Within the years 1532 and 1538, or thereabouts, would appear to fall
Titian's relations with another princely patron, Francesco Maria della
Rovere, Duke of Urbino, the nephew of the redoubtable Pope Julius II.,
whose qualities of martial ardour and unbridled passion he reproduced in
an exaggerated form. By his mother, Giovanna da Montefeltro, he
descended also from the rightful dynasty of Urbino, to which he
succeeded in virtue of adoption. His life of perpetual strife, of
warfare in defence of his more than once lost and reconquered duchy, and
as the captain first of the army of the Church, afterwards of the
Venetian forces, came to an abrupt end in 1538. With his own hand he
had, in the ardent days of his youth, slain in the open streets of
Ravenna the handsome, sinister Cardinal Alidosi, thereby bringing down
upon himself the anathemas of his uncle, Julius II., and furnishing to
his successor, the Medici pope Leo X., the best possible excuse for the
sequestration of the duchy of Urbino in favour of his own house. He
himself died by poison, suspicion resting upon the infamous Pier Luigi
Farnese, the son of Paul III.

Francesco Maria had espoused Eleonora Gonzaga, the sister of Titian's
protector, Federigo, and it is probably through the latter that the
relations with our master sprang up to which we owe a small group of
his very finest works, including the so-called _Venus of Urbino_ of the
Tribuna, the _Girl in a Fur Cloak_ of the Vienna Gallery, and the
companion portraits of Francesco Maria and Eleonora which are now in the
Venetian Gallery at the Uffizi. The fiery leader of armies had, it
should be remembered, been brought up by Guidobaldo of Montefeltro, one
of the most amiable and enlightened princes of his time, and, moreover,
his consort Eleonora was the daughter of Isabella d'Este Gonzaga, than