the 17th of August, 1576, old Titian is attacked and swept
away--surprised, as one would like to believe, while still at work on
his _Pietà_. Even at such a moment, when panic reigns supreme, and the
most honoured, the most dearly beloved are left untended, he is not to
be hurried into an unmarked grave. Notwithstanding the sanitary law
which forbids the burial of one who has succumbed to the plague in any
of the city churches, he receives the supreme and at this awful moment
unique honour of solemn obsequies. The body is taken with all due
observance to the great church of the Frari, and there interred in the
Cappella del Crocifisso, which Titian has already, before the quarrel
with the Franciscans, designated as his final resting-place. He is
spared the grief of knowing that the favourite son, Orazio, for whom all
these years he has laboured and schemed, is to follow him immediately,
dying also of the plague, and not even at Biri Grande, but in the
Lazzaretto Vecchio, near the Lido; that the incorrigible Pomponio is to
succeed and enjoy the inheritance after his own unworthy fashion. He is
spared the knowledge of the great calamity of 1577, the destruction by
fire of the Sala del Gran Consiglio, and with it, of the _Battle of
Cadore_, and most of the noble work done officially for the Doges and
the Signoria. One would like to think that this catastrophe of the end
must have come suddenly upon the venerable master like a hideous dream,
appearing to him, as death often does to those upon whom it descends,
less significant than it does to us who read. Instead of remaining fixed
in sad contemplation of this short final moment when the radiant orb
goes suddenly down below the horizon in storm and cloud, let us keep
steadily in view the light as, serene in its far-reaching radiance, it
illuminated the world for eighty splendid years. Let us think of Titian
as the greatest painter, if not the greatest genius in art, that the
world has produced; as, what Vasari with such conviction described him
to be, "the man as highly favoured by fortune as any of his kind had