that the Rovigo picture is actually by Titian, who has taken
the Vienna picture (which I attribute to Giorgione) as his model and
directly repeated it. The qualities of the work are admirable, and
worthy of Titian, and I venture to think this "Madonna" would long ago
have taken its rightful place among the pictures of the master had it
not hung in a remote provincial gallery little visited by travellers,
and in such a dark corner as to escape detection. The form TITIANVS
points to a period after 1520,[127] when Giorgione had been some years
dead, so that it was not unnatural that in after times the credit of
invention rested with the author of the signed picture, and that his
name came gradually to be attached also to the earlier example. The
engraving of Meyssen (_circa_ 1640) thus bears Titian's name, and both
engraving and the repetition at Rovigo are now adduced as evidence of
Titian's authorship of the Vienna "Gipsy Madonna."
But is there any proof that Titian ever copied or repeated any other
work of Giorgione? There is, fortunately, one great and acknowledged
precedent, the "Venus" in the Tribune of the Uffizi, which is _directly_
taken from Giorgione's Dresden "Venus," The accessories, it is true, are
different, but the nude figures are line for line identical.[128] Other
painters, Palma, Cariarli, and Titian, elsewhere, derived inspiration
from Giorgione's prototype, but Titian actually repeats the very figure
in this "Venus"; so that there is nothing improbable in my contention
that Titian also repeated Giorgione's "Gipsy Madonna," adding his
signature thereto, to the confusion and confounding of later
generations.
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