While Titian was executing portraits of the Doges, of Aretino and of Isabella of Portugal, and of himself and his daughter Lavinia, he was also striking out a new line in the ceiling pictures for the Church of San Spirito, which have since been transferred to the Salute. Though painted before his journey to Rome, it may be suspected that he had Michelangelo's work in the Sixtine Chapel in mind, and that he was setting himself the task of bold foreshortening and technical problems. The daring of the conception is great, yet we feel sure that this is not Titian's element; his figures in violent movement give a vivid idea of strength and muscular force, but fail both in grace and drawing, and though the colour and light and shade distract our attention from defects of form, he does not possess that mastery over the flowing silhouette which Tintoretto attained. It was in 1543 that his relations with the Farnese, whose young cardinal he had been painting, drew him at last to Rome. Leo X. had tried to attract him there without success, but now at sixty-eight he found himself as far on the road as Urbino. His son Orazio was with him, and Duke Guidobaldo was himself his escort, and sent him on with a band of men-at-arms from Pesaro. He was received in Rome by Cardinal Bembo; Paul III. gave him a cordial welcome and Vasari was appointed his cicerone. It is interesting to inquire what impression Rome, with its treasures of antique statuary and contemporary painting, made upon Titian. "He is filled with wonder and glad that he came," writes Bembo. In a letter to Aretino he regrets that he had not come before. He stayed eight months in Rome, and was made a Roman citizen. He visits the Stanze of Raphael in company with Sebastian del Piombo, and Michelangelo comes to see him at his lodgings, and he receives a long letter from Aretino advising him to compare Michelangelo with Raphael, and Sansovino and Bramante with the sculptors and architects of antiquity. Titian was well established in his own style, and was received as the creator of acknowledged masterpieces, and he never painted a more magnificent portrait-piece than that of Paul III., the peevish old Pope, ailing and humorous, suspicious of the two nephews who are painted with him, and who he guessed to be conspiring against him. The characteristic attitude of the old man of eighty, bent down in his chair, his quick, irritable glance, the steady, determined gaze of the cardinal, the obsequious attitude and weak, wily face of Ottavio Farnese are all immortalised in a broader, more careless technique than Titian has hitherto used. Though he does not seem to have been directly influenced by all he saw in Rome, we undoubtedly find a change coming over his work between 1540 and 1550, which may be in part ascribed to a widening of his artistic horizon and a consciousness of what others were doing, both around him and abroad. In its whole handling and character his late is different from his early manner.