his
_Worship of Venus_, now at Madrid, from the _Erotes_ of Philostratus,
and our own wonderful _Bacchus and Ariadne_ at the National Gallery from
the _Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ of Catullus. In the future it is
quite possible that the Austrian savant may propose new and precise
interpretations for the _Three Ages_ and for Giorgione's _Concert
Champetre_ at the Louvre.

[Illustration: _Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria
Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq._]

It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student of
Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him
at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young
poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly
allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have hard,
clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours.
It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere o