Until the death of Giovanni Bellini, in 1515, Titian seems a little hampered by his example as by that of Giorgione. Then, as if relieved of a restraint, Titian pursues his own aims. His design, in such great altar-backs as the Assumption and the Madonna of the Pesaro family, doubles its breadth and energy. His mythologies, in the bacchanals for the Alabaster Chamber of Alphonso d’Este, at Ferrara, are no longer pensive lyrics, but dithyrambs; primordial lyrics, for animation and power. The religious pictures, such as the noble Entombment in the Louvre, are no longer insistently pathetic. Subjective poetry is everywhere giving way to masculine assertion of the splendor of love, motherhood, comradeship. And these great objective commonplaces, which were the very staple in their day of Greek Epic and Sculpture, receive in Titian their finest modern embodiment. His new energy requires a changed color. All the hues are brighter and more resonant. Their harmonies no longer require the bond of deep shadow, but are positive and established at the middle of the color scale, where color is most itself. If the music of Giorgione was that of vibrating lute strings, that of Titian has the clarity and clangor of exquisitely harmonized woodwind and brass. [Illustration: FIG. 270. Titian. Holy Family with Rabbit.—_London._ ] Before sounding this new music, Titian prudently secured the sinecure, a Commissionership of the Salt Taxes, which old Giovanni Bellini had enjoyed. While scheming for it, he was designing also the most famous of his great altar-pieces, the Assumption, Figure 271. It was finished in 1518, set on the high altar of the Friar’s Church, whither it has lately returned. Titian adopts a form of composition which Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael had employed. The upper celestial tier is symmetrically arranged, almost in a domical way, the lower tier abounds in swinging turns and gestures, one carefully balancing the others. The forms are large and athletic, such as the Renaissance preferred, for greater gravity. Their weight is compensated by the ease with which they hold themselves and by the numerous floating and falling cherubs, playfully at home in their clouds, like so many celestial rose leaves for the crispness and lightness with which Titian’s brush has touched them in. [Illustration: FIG. 271. Titian. The Assumption.—_S. M. dei Frari._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 272. Titian. Pesaro Madonna.—_Frari._ ]