eighty-nine years old, brush in hand. The friends had much converse together of their art and of the master’s works. He died in 1576, wanting but one year to complete his century.[75] With Titian, Venetian painting reached its meridian glory. Inspiration and technical mastery went hand in hand. He has been defined as the painter _par excellence_ as distinguished from the draughtsman who colours. In his new manner, that became absolute painting which in the Bellini and Carpaccio was but coloured drawing. Palma Vecchio (Jacopo Negretti), 1480-1528, Titian’s contemporary, is the third of the dominant sixteenth-century painters. Without the finely endowed nature of his two fellows, he works with much energy and freshness, is masterly in his use of colour, and has a breadth and serenity of style which make of him a great, but not a paramount artist. The well-known St Barbara in S. Maria Formosa is the most grandiose and majestic female figure in Venetian art. The recently acquired Santa Conversazione, No. 147 in the Accademia, is an excellent example of a mode of composition which Palma brought to its ultimate form. He was the creator of that opulent type of female beauty with “marmoreal neck and bosom uberous” so characteristic of Venetian art. [Illustration: ACCADEMIA--THE DEAD CHRIST BY TITIAN] Sebastiano del Piombo (Sebastiano Luciani), 1485-1547, a pupil of Giorgione, was a younger painter of the school, a competent but not very gifted interpreter of the prevalent type of sensuous beauty. The painting on the high altar in S. Giov. Crisostomo is a fine example of his early style and in Vasari’s time was attributed to Giorgione. There is an early Pietà in Lady Layard’s collection and a doubtful Visitation in the Accademia. Early in his career he went to Rome and won the friendship of Raphael and Michel Angelo by whom his later style was profoundly influenced. This period of his activity belongs to Roman rather than to Venetian art. Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556), pupil of Alvise Vivarini, is a highly gifted but unequal painter, who was working in Venice early in the sixteenth century. He is one of the more original of the contemporaries of Titian. Much attention has recently been given to this artist, especially to his portrait work, by Mr Berenson, who gives him high, but perhaps somewhat exaggerated praise, as the first painter who sought to interpret the varying moods of the individual human soul; as an artist of penetrating sympathy and charity, preserving for us in his portraits the lineaments of the more gentle and refined of his contemporaries. These, however, must be sought anywhere but in Venice. One fine altar-piece, painted in the maturity of his powers, may be seen in the Carmine, St Nicholas in Glory, a work of real poetic feeling; another, better preserved, the Apotheosis of S. Antonino, is in S. Zanipolo. A later work, the Virgin and Child with Saints, is in S. Giacomo dall’ Orio.