La Vierge au Lapin. Louvre......................................... 87 St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in the Doge's Palace, Venice ............................................................ 89 The Madonna di Casa Pesaro. Church of S. Maria dei Frari, Venice... 93 Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican............................... 97 Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice........................ 99 THE EARLIER WORK OF TITIAN INTRODUCTION There is no greater name in Italian art--therefore no greater in art--than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the poet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than any one of these. Titian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, nor the most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, even of his time and country. Yet is it possible, remembering the _Entombment_ of the Louvre, the _Assunta_, the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, the _St. Peter Martyr_, to say that he has, take him all in all, been surpassed in this the highest branch of his art? Certainly nowhere else have the pomp and splendour of the painter's achievement at its apogee been so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly ever overstepping the bounds of nature. The sacred art of no other painter of the full sixteenth century--not even that of Raphael himself--has to an equal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of the world, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred passion must perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is not necessarily a distortion of truth.