personage high of rank, doubtless, notwithstanding the studied
simplicity of his dress. Because we know nothing of the sitter, and
there is in his pose and general aspect nothing sensational, this
masterpiece is, if not precisely not less celebrated among connoisseurs,
at any rate less popular with the larger public, than it deserves to
be.[14]

[Illustration: _S. Giovanni Elemosinario giving Alms. In the Church of
that name at Venice. From a Photograph by Naya._]

The noble altar-piece in the church of S. Giovanni Elemosinario at
Venice showing the saint of that name enthroned, and giving alms to a
beggar, belongs to the close of 1533 or thereabouts, since the
high-altar was finished in the month of October of that year. According
to Vasari, it must be regarded as having served above all to assert once
for all the supremacy of Titian over Pordenone, whose friends had
obtained for him the commission to paint in competition with the
Cadorine an altar-piece for one of the apsidal chapels of the church,
where, indeed, his work is still to be seen.[15] Titian's canvas, like
most of the great altar-pieces of the middle time, was originally arched
at the top; but the vandalism of a subsequent epoch has, as in the case
of the _Madonna di S. Niccola_, now in the Vatican, made of this arch a
square, thereby greatly impairing the majesty of the general effect.
Titian here solves the problem of combining the strong and simple
decorative aspect demanded by the position of the work as the central
feature of a small church, with the utmost pathos and dignity, thus
doing incomparably in his own way--the way of the colourist and the
warm, the essentially human realist--what Michelangelo had, soaring high
above earth, accomplished with unapproachable sublimity in the
_Prophets_ and _Sibyls_ of the Sixtine Chapel.