art in its prime has brought forth. Of extraordinary majesty and beauty
is the landscape, with its mighty trees growing out of the abrupt
mountain slope, close to the naked rock.

In the autumn of 1564 we actually find the venerable master, then about
eighty-seven years of age, taking a journey to Brescia in connection
with an important commission given to him for the decoration of the
great hall in the Palazzo Pubblico at Brescia, to which the Vicentine
artist Righetto had supplied the ceiling, and Palladio had added columns
and interior wall-decorations. The three great ceiling-pictures, which
were afterwards, as a consequence of the contract then entered upon,
executed by the master, or rather by his assistants, endured only until
1575, when in the penultimate year of Titian's life they perished in a
great fire.

The correspondence shows that the vast _Last Supper_ painted for the
Refectory of the Escorial, and still to be found there, was finished in
October 1564, and that there was much haggling and finessing on the part
of the artist before it was despatched to Spain, the object being to
secure payment of the arrears of pension still withheld by the Milanese
officials. When the huge work did arrive at the Escorial the monks
perpetrated upon it one of those acts of vandalism of which Titian was
in more than one instance the victim. Finding that the picture would not
fit the particular wall of their refectory for which it had been
destined, they ruthlessly cut it down, slicing off a large piece of the
upper part, and throwing the composition out of balance by the
mutilation of the architectural background.

[Illustration: _St. Jerome in the Desert. Gallery of the Brera, Milan.
From a Photograph by Anderson_.]