which for more than two hundred years was in the Church of Santa Maria
de' Frari. When Napoleon appointed a commission to select the paintings
in Venice that were considered best worth preserving and protecting, and
take them to the Belle d' Arte, this picture was included in the list. It
was then removed from its place, where it had so long hung, above the
grave of the man who executed it.

I have several large photographs of this picture, showing different
portions of it. One of these pictures reveals simply the form of the
Virgin. She rises from the earth, caught up in the clouds, the drapery
streaming in soft folds, and on the upturned face is a look of love and
tenderness and trust, combined with womanly strength, that hushes us into
tears.

Surely there is an upward law of gravitation as well as a gravitation
that pulls things down. Titian has shown us this. And as he drew over and
over again in his pictures the forms and faces of the men and women he
knew, so I imagine that this woman was a woman he knew and loved. She is
not a far-off, tenuous creature, born of dreams: she is a woman who has
lived, suffered, felt, mayhap erred, and now turns to a Power, not
herself, eternal in the heavens. Into this picture the artist infused his
own exalted spirit, for the mood we behold manifest in others is usually
but the reflection of our own spirit.

In some far-off eon, ere this earth-journey began, some woman looked at
me that way once, just as Titian has this woman look, with the same
melting eyes and half-parted lips, and it made an impression on my soul
that subsequent incarnations have not effaced.

I bought the photograph in Venice, at Ongania's, and paid three dollars