Farnese_, which has been already described, and with it other pieces of
the same type, and portraits of the Farnese family and circle now no
longer to be traced. Vasari, well pleased no doubt to renew his
acquaintance with the acknowledged head of the contemporary Venetian
painters, acted as his cicerone in the visits to the antiquities of
Rome, to the statues and art-treasures of the Vatican, while Titian's
fellow-citizen Sebastiano del Piombo was in his company when he studied
the Stanze of Raphael.

It was but three years since Michelangelo's _Last Judgment_ had been
uncovered in the Sixtine, and it would have been in the highest degree
interesting to read his comments on this gigantic performance, towards
which it was so little likely that his sympathies would spontaneously go
out. Memorable is the visit paid by Buonarroti, with an unwonted regard
for ceremonious courtesy, to Titian in his apartments at the Belvedere,
as it is recalled by Vasari with that naïve touch, that power of
suggestion, which gives such delightful colour to his unstudied prose.
No _Imaginary Conversation_ among those that Walter Savage Landor has
devised equals in significance this meeting of the two greatest masters
then living, simply as it is sketched in by the Aretine biographer. The
noble Venetian representing the alternating radiance and gloom of earth,
its fairest pages as they unfold themselves, the joys and sorrows, the
teeming life of humanity; the mighty Florentine disdainful of the world,
its colours, its pulsations, its pomps and vanities, incurious of
mankind save in its great symbolical figures, soaring like the solitary
eagle into an atmosphere of his own where the dejected beholder can
scarce breathe, and, sick at heart, oppressed with awe, lags far behind!

[Illustration: _Pope Paul III. with Cardinal Farnese and Ottavio
Farnese. Naples Gallery. From a Photograph by E. Alinari._]