earliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid.
Still this coiffure--for as such it must be designated--is to be found
more or less throughout the master's career. It is very noticeable in
the _Allegories_ just mentioned.

[Illustration: _Alessandro de' Medici (so called). Hampton Court. From a
Photograph by Spooner & Co._]

Infinitely pathetic is the old master's vain attempt to infuse into the
chosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires. An
atmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously betraying
life-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like fire
through the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and Titian. The
audacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rustic
festival, in which the gods unbend and, after the homelier fashion of
mortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, it
would seem, only _pour la forme_. A careful examination of the picture
substantially confirms Vasari's story that the _Feast of the Gods_ was
painted upon by Titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in many
passages a Titianesque hand. It may well be, at the same time, that
Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what the
younger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of the
elder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture left
unfinished by him. The whole conception, the _charpente_, the contours
of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are the
carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the
branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of the
picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground with
its small pebbles.[34] Even the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a
castle sunset-lit--so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore and