sixty-eight had still before him nearly thirty fruitful years, to
receive any impressions sufficiently deep to penetrate to the root of
his art. There is some evidence to show that Titian, deeply impressed
with the highest manifestations of the Florentine and Umbro-Florentine
art transplanted to Rome, considered that his work had improved after
the visit of 1545-1546. If there was such improvement--and certainly in
the ultimate phases of his practice there will be evident in some ways
a wider view, a higher grasp of essentials, a more responsive
sensitiveness in the conceiving anew of the great sacred subjects--it
must have come, not from any effort to assimilate the manner or to
assume the standpoint which had obtained in Rome, but from the closer
contact with a world which at its centre was beginning to take a deeper,
a more solemn and gloomy view of religion and life. It should not be
forgotten that this was the year when the great Council of Trent first
met, and that during the next twenty years or more the whole of Italy,
nay, the whole of the Catholic world, was overshadowed by its
deliberations.

Titian's friend and patron of that time, Guidobaldo II., Duke of Urbino,
had at first opposed Titian's visit to the Roman court, striving to
reserve to himself the services of the Venetian master until such time
as he should have carried out for him the commissions with which he was
charged. Yielding, however, to the inevitable, and yielding, too, with a
good grace, he himself escorted his favourite with his son Orazio from
Venice through Ferrara to Pesaro, and having detained him a short while
there, granted him an escort through the Papal States to Rome. There he
was well received by the Farnese Pope, and with much cordiality by
Cardinal Bembo. Rooms were accorded to him in the Belvedere section of
the Vatican Palace, and there no doubt he painted the unfinished
portrait-group _Paul III. with Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio