Ariadne_ Titian's genius flames up with an intensity of passion such as
will hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject of
this class. Certainly, with all the beauties of the _Venuses_, of the
_Diana and Actaeon_, the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, we
descend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance,
though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, its
power to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the
_Venere del Pardo_ of the Louvre and the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna,
is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earlier
times, with its exquisite naïveté and mitigated sensuousness.

[Illustration: _Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photograph
published by the Autotype Company._]

The _Bacchus and Ariadne_ is a Titian which even the Louvre, the Museum
of the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in our master's
works, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of most
readers, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are interested
in Italian art. This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus or
subtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose
_Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ he followed with a closeness which did
not prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation of
the subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that had
animated the original. How is it possible to better express the _At
parte ex aliâ florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoque
incensus amore_ of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eager
movement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian? Or to
paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines: _Horum pars
tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra
iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant_? Ariadne's crown of