_Annunciation_ at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appear
dignified by comparison. Titian's own _Annunciation_, bequeathed to the
Scuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high up
on the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity and
appropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the better
known picture.

[Illustration: _The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From a
Photograph by Alinari_.]

Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso's Duchess,--the
passive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose character
has been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,--our
master proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, we
are told, the finished _Bacchanal_, already described above. He appears
to have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early part
of 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed at
Ferrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our _Bacchus and
Ariadne_, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture too
late in the earlier section of Vecelli's work, though, with all its
freshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a further
advance on the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, and must be
deemed to close the great series inaugurated by the _Feast of the Gods_
of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of Titian already described
our National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time has
not spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of the
golden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the
_Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ the allegiance to Giorgiono has
been partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the naïveté remains, but not the
infinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the _Bacchus and