paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but
by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the
author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the
Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named
the "Townley Venus" and the "Vénus d'Arles"--myriads of Loves sport,
kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them
shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer
is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the
life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the
splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner)
dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of the
angelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the
Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly
beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North,
in touch with the South, as Albrecht Dürer, Mabuse, and Jacob
Cornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacred
works these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrier
and more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. To
say nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemish
sculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal at
their head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration in
similar subjects from these Loves of Titian.[37]

The sumptuous _Bacchanal_, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave the
commission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a less
delicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. From
certain points of analogy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus,
it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation of
the daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus,
whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus is,