An over-spiritual observer might ask, Why are the Apostles so jubilant at losing their beloved Mistress? Only a little earlier, Giovanni Bellini, who painted the theme for San Pietro Martire at Murano, invested his witnesses with pathos, silence, wonder and awe. In comparison Titian is obvious, and barely reverent. He thinks of nothing but that this is Mary’s moment of highest glory, so of course her friends cheer boisterously as they wave her off heavenwards. Titian’s mind does not work in half tones of sensibility, yet he is honestly religious in his own way. The Lord’s people are good enough for him, and he likes them not in the hush of devotion but in the expansive moments of action. The attitude is operatic. Choruses have no business with overtones, all voices shall be _robusto_. What infallible taste he shows along these simple lines! There is no smallness, no mere floridness of utterance, no hint of over-emphasis. Such art is the despair of the modern artist. He cannot feel so simply. The great enduring commonplaces are denied to his more complicated genius. Perhaps Titian is even more himself in the Madonna of the Pesaro Family, Figure 272, which was in hand from 1519 to 1526. For animation he sets the throne of Mary to the right, and carries splendid columns back in depth. He gives to every gesture of saint or donor a balancing relation to the gracious curve of the body of the Queen of Heaven. He renews the Giorgionesque mystery in the portraits of children, adds picturesque accessories of armor, velvet, and silken banner. The picture is as rich as it is logical and monumental, as varied in character as it is unified in mood. It is only by chance that it stands almost over Titian’s tomb, and yet it would have been hard to find a picture that better represents both his more intimate and his more objective perfections. Even such masterpieces as the Madonna with six Saints in the Vatican (1523), and the lost Slaying of Saint Peter Martyr (before 1530), which enjoyed three centuries of praise, seem a little set and over-reasonable in comparison.