[Illustration: _The Infant Daughter of Roberto Strozzi. Royal Gallery,
Berlin. From a Photograph by F. Hanfstängl._]

As the portrait of a child, though in conception it reveals a marked
progress towards the _intimité_ of later times, the Berlin picture lacks
something of charm and that quality which, for want of a better word,
must be called loveableness. Or is it perhaps that the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries have spoilt us in this respect? For it is only in
these latter days that to the child, in deliberate and avowed
portraiture, is allowed that freakishness, that natural _espièglerie_
and freedom from artificial control which has its climax in the
unapproached portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds. This is the more curious
when it is remembered how tenderly, with what observant and sympathetic
truth the relation of child to mother, of child to child, was noted in
the innumerable "Madonnas" and "Holy Families" of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries; how both the Italians, and following them the
Netherlanders, relieved the severity of their sacred works by the
delightful roguishness, the romping impudence of their little angels,
their _putti_.

It has already been recorded that Titian, taking up the commission
abandoned by Vasari, undertook a great scheme of pictorial decoration
for the Brothers of Santo Spirito in Isola. All that he carried out for
that church has now found its way into that of the Salute. The three
ceiling pictures, _The Sacrifice of Isaac, Cain and Abel_, and _David
victorious over Goliath_, are in the great sacristy of the church; the
_Four Evangelists_ and _Four Doctors_ are in the ceiling of the choir
behind the altar; the altar-piece, _The Descent of the Holy Spirit_, is
in one of the chapels which completely girdle the circular church