Thus, though there cannot be claimed for Titian that universality in art
and science which the lovers of Leonardo's painting must ever deplore,
since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of scope
of Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht Dürer;
it must be seen that as a _painter_ he covered more ground than any
first-rate master of the sixteenth century. While in more than one
branch of the painter's art he stood forth supreme and without a rival,
in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorial
decorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his younger
rivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves more
practised and more successfully daring in this particular branch.

To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, such
parallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must go
to Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or had
been, the great merchant city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly be
styled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetian
predecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was during
the first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle of
supremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer period
during the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation of
those vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that owned
them; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as an
accessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who,
in his greatest efforts--those sumptuous and almost truculent _portraits
d'apparat_ of princes, nobles, and splendid dames--knew no superior,
though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and
Velazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more
demonstrative, a seemingly closer embrace, drawing from the contact a