Giovanni’s early Madonnas are singularly various. We have one very stately and tender in the estate of Theodore M. Davis, Figure 233. The Madonna in the John G. Johnson collection, Philadelphia, is wistful and emaciated. One belonging to Mr. Philip Lehman, New York, is of sensuous, peasant type, while the painting, unlike the soberness of the two earlier ones, shows the utmost resplendence of Mantegnesque enamels. Its date may be about 1470. So we see Giovanni wholly flexible and experimental at forty, and developing chiefly under Mantegna’s influence.

Giovanni’s emancipation from Mantegna takes place very gradually. It is virtually complete in the Transfiguration, Figure 234, at Naples which may be dated towards 1480. Bellini asserts himself fully in the gracious monumentality of the chief group, while his Arcadian mood is forecast in the ample landscape softly invested with a colorful light and shade. There is a more specific emotion and a more romantic richness of setting in St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, Figure 207, Frick Collection, which may be a year or two later. These are both Wordsworthian pictures, imbued with a mystical tenderness for natural appearances. Such are the sources from which Giorgione will soon draw his pagan pastoralism.

Towards 1480 Giovanni Bellini’s work assumes monumental breadth, and withal a new sweetness. His Madonnas settle into what was to be the Venetian type—superb, mature forms at once queenly and maternal. Earlier there had been no Madonna type in his work but a singular variety of forms and faces. In generalizing the stately charm of Venetian motherhood, Giovanni moves towards the grand style, and does so nearly twenty years sooner than the Florentines. His characteristic works are now great altar-pieces, with monumental distribution of the figures within fine architectural spaces. Generally the frame is a part of the pictorial organism, the plastic front of a pavillion. It is about the only survival of Mantegna’s practice in these solemn and gracious pictures. Unluckily the first of the series perished in 1867 in the disastrous fire which robbed us also of Titian’s Death of St. Peter Martyr. But surviving copies of this altar-back for the Church of S. Giovanni e Paolo confirm the tradition that it was painted well before 1480. In its arrangement and details, especially in the tendency to crowd the many figures forward, it reveals to me the influence of Antonello da Messina’s great altar-piece for San Cassiano. It had apparently a somewhat rigid formality like that of the slightly earlier piece at Pesaro. Bellini is not yet quite at ease in his new and broader style, but he has at least glimpsed the ideal of monumentality and acquired a new technique, that of oil painting, in which to express it.

We find him full-grown in the noble Madonna of St. Job, Figure 235a, made for the church of that name about 1484 and now in the Venice Academy. In this picture the new Venetian ideals of ardor and gravity unite harmoniously with the old ideal of material splendor. What playings of light and half-lights there are over mosaics, polished marbles and carvings! How admirably the strict symmetry of the group is relieved by varying the postures of the six saints and by contrasting the sober garb of the monkish saints with the superb nudity of Saints Job and Sebastian and the shimmering silks of the playing angels below. And the great picture, with all its monumentality, retains much of that old lyrical fire, which is gradually yielding to more sedate and reflective aims.

We shall find the two great Madonnas of 1488, for the Frari, Figure 235, and for St. Peter’s at Murano, conceived more impassively. For the city church, Bellini insisted on hieratic effect and incidental splendors, reverting to the form of the triptych and arranging it after Mantegna’s fashion with the frame and picture in one perspective. It is perhaps the grandest as it is the most formal of his altar-backs, consciously regal in the attitude of the Virgin, with saints as magisterial as so many Venetian senators. For the suburban church at Murano he set the Madonna low amid her paladins and opened up delicious landscape vistas at the sides. The thing, with all its dignity, is lyrical, and almost intimate. It anticipates the mood of the later open-air Sacred Conversations.

In the nineties and the early years of the new century, masterpiece follows masterpiece, and we must proceed by selection. Giovanni invents a charming form of altar-piece for private chapels. These Madonnas and saints at half-length have already the mood of the later conversation pieces, and need only the less symmetrical scheme which Bellini’s pupil, Titian, will soon give them. For harmony one might prefer the Madonna with two female saints, or for robust contrast and vitality the Madonna with two burly military champions, Figure 236. Both are in the Venetian Academy.

