the Painters' Gallery of the Uffizi. It is strange that there should
exist no certain likeness of the master of Cadore done in youth or
earlier manhood, if there be excepted the injured and more than doubtful
production in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, which has pretty generally
been supposed to be an original auto-portrait belonging to this period.
In the Uffizi and Berlin pictures Titian looks about sixty years old,
but may be a little more or a little less. The latter is a half-length,
showing him seated and gazing obliquely out of the picture with a
majestic air, but also with something of combativeness and disquietude,
an element, this last, which is traceable even in some of the earlier
portraits, but not in the mythological _poesie_ or any sacred work. More
and more as we advance through the final period of old age do we find
this element of disquietude and misgiving asserting itself in male
portraiture, as, for instance, in the _Maltese Knight_ of the Prado, the
_Dominican Monk_ of the Borghese, the _Portrait of a Man with a Palm
Branch_ of the Dresden Gallery. The atmosphere of sadness and foreboding
enveloping man is traceable back to Giorgione; but with him it comes
from the plenitude of inner life, from the gaze turned inwards upon the
mystery of the human individuality rather than outwards upon the
inevitable tragedies of the exterior life common to all. This same
atmosphere of passionate contemplativeness enwraps, indeed, all that
Giorgione did, and is the cause that he sees the world and himself
lyrically, not dramatically; the flame of aspiration burning steadily at
the heart's core and leaving the surface not indeed unruffled, but
outwardly calm in its glow. Titian's is the more dramatic temperament in
outward things, but also the more superficial. It must be remembered,
too, that arriving rapidly at the maturity of his art, and painting all
through the period of the full Renaissance, he was able with far less
hindrance from technical limitations to express his conceptions to the
full. His portraiture, however, especially his male portraiture, was and