portrait, may perhaps be left to the master. He vindicates himself more
completely than in any other passage of the work when he depicts the
youthful, supple form of the Venetian courtesan, as in a merely passive
pose she personates the goddess whose insignificant votary she really
is. It cannot be denied that he touches here the lowest level reached by
him in such delineations. What offends in this _Venus with the Organ
Player_, or rather _Ottavio Farnese with his Beloved_, is that its
informing sentiment is not love, or indeed any community of sentiment,
but an ostentatious pride in the possession of covetable beauty subdued
like that of Danaë herself by gold.

If we are to assume with Crowe and Cavalcaselle that the single figure
_Ecce Homo_ of the Prado Gallery was the piece taken by the master to
Charles V. when, at the bidding of the Emperor, he journeyed to
Augsburg, we can only conclude that his design was carried out by pupils
or assistants. The execution is not such as we can ascribe to the brush
which is so shortly to realise for the monarch a group of masterpieces.

It was in January 1548 that Titian set forth to obey the command of the
Emperor, "per far qualche opera," as Count Girolamo della Torre has it
in a letter of recommendation given to Titian for the Cardinal of Trent
at Augsburg. It is significant to find the writer mentioning the
painter, not by any of the styles and titles which he had a right to
bear, especially at the court of Charles V., but extolling him as
"Messer Titiano Pittore et il primo huomo della Christianita."[40]

It might be imagined that it would be a terrible wrench for Titian, at
the age of seventy, to transplant himself suddenly, and for the first
time, into a foreign land. But then he was not as other men of seventy
are. The final years of his unexampled career will conclusively show