exercise a dominating influence of fascination. In illustration of this
assertion it is only necessary to refer to the draped and the undraped
figure in the _Medea and Venus (Sacred and Profane Love)_ of the
Borghese Gallery, to the _Herodias_ of the Doria Gallery, to the _Flora_
of the Uffizi. Here, even when the beautiful Venetian courtesan is
represented or suggested, what the master gives is less the mere votary
than the priestess of love. Of this power of domination, this feminine
royalty, the _Venus Anadyomene_ still retains a measure, but the _Venus
of Urbino_ and the splendid succession of Venuses and Danaës, goddesses,
nymphs, and heroines belonging to the period of the fullest maturity,
show woman in the phase in which, renouncing her power to enslave, she
is herself reduced to slavery.

These glowing presentments of physical attractiveness embody a lower
ideal--that of woman as the plaything of man, his precious possession,
his delight in the lower sense. And yet Titian expresses this by no
means exalted conception with a grand candour, an absence of
_arrière-pensée_ such as almost purges it of offence. It is Giovanni
Morelli who, in tracing the gradual descent from his recovered treasure,
the _Venus_ of Giorgione in the Dresden Gallery,[17] through the various
Venuses of Titian down to those of the latest manner, so finely
expresses the essential difference between Giorgione's divinity and her
sister in the Tribuna. The former sleeping, and protected only by her
sovereign loveliness, is safer from offence than the waking goddess--or
shall we not rather say woman?--who in Titian's canvas passively waits
in her rich Venetian bower, tended by her handmaidens. It is again
Morelli[18] who points out that, as compared with Correggio, even
Giorgione--to say nothing of Titian--is when he renders the beauty of
woman or goddess a realist. And this is true in a sense, yet not
altogether. Correggio's _Danaë_, his _Io_, his _Leda_, his _Venus_, are