_Aeneas and Evander_, not so much what has been related to him of those
ancient legends as his own mood when he is brought into contact with
them; he transposes his motive from a dramatic into a lyrical
atmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something "rich
and strange," coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmly
human fantasy. Titian, in the _Sacred and Profane Love_, as for
identification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep close
to the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. But
for all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, for
the splendour of female loveliness unveiled, for the piquant contrast of
female loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He has
presented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such a
delightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries to
decipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian in these exquisite
idylls--for so we may still dare to call them--have consciously or
unconsciously achieved, is the indissoluble union of humanity outwardly
quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion, to the
environing nature. It is Nature herself that in these true painted poems
mysteriously responds, that interprets to the beholder the moods of man,
much as a mighty orchestra--Nature ordered and controlled--may by its
undercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the very
personages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so we
may be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his new interpretations,
not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first
acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old
ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from
another and a more prosaic, because a more precise and literal,
standpoint.

[Illustration: _Vanitas. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From a Photograph by