Madonnas and saints are usually built into close-packed pyramids, but in the "Repose in Egypt," now in the Ambrosiana, Milan, his arrangement comes very close to Palma and Lotto. The beautiful Mother and Child, the attendants, above all the St. Joseph, resting, head on hand, at the Virgin's feet and gazing in rapt adoration on the Child, are examples of the true Venetian manner, while the exquisite landscape behind them, and the vigorously drawn tree under which they recline, show Bassano true to his passion for nature. Hampton Court is rich in his pictures. "The Adoration of the Shepherds," in which the pillars rise behind the sacred group, is an exercise in the manner of Titian's Frari altarpiece. His portraits are fine and sympathetic, but hardly any of them are signed or can be dated. His own is in the Uffizi, and there is a splendid "Old Man" at Buda-Pesth. Ariosto and Tasso, Sebastian Venier, and many other distinguished men were among his sitters; most of them are in half-length with three-quarter heads. The National Gallery possesses a singularly attractive one of a young man with a sensitive, acute countenance, robed in dignified, picturesque black, relieved by an embroidered linen collar. He stands by the sort of square window, opening on a distant landscape, of which Tintoretto and Lotto so often made use, in front of which a golden vase, holding a branch of olive, catches the rays of light. Bassano has no great power of design, and his knowledge of the nude seems to have been small, but his brushwork is facile, and his colour leaps out with a vivid beauty which obliterates other shortcomings. PRINCIPAL WORKS