in their exquisite grace of form and movement farther removed from the
mere fleshly beauty of the undraped model than are the goddesses and
women of Giorgione. The passion and throb of humanity are replaced by a
subtler and less easily explicable charm; beauty becomes a perfectly
balanced and finely modulated harmony. Still the allurement is there,
and it is more consciously and more provocatively exercised than with
Giorgione, though the fascination of Correggio's divinities asserts
itself less directly, less candidly. Showing through the frankly human
loveliness of Giorgione's women there is after all a higher
spirituality, a deeper intimation of that true, that clear-burning
passion, enveloping body and soul, which transcends all exterior grace
and harmony, however exquisite it may be in refinement of
voluptuousness.[19]

It is not, indeed, by any means certain that we are justified in
seriously criticising as a _Venus_ the great picture of the Tribuna.
Titian himself has given no indication that the beautiful Venetian woman
who lies undraped after the bath, while in a sumptuous chamber,
furnished according to the mode of the time, her handmaidens are seeking
for the robes with which she will adorn herself, is intended to present
the love-goddess, or even a beauty masquerading with her attributes.
Vasari, who saw it in the picture-closet of the Duke of Urbino,
describes it, no doubt, as "une Venere giovanetta a giacere, con fieri e
certi panni sottili attorno." It is manifestly borrowed, too--as is now
universally acknowledged--from Giorgione's _Venus_ in the Dresden
Gallery, with the significant alteration, however, that Titian's fair
one voluptuously dreams awake, while Giorgione's goddess more divinely
reposes, and sleeping dreams loftier dreams. The motive is in the
borrowing robbed of much of its dignity and beauty, and individualised
in a fashion which, were any other master than Titian in question, would