magnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentous
tragedy.

Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge's
chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about
the altar,[48] with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the
kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the
altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.

[Illustration: _The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria de'
Frari, Venice. From a Photograph by Naya_.]

The _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, which Titian finished in 1526, after
having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the
masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of
exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at the
Frari, the _Assunta_. For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pomp
and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite
sufficient _vraisemblance_, of divine and sacred with real personages,
it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its class. And yet,
apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties
overcome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole,
many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than we
should care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a more
splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand.
It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and less
interesting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virgin
and Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by an
invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed
crowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's