The single, half-length Madonnas, Figure 237, of this period are counted by scores, and are in many public and private collections in Europe and America. They are singularly uniform in inspiration, and yet the mood is so rich and noble that an apparent monotony is never cloying. Bellini’s gift in these pictures is to combine a kind of serene obviousness with great delicacy. There are hints of wistfulness and sadness through the series, but such sentiments are never much insisted on. The real mysticism of these pictures is nothing but the notation of the most natural and mysterious thing in the world—the bond between mother and babe, the pride of it, the exclusiveness of it, the joyous burden of it. Art could hardly be less theological or more genuinely religious than in these Madonnas. I think no human being could miss either their naturalness or their sacredness.

As Giovanni Bellini approached the scriptural term of years, and the century drew to its close, he cultivates by way of recreation certain old leads which become new and powerful influences on his successors. The element of tact in the man is miraculous. He does nothing till the time has come when the doing will be most useful. Thus such pastoral recreations as the Religious Allegory in the Uffizi, Figure 238, and the little symbolical panels in the Venice Academy lead directly to the fantastic Arcadianism of Giorgione. The Religious Allegory is vaguely an illustration for the old French poem “Man’s Pilgrimage.” We have a Paradise, with the new souls in infant form. The apostles Peter and Paul stand guard outside the celestial barrier, while the Madonna presides within. Beyond a dark stream is the hazardous world, a place of caverns and crags, and hermits and centaurs; of mystery and uncertainty. Perhaps Giovanni Bellini cared rather more for the darkling shadows over water and river bank, for the broken light under a veiled sky than for the formal allegory. Certainly the element of strangeness and glamour is evident enough in the five little panels depicting virtues and vices. Again the faery quality, our earth grown strange to us, is the basis of the charm. We have noted similar fantastic inventions at Florence, notably in the work of Piero di Cosimo. Bellini evokes a more normal poetry which is based on a more intimate study of nature. Such landscapes as his, even when unpeopled, suggest nymphs and shepherds.

At seventy, at the opening of the new century, Giovanni Bellini’s mind was still flexible, so much so that we hardly know whether he leads or follows such pupils of genius as Titian and Giorgione. His color acquires a deeper glow, his warm shadows are heavier and more carefully graduated; he drops his few remaining Mantegnesque habits. In the Madonna for San Zaccaria, Figure 239, dated 1505, we have no longer the illusionistic perspective of the altar-pieces of the ’80s. The group is set well back, the suffusion of the niche with air is more dense, the saintly figures have exchanged the old resolute, hieratic attitudes for a gentle dreaminess; the mood is that of Giorgione’s contemporary altar-piece at Castelfranco. In the portrait of Doge Loredano, Figure 240, of the same year resolution and wistfulness blend fascinatingly. The delineation has the force and certainty of Antonello da Messina with a refinement Antonello never even glimpsed.

In these later years Giovanni Bellini multiplied, largely through student aid, conversation pieces with gracious gatherings of saints in the open air. The mood is that of courtly revery. Titian and Palma will later repeat the theme indefinitely. One of the best is at S. Francesco della Vigna, and bears the date 1507. It is an idyl borrowing religious forms. In the altar-piece painted in 1513, Figure 241, for the church of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, Giambellino anticipates the new and compositional forms of the rising generation. The rich architecture opens upon a contemplative old man reading on a crag, with majestic mountain lines behind him athwart a serene sky. Everything above is off centre and diagonal, stability being preserved by the great vertical figures of the saints in the foreground, and by the formality of the parapet behind them. We have almost a picture within a picture, the maximum of formality and informality, of nature and artifice—all those elaborate and calculated beauties which we associate with Titian’s maturity. There is withal a mystical earnestness of which Titian himself lacked the secret.

In his remaining two years Bellini designed the lovely and modest nude Lady at her Toilet, at Vienna, and the Feast of the Gods, Figure 242, now in Mr. Joseph Widener’s collection at Philadelphia. His career ends in a rather skeptical acceptance of the sensuous graces of the new humanism, for the gods are merely Venetian picnickers on an excursion. The penetrating poetry of the picture is of a homely sort without pretensions to grandeur. The landscape is partly by Titian.

Giovanni died in 1515, being more than eighty-five years old. As late as 1506, Albrecht Dürer found him the greatest artist at Venice. He had begun with the faint dawn of the Renaissance and ended in its midday glow. He had raised Venetian painting to monumental estate, had mastered the secrets of landscape and its illumination, had initiated a delightful pastoralism, had conveyed religious emotion in forms humanly sweet and grave, had made the best of every world. Scores of his pupils extended his manner to Brescia, Bergamo, Vicenza, and Treviso. His genius knew neither haste nor hesitation, he was almost never below his best. The Renaissance produced a few painters of greater scope and powers, but none more consistently great as an artist or more venerable as a personality.

