It is very different with the _Trinity_, called in Spain _La Gloria_,
and now No. 462 in the same gallery. Though the master must have been
hampered by the express command that the Emperor should be portrayed as
newly arisen from the grave and adoring the _Trinity_ in an agony of
prayer, and with him the deceased Empress Isabel, Queen Mary of Hungary,
and Prince Philip, also as suppliants, he succeeded in bringing forth
not indeed a complete masterpiece, but a picture all aspiration and
fervent prayer--just the work to satisfy the yearnings of the man who,
once the mightiest, was then the loneliest and saddest of mortals on
earth. The crown and climax of the whole is the group of the Trinity
itself, awful in majesty, dazzling in the golden radiance of its
environment, and, beautifully linking it with mortality, the blue-robed
figure of the Virgin, who stands on a lower eminence of cloud as she
intercedes for the human race, towards whom her pitying gaze is
directed. It would be absurd to pretend that we have here a work
entitled, in virtue of the perfect achievement of all that has been
sought for, to rank with such earlier masterpieces as the _Assunta_ or
the _St. Peter Martyr_. Yet it represents in one way sacred art of a
higher, a more inspired order, and contains some pictorial
beauties--such as the great central group--of which Titian would not in
those earlier days have been equally capable.

There is another descent, though not so marked a one as in the case of
the _Danaë_, with the _Venus and Adonis_ painted for Philip, the new
King-Consort of England, and forwarded by the artist to London in the
autumn of 1554. That the picture now in the _Sala de la Reina Isabel_
at Madrid is this original is proved, in the first place, by the quality
of the flesh-painting, the silvery shimmer, the vibration of the whole,
the subordination of local colour to general tone, yet by no means to
the point of extinction--all these being distinctive qualities of this