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it had been painted on a pine board and the wood had asserted itself from below. It is a charming picture, with all the great Roman's inevitable perfection of design; but it is incomprehensible that critics, M. Viardot among them, should call it the first in rank of Raphael's Virgins in Glory. There are none which can dispute that title with Our Lady of San Sisto, unearthly and supernatural in beauty and majesty.
The school of Florence is represented by a charming Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci, almost identical with that of the Louvre; and six admirable pictures of Andrea del Sarto. But the one which most attracts and holds all those who regard the Faultless Painter with sympathy, and who admiring his genius regret his errors, is a portrait of his wife Lucrezia Fede, whose name, a French writer has said, is a double epigram. It was this capricious and wilful beauty who made poor Andrea break his word and embezzle the money King Francis had given him to spend for works of art. Yet this dangerous face is his best excuse,--the face of a man-snarer, subtle and passionate and cruel in its blind selfishness, and yet so beautiful that any man might yield to it against the cry of
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his own warning conscience. Browning must have seen it before he wrote, in his pathetic poem,--
"Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, You beautiful Lucrezia, that are mine!"
Nowhere, away from the Adriatic, is the Venetian school so richly represented as in Madrid. Charles and Philip were the most munificent friends and patrons of Titian, and the Royal Museum counts among its treasures in consequence the enormous number of forty-three pictures by the wonderful centenarian. Among these are two upon which he set great value,--a Last Supper, which has unfortunately mouldered to ruin in the humid refectory of the Escorial, equal in merit and destiny with that of Leonardo; and the Gloria, or apotheosis of the imperial family, which, after the death of Charles, was brought from Yuste to the Escorial, and thence came to swell the treasures of the Museum. It is a grand and masterly work. The vigorous genius of Titian has grappled with the essential difficulties of a subject that trembles on the balance of ridiculous and sublime, and has come out triumphant. The Father and the Son sit on high. The Operating Spirit hovers above them. The Virgin in robes of azure stands in the blaze of