Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/394

382 with the pen, of the Bolognese Painter Passerotto, his intimate friend, which Portrait has come into our hands, we have placed it in our Book of Designs from the hands of eminent painters.

Titian was born in the year 1480, at Cadore, a small place distant about five miles from the foot of the Alps; he belonged to the family of the Vecelli, which is among the most noble of those parts. Giving early proof of much intelligence, he was sent at the age of ten to an uncle in Venice, an honourable citizen, who seeing the boy to be much inclined to Painting, placed him with the excellent painter Gian Bellino, then very famous, as we have said. Under his care the youth soon proved himself to be endowed by nature with all the gifts of judgment and genius required for the art of painting. Now Gian Bellino, and the other masters of that country, not having the habit of studying the antique, were accustomed to copy only what they saw before them, and that in a dry, hard, laboured manner, which Titian also acquired; but about the year 1507, Giorgione da Castel Franco, not being satisfied with that mode of proceeding, began to give to his works an unwonted softness and relief, painting them in a very beautiful manner; yet he by no means neglected to draw from the life, or to copy nature with his colours as closely as he could, and in doing the latter he shaded with colder or warmer tints as the living object might demand, but without first making a drawing, since he held that, to paint with the colours only, without