"We may suppose," says Donald G. Mitchell, "that a vision of Lavinia--long gone out of his household--of Cecilia, still longer gone--of Violante, a memory of his young days--may have flitted on his mind as he traced the last womanly face he was to paint." "On marble plinths at the sides of the niche are statues of Moses and the Hellespontic Sibyl, and on a scutcheon at the Sibyl's feet we see the arms of Titian, a set square sable on a field argent, beneath the double eagle on a field or. A small tablet leaning against the scutcheon contains the defaced portraits of Titian and his son Orazio, kneeling before a diminutive group of the 'Christ of Pity.'... It is truly surprising," says Crowe, "that a man so far advanced in years should have had the power to put together a composition so perfect in line, so elevated in thought, or so tragic in expression.... We see the traces of a brush manipulated by one whose hand never grew weary, and never learned to tremble.... In the group of the Virgin and Christ--a group full of the deepest and truest feeling--there lies a grandeur comparable in one sense with that which strikes us in the 'Pietà' of Michael Angelo. For the sublime conventionalism by which Buonarotti carries us into a preternatural atmosphere, Titian substitutes a depth of passion almost equally sublime, and the more real as it is enhanced by color." Titian did not live to complete this work, which was done by his pupil, Palma Giovine, who placed conspicuously upon it this touching inscription: "That which Titian left unfinished, Palma reverently completed, and dedicated the work to God." Age did not spoil the skill of the master. Aretino said, on looking at a portrait of a daughter of the rich Strozzio, "If I were a painter, I should die of despair.... But certain it is that Titian's pencil has waited on Titian's old age to perform its miracles." Tullia said, "I hold Titian to be not a painter--his creations not art, but his works to be miracles, and I think that his pigments must be composed of that wonderful herb which made Glaucus a god when he partook of it; since his portraits make upon me the impression of something divine, and, as heaven is the paradise of the soul, so God has transfused into Titian's colors the paradise of our bodies." In the summer of this year, 1576, Venice was stricken by a plague which destroyed fifty thousand people out of one hundred and ninety thousand; more than a quarter of the whole population. There was a general panic, the sick were left to die unattended, and a law was passed that no victims of the scourge should be buried in the churches.