In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariosto brought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_.[35] A greater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quarters been presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's career, when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from being as close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised that in the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, we have proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet who infused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the Italian Renaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, in their unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these very pictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any process of cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from a broad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate and unbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relation to Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorous eccentricity. [Illustration: _The Worship of Venus. Prado Gallery, Madrid. From a Photograph by Braun, Clément, & Cie_.] In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behind already the fresh morning of Titian's genius, represented by the Giorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching its bright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without some evaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_ might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour of Venus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, a renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, but by one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of the author's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of the Praxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been named the "Townley Venus" and the "Vénus d'Arles"--myriads of Loves sport, kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of them shooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answer is made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, the life, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been the splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner) dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of the angelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly beings than their predecessors had imagined.