nothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied
attitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In the
same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in
the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and
conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for
the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all
the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the _dramatis personae_
of the gruesome scene--extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense
effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that
can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must
ever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come face
to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the _St.
Sebastian_ of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the magic
of the painter _par excellence_ would assert itself. Very curiously it
is not any more less contemporary copy--least of all that by Ludovico
Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS.
Giovanni e Paolo--that gives this impression that Titian in the original
would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work. The
best notion of the _St. Peter Martyr_ is, so far as the writer is aware,
to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which
hangs in the great hall of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Even
through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties, especially
in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without
further carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and, criticism
notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who,
perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower
rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be
discovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la più compiuta, la
più celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, la
quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor mai_.