remained in its essence a splendid and full-blown development of the
Giorgionesque ideal. It was grander, more accomplished, and for obvious
reasons more satisfying, yet far less penetrating, less expressive of
the inner fibre, whether of the painter or of his subject.

But to return to the portrait of Berlin. It is in parts unfinished, and
therefore the more interesting as revealing something of the methods
employed by the master in this period of absolute mastery, when his
palette was as sober in its strength as it was rich and harmonious;
when, as ever, execution was a way to an end, and therefore not to be
vain-gloriously displayed merely for its own sake. The picture came,
with very many other masterpieces of the Italian and Netherlandish
schools, from the Solly collection, which formed the nucleus of the
Berlin Gallery. The Uffizi portrait emerges noble still, in its
semi-ruined state, from a haze of restoration and injury, which has not
succeeded in destroying the exceptional fineness and sensitiveness of
the modelling. Although the pose and treatment of the head are
practically identical with that in the Berlin picture, the conception
seems a less dramatic one. It includes, unless the writer has misread
it, an element of greater mansuetude and a less perturbed
reflectiveness.

The double portrait in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at
Windsor Castle, styled _Titian and Franceschini_[26] has no pretensions
whatever to be even discussed as a Titian. The figure of the Venetian
senator designated as Franceschini is the better performance of the two;
the lifeless head of Titian, which looks very like an afterthought, has
been copied, without reference to the relation of the two figures the
one to the other, from the Uffizi picture, or some portrait identical
with it in character. A far finer likeness of Titian than any of these