popular picture he had ever painted. In 1563 Vecelli offered to Philip II. his Last Supper, which had been in hand for six years; it was cut down in the Escorial to suit a particular space, and offers now little noticeable beyond the fine grouping. The St Jerome of the Brera Gallery in Milan, a work of wonderful energy, spirit, and force, especially for a more than octogenarian hand, was probably rather earlier than this; there is a replica of it in the Escorial. One of the master's latest pictures (1574-75) is in Madrid, and commemorates the Battle of Lepanto; it is a work of failing power but still the power of a Titian. Two of the mosaics in St Mark's church, Venice, the Mark in pontificals, and the sword-sheathing angel on the right of the high altar, are after Vecelli's designs; but they are contrary to the true spirit of mosaic work, and the Mark in especial is a decided eyesore.
We now turn to the portraits,—works so great in style, so stately, and in the best sense so simple in perception and feeling that, after allowing everything which can be said on behalf of some other masters of the craft, such as Raphael, Velazquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt, one is still compelled to say that Titian stands on the whole supreme. Among the highest examples are Alphonso, duke of Ferrara (Madrid); the same duke and his second wife Laura Dianti (Louvre), commonly called Titian and his Mistress; Francis I. (Louvre), painted towards 1536, but not from direct sittings, for Titian never saw the French king; various likenesses of himself, one of about 1542, and another of 1562; Paul III., also the same pope with his grandsons Cardinal Alessandro and Duke Ottavio (Naples), the former, done in about four weeks, was presented to the pontiff in May 1543, and cost two gold ducats; Pietro Aretino (Pitti); Titian's daughter Lavinia (with a fan in the Dresden gallery, with a jewelled casket in Lord Cowper's collection); the Cornaro Family (Alnwick Castle); L Homme au Gant (Louvre), an unknown personage, youthful and handsome, the ne plus ultra of portraiture; Sansovino, Eleonora duchess of Urbino, Francesco duke of Urbino, Catherine Cornaro queen of Cyprus (these four are in the Uffizi); Charles V. on horseback (Madrid); Cardinal Bembo (Naples), discovered in an uncared-for condition in 1878, very unlike the portrait in the Barberini Gallery. The female portraits done by Titian are few, and are almost invariably of women of exalted rank. Of Ariosto, with whom Titian was intimate in Ferrara, though there may probably have been nothing approach ing to a romantic friendship between them, the painter is said to have done three portraits. Much uncertainty, however, besets this matter. One of the three appears as a woodcut in an edition of the Orlando Furioso. A second, now at Cobham Hall, corresponds with the woodcut likeness, and is signed Titianus F. " The third, a work of admirable beauty, and a most fitting likeness of a poet, is in the National Gallery of London. It is difficult, how ever, to reconcile the features here with the other portraits, and some connoisseurs do not admit that the work is really a Titian.
Authorities.—For English readers, the Life and Times of Titian by Crowe and Cavalcaselle (1877) has superseded all previous works, such as those of Sir Abraham Hume (1829) and Northcpte (1830). Mr Josiah Gilbert's book, Cadore, or Titian's Country (1869), supplies many interesting side-lights on the subject. Mr R. F. Heath's monograph (1885) is founded mainly on Crowe and Cavalcaselle and on Gilbert, and forms a very convenient compendium. In Italian, see the usual authorities Ticozzi, Ridolfi, Lanzi, &c. (W. M. R.)
