greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters
been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's career,
when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being
as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that
in the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, we
have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who
infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian
Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in
their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very
pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process
of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from a
broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and
unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation
to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous
eccentricity.

[Illustration: _The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a
Photograph by Braun, Clément, & Cie_.]

In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behind
already the fresh morning of Titian's genius, represented by the
Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its
bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some
evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more
delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_
might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of
Venus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, a
renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman
Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the
Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of