and other mythological subjects, some of which are extremely voluptuous. Two of his grandest and most celebrated works are the Last Supper in the Escurial, and Christ crowned with Thorns at Milan. It is said that the works of Titian, to be appreciated, should be seen at Venice or Madrid, as many claimed to be genuine elsewhere are of very doubtful authenticity. He painted many of his best works for the Spanish court, first for the Emperor Charles V., and next for his successor, Philip II., who is known

   to have given him numerous commissions to decorate the Escurial and the royal palaces at Madrid. There are numerous duplicates of some of his works, considered genuine, some of which he is supposed to have made himself, and others to have been carefully copied by his pupils and retouched by himself; he frequently made some slight alterations in the backgrounds, to give them more of the look of originals; thus the original of his Christ and the Pharisees, or the Tribute Money, is now in the Dresden Gallery, yet Lanzi says there are numerous copies in Italy, one of which he saw at St. Saverio di Rimini, inscribed with his name, which is believed to be a duplicate rather than a copy. There are more than six hundred engravings from his pictures, including both copper-plates and wooden cuts. He is said to have engraved both on wood and copper himself, but Bartsch considers all the prints attributed to him as spurious, though a few of them are signed with his name, only eight of which he describes.

   Titian, the great head of the Venetian school, like Raffaelle, the head of the Roman, had a host of imitators and copyists, some of whom approached him so closely as to deceive the best judges; and many works attributed to him, even in the public galleries of Europe, were doubtless executed by them.

   This chef-d'œuvre of Titian, so celebrated in the history of art, represents Venus endeavoring to detain Adonis from the fatal chase. Titian is known to have made several repetitions of this charming composition, some of them slightly varied, and the copies are almost innumerable. The original is supposed to have been painted at Rome as a companion to the Danaë, for the Farnese family, about 1548, and is now in the royal gallery at Naples. The most famous of the original repetitions is that at Madrid, painted for King Philip II., when prince of Spain, and about the period of his marriage with Queen Mary of England. There is a fine duplicate of this picture in the English National Gallery, another in the Dulwich gallery, and two or three more in the private collections of England. Ottley thus describes this picture:—

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