Vasari mentions, as executed by Titian for the court of Urbino, portraits of Popes Sixtus IV., Julius II., and Paul III.; of Charles V., Francis I., Sultan Solyman, and the Cardinal of Lorraine. I have not succeeded in tracing any of these with certainty, but two half-lengths of beautiful women, added to the list by Ticozzi, may probably be the Flora[*235] now in the Uffizi Gallery, and the Bella in the Pitti Palace: their features exhibit considerable analogy with each other, and with the former of two pictures we are now to describe. In the last number of the Appendix we shall rectify various errors regarding Titian's two celebrated Venuses in the Tribune at Florence. One of them, painted for Guidobaldo II., has no proper right to that title, being correctly called in the old Urbino inventories, "a naked woman lying." She is stretched at full length along a bed, on which is a linen sheet, with a green curtain above. A tiny spaniel crouches at her feet, and two waiting-maids are searching in a chest near an open balcony, for garments wherewith to veil her all-exposed charms. The languor of her eye, the listless attitudes into which her limbs have dropped, personify voluptuousness, and express a mind quietly gloating over the past. A certain harmony and warmth of tone, fused throughout the vast surface of delicate flesh-tints and snowy linen, over which broad daylight streams without shadow, are worthy of our highest admiration; and the relief given to the figure, with little aid from the chiaroscuro, is probably unrivalled. The companion picture, which was not, however, executed for Urbino, represents an equally nude figure on a couch of purple damask, near a balcony opening upon a distant landscape. The boy of love, archly toying upon her bosom, decides the subject to be Venus; and her glowing eye-ball expresses the ardour that thrills through her veins. The full and solid flesh is true to those developed forms which, still characterising the women about Treviso, formed the standard of female perfection in Titian's studio; and although the skill with which they undulate, softened by chiaroscuro, demands all praise, there may yet be some who, dissenting from such an ideal of beauty, wish this mortal mould had been refined into the symmetry of that "perfect goddess-ship" which close by "loves in stone." Having thus noticed these nudities, it may be well to add, that the shameless Aretino, while boasting of his own unrestrained debaucheries, bears testimony to the purity of Titian's morals, and the habitual control under which his passions were maintained. [Footnote *235: It seems unlikely that the _Flora_ was ever in Urbino. At any rate, in the seventeenth century it was in the collection of the Spanish ambassador at Amsterdam (cf. GRONAU, _op. cit._, p. 289).]