marching with song and laughter, seems to people that golden country-side with fit inhabitants. The careless satyrs and little merry, goat-legged fauns shock us no more than a herd of forest ponies, tossing their manes and dashing along for love of life and movement.[3] Yet almost before this series was put in place Titian was showing the diversity of his genius by the "Deposition," now in the Louvre, which was painted at the instance of the Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua and nephew of Alfonso d'Este. Here he makes a great step in the use of chiaroscuro. While it is satisfying in balance and sweeping rhythm, and by the way in which every line follows and intensifies the helpless, slackened lines of the dead Body, it escapes Raphael's academic treatment of the same subject. Its splendid colours are not noisy; they merge into a scene of solemn pathos and tragedy. The scene has a simplicity and unity in its passion, and what above all gives it its intense power is the way in which the flaming hues are absorbed into the twilight shadows. The dark heads stand out against the dying sunset, the pallor of the dead is half veiled by the falling night. It is a picture which has the emotional beauty of a scene in nature, and makes a profound impression by its depth and mystery. This same solemnity and gravity temper the brilliant colouring of the great altarpiece painted for the Pesaro family in the Frari. Columns rise like great tree-trunks, light and air play through the clouds seen between them. The grouping is a new experiment, but the way in which the Mother and Child, though placed quite at one side of the picture, are focussed as the centre of interest, by the converging lines, diagonal on the one hand and straight on the other, crowns it with success. The scheme of colour brings the two figures into high relief, while St. Francis and the family of the donor are subordinated to rich, deep tints. Titian has abandoned, more completely than ever before, any attempt to invest the Child with supernatural majesty. He is a delightful, spoiled baby, fully aware of his sovereignty over his mother, pretending to take no notice of the kneeling suppliants, but occupying himself in making a tent over his head out of her veil. The "Madonna in Glory with six Saints" of the Vatican is another example of the rich and "smouldering" colour in which Titian was now creating his great altarpieces, kneading his pigments into a quality, a solidity, which gives reality without heaviness, and finishing with that fine-grained texture which makes his flesh look like marble endowed with life.