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Petrarch proceeds to mention that he has also known sculptors, and asserts their inferiority to painters in modern times. Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle reject, not without reason, as it seems to me, the tradition that Simone painted the frescoes of S. Ranieri in the Campo Santo at Pisa. See vol. ii. p. 83. What remains of his work at Pisa is an altar-piece in S. Caterina.
Go to Crowe and Cavalcaselle and be wise. Parables! I like the word to go round about the thing, whose heart I cannot hit with my small-arm, marking the goodly masses and unobtrusive meek beauties of it, and longing for them in vain. No amount of dissecting shall reveal the core of Sandro's Venus.
This was once the luxurious cardinal's bath-room, and was beautifully painted by Raphael in fresco, with mythological subjects. In 1835, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Passavant saw it as it had originally been, with frescoes still beautiful, though much damaged, and the marble bath still in its place in a niche painted with river gods.
It appears to the writer that this masterpiece of colour and reposeful charm, with its wonderful gleams of orange, pale turquoise, red, blue, and golden white, with its early signature, "Ticianus F.," should be placed not later than this period. Crowe and Cavalcaselle assign it to the year 1530, and hold it to be the Madonna with St.
Crowe and Cavalcaselle, however, adduce strong evidence to prove that Titian was busy in Venice for Federigo Gonzaga at the time of the Emperor's first visit, and that he only proceeded to Bologna in July to paint for the Marquess of Mantua the portrait of a Bolognese beauty, La Cornelia, the lady-in-waiting of the Countess Pepoli, whom Covas, the all-powerful political secretary of Charles the Fifth, had seen and admired at the splendid entertainments given by the Pepoli to the Emperor.
Now it is notorious that the results at which these critics arrived are often widely divergent, but a great deal too much has been made of the differences and not enough of the points of agreement. As a matter of fact, Morelli only questions three of the thirteen Giorgiones accepted definitely by Crowe and Cavalcaselle. Uffizi Gallery, Florence
As to which of these two artists it is, opinions so far as any have been published are divided. Yet Dr. Gronau, who claims it for Titian, admits in the same breath that the hand is the same as that which painted the Cobham Hall picture and the Pitti "Concert," a judgment in which I fully concur. Dr. Bode labels it "Art des Giorgione." Finally, Mr. Berenson, with rare insight proclaimed the conception and the spirit of the picture to be Giorgione's. But he asserts that the execution is not fine enough to be the master's own, and would rank it with the "Judith" at St. Petersburg in the category of contemporary copies after lost originals. This view is apparently based on the dangerous maxim that where the execution of a picture is inferior to the conception, the work is presumably a copy. But two points must be borne in mind, the actual condition of the picture, and the character of the artist who painted it. Mr. Berenson has himself pointed out elsewhere that Giorgione, "while always supreme in his conceptions, did not live long enough to acquire a perfection of draughtsmanship and chiaroscuro equally supreme, and that, consequently, there is not a single universally accepted work of his which is absolutely free from the reproaches of the academic pedant." Secondly, the surface of this portrait has lost its original glow through cleaning, and has suffered other damage, which actually debarred Crowe and Cavalcaselle (who saw the picture in 1877) from pronouncing definitely upon the authorship. The eyes and flesh, they say, were daubed over, the hair was new, the colour modern. A good deal of this "restoration" has since been removed, but the present appearance of the panel bears witness to the harsh treatment suffered years ago. Nevertheless, the original work is before us, and not a copy of a lost original, and Mr. Berenson's enthusiastic praise ought to be lavished on the actual picture as it must have appeared in all its freshness and purity. "Je n'hésiterais pas," he declares, "
Without precisely calling Titian to account in set terms, his biographers Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and above all M. Georges Lafenestre in La Vie et L'Oeuvre du Titien, have relentlessly raked up Aretino's past before he came together with the Cadorine, and as pitilessly laid bare that organised system of professional sycophancy, adulation, scurrilous libel, and blackmail, which was the foundation and the backbone of his life of outward pomp and luxurious ease at Venice.
Crowe and Cavalcaselle have placed about the year 1555 the extravagantly lauded St. John the Baptist in the Desert, once in the church of S.M. Maria Maggiore at Venice, and now in the Accademia there.
Of this last a copy exists in the Pitti Gallery which Crowe and Cavalcaselle have ascribed to Dosso Dossi, but the original is nowhere to be traced. The Ferrarese ruler is, in this last canvas, depicted as a man of forty or upwards, of resolute and somewhat careworn aspect.
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