TITLES OF HONOUR are words and phrases used for marking and distinguishing the rank or station of the persons to whom they are assigned and appropriated. Whatever may have been their actual or verbal origin, it is certain that among nations which have made any considerable progress in civilization their immediate derivation has been in the great majority of cases from some kind of public office or employment. As Mr Freeman has pointed out,[1] the principal exceptions to this rule are the merely complimentary additions which it is usual to accord in Europe and America to persons who have no ascertained place or precedence in the social scale. Among ourselves "mister" or "master" (magister) and its feminine equivalents, and on the Continent signor, senor, and sieur (senior} and their feminine equivalents, are the leading examples. They are employed simply to avoid the necessity of calling those to whom they are applied by their proper names only, and are not indicative of any special rank or station. In France, however, maltre, which answers to our mister or master, is the professional designation of an avocat, and in England "sir," which answers to signor, senor, and sieur, is the appropriate prefix to the Christian name and surname of a baronet or a knight. Of the derivatives of dominus don, donna, and dame the last in French compounded like sieur with the possessive pronoun in ordinary speech and appearing in madame as the feminine equivalent of monsieur, much the same may be said as of the derivatives of magister and senior. And, although our word " lord " has a special reference to the House of Lords, as the German Herr has to the Herrenhaus in certain of its uses, it largely partakes of the character which belongs to them. Its derivation is analogous to theirs, and within somewhat narrower limits it is almost as indiscriminately employed. More strictly lord and lady are the equivalents of baron and baroness, the fifth grade of the British peerage.[2] But colloquially it is applied to all grades of the peerage except the first; and, though duchesses are not called ladies in society, dukes are unquestionably lords in their capacity as members of the second chamber of the legislature. Certain of the sons and daughters of peers are lords and ladies by courtesy, while the wives of baronets are legally and the wives of knights are conventionally called ladies, although the wives of knights are more accurately described as dames. But besides this we have our lord the king and our lady the queen, lord bishops, lord lieutenants, lord justices, lord advocates, lord mayors, lord provosts, lords of the council, lords of the treasury, lords of the admiralty, lords of manors, and a variety of other lords who have no necessary connexion with the nobility. Lord and lady in fact are among the titles of honour which have never been historically associated with any particular function. Lord was originally in Anglo-Saxon hldford, probably a corruption of hldfweard, "the warden of bread." Lady in Anglo-Saxon is hlaefdige, and has also some connection with hldf. Neither name acquired by means of official association any definite signification beyond the more or less general ascription of superiority.[3]
It is exceedingly difficult to distribute titles of honour into rigidly distinct categories. The following is as near an approximation as we are able to make.
I. Supreme Sovereign Titles.—Among titles implying sovereignty the first place is occupied by "emperor" and "king." Under existing international arrangements the crowned heads of Europe take precedence according to the date of their accession, and their rank is precisely the same, whether their style is imperial or royal. But the proper meaning of emperor is the chief of a confederation of states of which kings are members. The German emperor is an emperor in this sense, and he of course has precedence of the kings of Saxony, Bavaria, and Wurtemberg, whose dominions are in cluded in his empire. But neither he nor the emperors of Russia and Austria have any precedence as such of the queen of the United Kingdom or the kings of Italy and Spain. Originally the title of king was superior to that of emperor, and it was to avoid the assumption of the superior title of rex that the chief magistrates of Rome adopted the names of CSBSOT, imperator, and princeps to signalize their authority. As imperator was the distinctive title of the ruler of the Western empire, so /ScuriXefa was the distinctive title of the ruler of the Eastern empire, and the Greek /SaoiXeiys is the exact equivalent of the Latin rex. The emperor of the East was called avroKparup as well as /SacrtAetfs. But /a(riei/s came to mean the same as imperator in so special a way that the word frf was borrowed to express what had grown to be the in ferior dignity of king.[4] Under Charlemagne the imperial style of Rome and the royal style of Germany were united.[5] It was,
- ↑ In Longman's Mag., vol. ii. p. 477 sq.
- ↑ "The baron alone among the ranks of peerage can hardly be called official, except so far as peerage itself is an office. His title rather marks a rank or class than an office; it does not at once point out even the memory of distinct functions like those of the duke, the marquis, or the earl" (Longman's Mag., vol. ii. p. 483).
- ↑ Müller, Lect. Sci. Lang., 2d ser., p. 255.
- ↑ Freeman, Comparative Politics, pp. 161-162.
- ↑ The great triumph in the life of Charles the Great was when the ambassadors of the Eastern emperor Michael addressed him according to the full, imperial style (Eginhard, Annals, 812), Aquisgrani, ubi ad imperatorem venerunt . . . more suo, id est, Græca lingua, laudes ei dixerunt, Imperatorem eum et Basileum appellantes'" (Freeman, Comparative Politics, p. 353). Mr Freeman notices also the great controversy concerning the imperial titles, especially the word /3a<rte15s, which arose three generations later between the emperors Basil the Macedonian and Lewis the Second. See also John Lydus, De Magistratibus, 1, 3, on the distinction between rtipavvos, /ScKnXetfs, and avTOKpartap, discussed in Freeman, Comp. Pol., p. 445.
