retained and betrayed its immemorial frailties and misgivings. Lotto died in 1556, having widely diffused his sensitive art through the Marca and Lombardy. [Illustration: FIG. 281. Lorenzo Lotto. The Marriage Yoke.—_Madrid._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 282. Moretto of Brescia. Madonna with St. Nicholas.—_Brescia._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 283. Correggio. Detail of Ceiling.—_Convent of S. Paolo, Parma._ ] It is significantly the provincial painters and not the born Venetians who indulge these quite feminine refinements of sensibility. Such a one is Moretto of Brescia, born in 1498 and active until 1555. Although closely in touch with Palma and Titian, he avoids their positive color and dreams his pictures in delicate harmonies of silver and blue. There is a morning coolness about them which anticipates certain perfections of early Velasquez and even of the figure painting of Corot. He is a distinguished spirit but an anomaly in the age of Aretino. Milton would have understood him. In portraiture, as in the richly clad nobleman of the National Gallery, he forces the note of picturesqueness to restlessness. In such religious pictures as the Madonna in Glory, (1540), in San Giorgio Maggiore, at Verona, or in the Madonna with St. Nicholas, at Brescia, (1539), Figure 282, he shows an ecstatic lyrical feeling, and finds the free and florid compositional forms to express it. It has an informality which Titian would never have permitted himself at this moment. [Illustration: FIG. 284. Correggio. St. Augustine. Fresco. Toschi’s Copy.—_Cathedral, Parma._ ]