expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of
his personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione--judging it from
such unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of
Castelfranco, the so-called _Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the
Soldier_[1] in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called _Three
Philosophers_ in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--has in it still a
slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection. It
was reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullest
development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the _Three Ages_ and
the _Sacred and Profane Love_. Then all himself, and with hardly a rival
in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of
earth and sky which enframe the figures in the _Worship of Venus_, the
_Bacchanal_, and, above all, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_; to give back his
impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty
which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred
Conversations. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the _St.
Peter Martyr_, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic
amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.
The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be
said to exist in the late _Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo)_ of
the Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose and
Giorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late _Rape of Europa_, the
bold sweep and the rainbow hues of the landscape in which recall the
much earlier _Bacchus and Ariadne_. In the exquisite _Shepherd and
Nymph_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--a masterpiece in monotone of
quite the last period--the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque time
reappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, as
in the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by that
solemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the final
years of Titian's old age.