finished in 1547, so that it must have been undertaken soon after the
return from Rome. In the distance between the two majestic figures of
the saints is a prospect of landscape with a lake, upon which Titian has
shown on a reduced scale Christ calling Peter and Andrew from their
nets; an undisguised adaptation this, by the veteran master, of the
divine Urbinate's _Miraculous Draught of Fishes_, but one which made of
the borrowed motive a new thing, no excrescence but an integral part of
the conception. In this great work, which to be more universally
celebrated requires only to be better known to those who do not come
within the narrow circle of students, there is evidence that while
Titian, after his stay at the Papal court, remained firm as a rock in
his style and general principles--luckily a Venetian and no
pseudo-Roman,--his imagination became more intense in its glow, gloomier
but grander, than it had been in middle age--his horizon altogether
vaster. To a grand if sometimes too unruffled placidity succeeded a
physical and psychical perturbation which belonged both to the man in
advanced years and to the particular moment in the century. Even in his
treatment of classic myth, of the nude in goddess and woman, there was,
as we shall see presently, a greater unrest and a more poignant
sensuality--there was evidence of a mind and temperament troubled anew
instead of being tranquillised by the oncoming of old age.

Are we to place here, as Crowe and Cavalcaselle do, the _Venus and
Cupid_ of the Tribuna and the _Venus with the Organ Player_ of the
Prado? The technical execution of these canvases, the treatment of
landscape in the former, would lead the writer to place them some years
farther on still in the _oeuvre_ of the master. There are, however,
certain reasons for following them in this chronological arrangement.
The _Venus and Cupid_ which hangs in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, as the
pendant to the more resplendent but more realistic _Venus of Urbino_, is