[Illustration: _Francis the First. Louvre. From a Photograph by Neurdein_.]
[Illustration: _Portrait of a Nobleman. Pitti Palace, Florence. From a Photograph by E. Alinari_.]
It may be convenient to mention here one of the most magnificent among the male portraits of Titian, the _Young Nobleman_ in the Sala di Marte of the Pitti Gallery, although its exact place in the middle time of the artist it is, failing all data on the point, not easy to determine. At Florence there has somehow been attached to it the curious name _Howard duca di Norfolk_,[13] but upon what grounds, if any, the writer is unable to state. The master of Cadore never painted a head more finely or with a more exquisite finesse, never more happily characterised a face, than that of this resolute, self-contained young patrician with the curly chestnut hair and the short, fine beard and moustache--a personage high of rank, doubtless, notwithstanding the studied simplicity of his dress. Because we know nothing of the sitter, and there is in his pose and general aspect nothing sensational, this masterpiece is, if not precisely not less celebrated among connoisseurs, at any rate less popular with the larger public, than it deserves to be.[14]
[Illustration: _S. Giovanni Elemosinario giving Alms. In the Church of that name at Venice. From a Photograph by Naya._]
The noble altar-piece in the church of S. Giovanni Elemosinario at Venice showing the saint of that name enthroned, and giving alms to a beggar, belongs to the close of 1533 or thereabouts, since the high-altar was finished in the month of October of that year. According to Vasari, it must be regarded as having served above all to assert once for all the supremacy of Titian over Pordenone, whose friends had obtained for him the commission to paint in competition with the Cadorine an altar-piece for one of the apsidal chapels of the church, where, indeed, his work is still to be seen.[15] Titian's canvas, like most of the great altar-pieces of the middle time, was originally arched at the top; but the vandalism of a subsequent epoch has, as in the case of the _Madonna di S. Niccola_, now in the Vatican, made of this arch a square, thereby greatly impairing the majesty of the general effect. Titian here solves the problem of combining the strong and simple decorative aspect demanded by the position of the work as the central feature of a small church, with the utmost pathos and dignity, thus doing incomparably in his own way--the way of the colourist and the warm, the essentially human realist--what Michelangelo had, soaring high above earth, accomplished with unapproachable sublimity in the _Prophets_ and _Sibyls_ of the Sixtine Chapel.