did his daughter
Lavinia. As it happened, however, a more certain influence was nearly
coincident with this event--the arrival in Venice of the notorious
Aretine, who, chiefly as it appears, with an eye to business, entered
into the most intimate relations with Titian. The accession of the
sculptor

[Illustration: PLATE XVI.--TITIAN

THE ENTOMBMENT

_Louvre, Paris_]

Sansovino to the comradeship earned for the group the name of the
Triumvirate.

So far from Titian being corrupted by the society of Aretine, there is
direct evidence in one of the poet's letters to him that he was not.
"You must come to our feast to-night," he writes, "but I may as well
warn you that you had better leave early, as I know how particular you
are about certain things." Nor is there anything in the artist's works
of this next period--which we may roughly date from 1530 to 1550, that
betrays a more serious devotion to the sensual side of life than can be
accounted for by the demands of the high and mighty patrons that Aretine
was soon to find for him. As an artist he looked upon woman as a
beautiful creature, as a man he most probably never troubled about her,
or was troubled by her. There is no proof that any of his pictures are
rightly called "Titian's mistress," and we may conclude that he was as
good a husband and a father as was Rubens, who revelled in painting
woman, or Velasquez, who seems to have frankly disliked it. Like
Rowlandson, whom the general public only know as a caricaturist, but who
when he once got away from London was the most pure minded and poetical
artist, so Titian, when once dissociated from the demands of corrupt
patrons, like Philip II., never reveals himself as having fallen under
the influence of Aretine--if indeed at all. The _Danae_ and the _Venus
and a Musician_ at the Prado are the only examples it is possible to
cite--unless it be the _Venus_, to which popular opinion would hardly
deny its place of honour in the Tribune at the Uffizi.

At the same time the difference in circumstances, the fuller, richer
life that he must have led in these years of patronage and prosperity,
accounts for a certain "shallowness and complacency" which
distinguishes his work during this period as sharply from that which
preceded as from that which followed it; and fine as is his
accomplishment during these years, especially in portraiture, it
includes fewer of those masterpieces which appeal to the heart as much
as to the