monochromatic harmony of embrowned silver the canvas embodies more
absolutely than any other, save perhaps the final _Pietà_, the ideal of
tone-harmony towards which the master in his late time had been steadily
tending. Richness and brilliancy of local colour are subordinated, and
this time up to the point of effacement, to this luminous monotone, so
mysteriously effective in the hands of a master such as Titian. In the
solemn twilight which descends from the heavens, just faintly flushed
with rose, an amorous shepherd, flower-crowned, pipes to a nude nymph,
who, half-won by the appealing strain, turns her head as she lies
luxuriously extended on a wild beast's hide, covering the grassy knoll;
in the distance a strayed goat browses on the leafage of a projecting
branch. It may not be concealed that a note of ardent sensuousness still
makes itself felt, as it does in most of the later pieces of the same
class. But here, transfigured by a freshness of poetic inspiration
hardly to be traced in the master's work in pieces of this order, since
those early Giorgionesque days when the sixteenth century was in its
youth, it offends no more than does an idyll of Theocritus. Since the
_Three Ages_ of Bridgewater House, divided from the _Nymph and Shepherd_
by nearly seventy years of life and labour, Titian had produced nothing
which, apart from the question of technical execution, might so nearly
be paralleled with that exquisite pastoral. The early _poesia_ gives,
wrapped in clear even daylight, the perfect moment of trusting,
satisfied love; the late one, with less purity, but, strange to say,
with a higher passion, renders, beautified by an evening light more
solemn and suggestive, the divine ardours fanned by solitude and
opportunity.

And now we come to the _Pietà_,[62] which so nobly and appropriately
closes a career unexampled for duration and sustained achievement.
Titian had bargained with the Franciscan monks of the Frari, which