96 THE FINE ARTS. 
in Augsburg, and the emperor made him. a knight and count palatine. 
After his return to Venice, Titian painted the admirable picture of Peter 
the Martyr, which was carried off with several of Titian’s paintings to 
France, but was afterwards restored. Among these pictures was also the 
Christ crowned with Thorns from Milan (pl. 18, fig. 3), which was taken 
from the church of Maria delle Grazie and is now in the Florence Museum. 
Titian bestowed great pains on the execution of the landscapes in which 
he placed his figures, and indeed it was he who prepared the way for 
the great landscape painters who came after him. But his greatest 
eminence was in historical portraits and in characteristic heads generally. 
Titian studied the antique with great zeal, and we meet in several of 
his works with reminiscences of the Laocoon and of some ancient reliefs 
in the church of Maria dei Miracoli, which Rossi has declared to be 
works of Phidias himself. It is also well known that Titian afterwards 
became the great exemplar for the portraying of children, and that Poussin, 
the so-called Fiamingo, Algardi, and all who have rendered themselves 
eminent in this line, have made him their study, in order to master that 
expression of naive innocence and unassuming truth which constitutes its 
charm. Titian painted flesh with great skill. The gradation of his tints is 
so admirable that they can be distinguished only by comparing one with 
the other with the closest attention. Each one appears as flesh in itself, 
and the endless variety of all of them is subjected to the unity of one domi- 
nant tone. This is most conspicuous in his famous Venus in Florence, 
which, when the spectator stands close to it, seems to be painted with a 
single color, so that neither light nor shadow, so to speak, is discerned in it; 
but the further one recedes towards the proper point of view, the more 
everything appears rounded and seems to stand out from the level surface. 
Titian to the last remained like himself and was always great; although in 
his latest pictures, in place of that diluting and blending of the tints, we 
find the parts boldly delineated with a firm and masterly pencil. Titian 
died in the year 1576, of the plague, when 99 years old. 
Among the pupils of Titian and Giorgione we will mention first Sebas- 
tiano Veneziano, who afterwards received the office of attaching the leaden 
seals (piombe) to the papal bulls, a very profitable sinecure, from which he 
received the name of Sebastiano del Piombo. He was born in the year 
1584, and was at first a pupil of Bellini; but he soon left the rather dry 
manner of that master, and took as his models Giorgione and Titian. He 
painted historical pieces and portraits with great success. In Rome he 
painted along with Raphael in the Farnesina; and Michael Angelo, who 
wished to advance him, praised his works beyond measure, and made for 
him compositions, drawings, and even the cartoons for his pictures, so that 
after Raphael’s death, Sebastian came to be regarded as the first painter. 
Giacomo Palma Vecchio (Palma the Elder) was also at first a pupil of 
Bellini, but afterwards received instruction from Giorgione, and lastly from 
Titian. In his pictures we find one after another all the peculiarities of 
these masters repeated: on which account Zanetti said that the beauties of 
his pictures were the daughters of the beauties of the works of other artists 
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