wrong to the "many noble craftsmen" then practising in his city and
dominion. More probably, however, Cosimo's hatred and contempt of his
father's minion Aretino, whose portrait by Titian he had condescended to
retain, yet declined to acknowledge, impelled him to show something less
than favour to the man who was known to be the closest friend and
intimate of this self-styled "Scourge of Princes."

Crowe and Cavalcaselle have placed about the year 1555 the extravagantly
lauded _St. John the Baptist in the Desert_, once in the church of S.M.
Maria Maggiore at Venice, and now in the Accademia there. To the writer
it appears that it would best come in at this stage--that is to say in
or about 1545--not only because the firm close handling in the nude
would be less explicable ten years later on, but because the conception
of the majestic St. John is for once not pictorial but purely
sculptural. Leaving Rome, and immediately afterwards coming into contact
for the first time with the wonders of the earlier Florentine art,
Titian might well have conceived, might well have painted thus. Strange
to say, the influence is not that of Michelangelo, but, unless the
writer is greatly deceived, that of Donatello, whose noble ascetic type
of the _Precursor_ is here modernised, and in the process deprived of
some of its austerity. The glorious mountain landscape, with its
brawling stream, fresher and truer than any torrent of Ruysdael's, is
all Titian. It makes the striking figure of St. John, for all its
majesty, appear not a little artificial.

The little town of Serravalle, still so captivatingly Venetian in its
general aspect, holds one of the most magnificent works of Titian's late
time, a vast _Virgin and Child with St. Peter and St. Andrew_. This
hangs--or did when last seen by the writer--in the choir of the Church
of St. Andrew; there is evidence in Titian's correspondence that it was