Titian as could a Florentine, ill at ease in the neighbourhood of
Leonardo and Michelangelo. As an artist he was, it is true, not endowed
with the profoundest sense for the significant, yet within the sphere of
common humanity who has produced anything more genial than his "Portrait
of a Lady"--probably his wife--with a Petrarch in her hands? Where out
of Venetia can we find portraits so simple, so frank, and yet so
interpretive as his "Sculptor," or as his various portraits of
himself--these, by the way, an autobiography as complete as any in
existence, and tragic as few? Almost Venetian again is his "St. James"
caressing children, a work of the sweetest feeling. Even in colour
effect, and technique, how singularly close to the best Venetian
painting in his "Dispute about the Trinity"--what blacks and whites,
what greys and purplish browns! And in addition, tactile values peculiar
to Florence--what a back St. Sebastian's! But in a work of scarcely less
technical merit, the "Madonna of the Harpies," we already feel the man
not striving to get the utmost out of himself, but panting for the grand
and magnificent. Even here, he remains almost a great artist, because
his natural robustness comes to his rescue; but the "Madonna" is too
obviously statuesque, and, good saints, pray why all these draperies?

The obviously statuesque and draperies were Andrea's devices for keeping
his head above water in the rising tide of the Michelangelesque. As you
glance in sequence at the Annunziata frescoes, on the whole so full of
vivacity, gaiety, and genuine delight in life, you see from one fresco
to another the increased attention given to draperies. In the Scalzo
series, otherwise masterpieces of tactile values, the draperies do their
utmost to smother the figures. Most of these paintings are closed in
with ponderous forms which have no other purpose than to serve as a
frame, and as clothes-horses for draperies: witness the scene of
Zacharias in the temple, wherein none of the bystanders dare move for