An importance to which it is surely not entitled in the life-work of the
master is given to the portrait of the Legate Beccadelli, executed in
the month of July 1552, and included among the real and fancied
masterpieces of the Tribuna in the Uffizi. To the writer it has always
appeared the most nearly tiresome and perfunctory of Titian's more
important works belonging to the same class. Perhaps the elaborate
legend inscribed on the paper held by the prelate, including the unusual
form of signature "Titianus Vecellius faciebat Venetiis MDLII, mense
Julii," may have been the cause that the canvas has attracted an undue
share of attention.[45] At p. 218 of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's second
volume we get, under date the 11th of October 1552, Titian's first
letter to Philip of Spain. There is mention in it of a _Queen of
Persia_, which the artist does not expressly declare to be his own work,
and of a _Landscape_ and _St. Margaret_ previously sent by Ambassador
Vargas ("... il Paesaggio et il ritratto di Sta. Margarita mandatovi per
avanti"). The comment of the biographers on this is that "for the first
time in the annals of Italian painting we hear of a picture which claims
to be nothing more than a landscape, etc." Remembering, however, that
when in 1574, at the end of his life, our master sent in to Philip's
secretary, Antonio Perez, a list of paintings delivered from time to
time, but not paid for, he described the _Venere del Pardo_, or _Jupiter
and Antiope_, as "La nuda con il paese con el satiro," would it not be
fair to assume that the description _Il Paesaggio et il ritratto di Sta.
Margarita_ means one and the same canvas--_The Figure of St. Margaret in
a Landscape_? Thus should we be relieved from the duty of searching
among the authentic works of the master of Cadore for a landscape pure
and simple, and in the process stumbling across a number of spurious and
doubtful things. The _St. Margaret_ is evidently the picture which,
having been many years at the Escorial, now hangs in the Prado Gallery.
Obscured and darkened though it is by the irreparable outrages of time,