splendid Venetian beauty of no very refined type or emotional intensity.
Perfect repose and serenity are the keynote of the conception, which in
its luxuriant beauty has little of the power to touch that must be
conceded to the more naïve and equally splendid _Madonna del
Coniglio_.[3] It is above all in the wonderful Venetian landscape--a
mountain-bordered vale, along which flocks and herds are being driven,
under a sky of the most intense blue--that the master shows himself
supreme. Nature is therein not so much detailed as synthesised with a
sweeping breadth which makes of the scene not the reflection of one
beautiful spot in the Venetian territory, but without loss of essential
truth or character a very type of Venetian landscape of the sixteenth
century. These herdsmen and their flocks, and also the note of warning
in the sky of supernatural splendour, recall the beautiful Venetian
storm-landscape in the royal collection at Buckingham Palace. This has
been very generally attributed to Titian himself,[4] and described as
the only canvas still extant in which he has made landscape his one and
only theme. It has, indeed, a rare and mysterious power to move, a true
poetry of interpretation. A fleeting moment, full of portent as well as
of beauty, has been seized; the smile traversed by a frown of the stormy
sky, half overshadowing half revealing the wooded slopes, the rich
plain, and the distant mountains, is rendered with a rare felicity. The
beauty is, all the same, in the conception and in the thing actually
seen--much less in the actual painting. It is hardly possible to
convince oneself, comparing the work with such landscape backgrounds as
those in this picture at the National Gallery in the somewhat earlier
_Madonna del Coniglio_, and the gigantic _St. Peter Martyr_, or, indeed,
in a score of other genuine productions, that the depth, the vigour, the
authority of Titian himself are here to be recognised. The weak
treatment of the great Titianesque tree in the foreground, with its too
summarily indicated foliage--to select only one detail that comes