2i8 TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART 



joiced in and to be represented for its own 

 sake, worthy to come into art almost if not 

 wholly independently of figures, not as a mere 

 background to them, a subordinate element 

 only, and only formally treated. He hardly 

 quite passes the boundary and becomes in any 

 considerable part of his work a landscape 

 painter ; but he is a keenly observant and sym- 

 pathetic painter of landscape. 



His trees are remarkable, not only for the 

 rendering of stem and branch and leafage, but 

 because in size and tone and value, they take 

 their right place in the landscape. We are far 

 away, in his pictures, from the formal toy-trees 

 of the fifteenth-century Italians ; and while we 

 feel Botticelli to have been reaching after the 

 truth, we are ready to declare that Titian has 

 attained it. And a large measure of truth he 

 did, indeed, attain. 



This is evinced, in such pictures of his, 

 in our National Gallery, as ''Bacchus and 

 Ariadne," "Noli me Tangere," and "The 

 Repose," though they also show that he would 

 not sacrifice tone and harmonious colour to the 

 literal rendering of fact. Still Ruskin can 

 praise the botanical accuracy of the flowers in 



