The Earlier Work of Titian by Claude Phillips
page 38 of 100 (38%)
page 38 of 100 (38%)
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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 |
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