To appreciate his value a glance at less progressive contemporaries will suffice. We find Bartolommeo Vivarini normally continuing the routine of the Murano School. In the polyptych at Bologna, done with his elder brother Antonio in 1450, we have with slight Squarcionesque improvements the old attenuated Venetian forms. In the highly decorated Madonna at Naples, dated 1465, we have an intelligent use of both the Squarcionesque realisms, and the refinements of Jacopo Bellini. Figure 243. Later pieces such as the triptych of 1487 at the Frari reveal a heavy-handed imitation of Mantegna, and any little originality of the master soon gets lost in the voluminous output of the shop. Bartolommeo died in the last year of his century, whose fair average he had well represented. His nephew Alvise Vivarini deserves notice as the transmitter of the realism of Antonello da Messina to such artists as Montagna, Cima, and Lorenzo Lotto. As a portraitist he has real power. His great altar-pieces have their bleak and unattractive nobility. Venice greatly honored him in confiding several of the new panels for the Ducal Palace to his care. But since these works of the eighties were soon burned, our view of Alvise remains imperfect. I suspect modern criticism has somewhat exaggerated his importance. He was active from about 1460 to 1503, and his altar-pieces afford the best foils for Giovanni Bellini, as revealing a lesser capacity for growth.

We have now to trace the old narrative style to its climax and end in Vittore Carpaccio.^[76] He inherited all the panoramic and luministic accomplishments of Gentile Bellini, but applied them with far greater imagination. He deals with legend, giving it contemporary color, and in his sensitive hands it becomes the most veridical and charming of fairy lands. Carpaccio’s training is obscure to us. It may be that the very mediocre narrative painter, Lazzaro Bastiani, first taught him. In any case he drew more from Gentile Bellini’s resolute handling of light, textures and costume. We first meet Carpaccio as an artist in the decoration of the Great School of St. Ursula from 1492 to 1495. He was probably all of fifty years old. The childlike legend, with its numerous embassies, meetings and partings, settings out and arrivings, gave him spectacular opportunities of which he made the most winning use. In the nine canvases now in the Academy we find an epitome of the courtesy, circumstance and adventure that accompanied travel in those days, and the mere spectacle is underlaid with a pensive ideality; for these are no ordinary journeys, but the quest of martyrdom by a princely youth and maiden. Nothing is insisted on, however, but the gayety of the events, and the picturesqueness of their settings. As in all good story-telling, the persuasiveness depends on veracious minor episodes. There are the most attentive scribes and secretaries, as if to carry off the unlikely matter they are inditing. The heavy ease of men-at-arms and self-conscious elegance of young Venetian fops make them credible witnesses to else incredible legend. To adorn his tales Carpaccio borrowed from the woodcut illustrations to Breydenbach’s “Itinerary to Jerusalem.” It is remarkable how he invests these mere skeletons of cities with color, sunlight, the glamour of the orient. About all he draws a veil of air saturated with sunlight, concentrated into rising clouds whose shadows darken the lustrous blue of the tranquil lagoon. There never was a more ravishing raconteur in the art of making incidentals count for essentials. Such a picture as Prince Hero taking leave of his father and greeting St. Ursula, Figure 244, is the fulfilment of all that old Jacopo Bellini and his Veronese precursors had dreamed of. It is typical of a series which has its more intimate phases only by way of exception. The virginal beauty of the legend gets a real expression only in the Vision of St. Ursula. Figure 245. The character of the earnest, slumbering face and the sweet slight body carries through the exquisitely indicated space, and we hardly need to be told that the wistful boyish angel is offering a martyr’s palm. Possibly it takes a mundane person like Carpaccio to realize the beauty of the more fantastic religious ardors. A completely devout person takes them as in the day’s work.

Before the end of the century, Carpaccio painted for the School of S. Giovanni Evangelista the Miracle of the healing of a Demoniac. The picture is now in the Academy. It is a marvellous panorama of contemporary Venice, with the bustle of eager crowds, the slipping of gondolas over the canal, and light flickering over and caressing the manifold colors of the gay scene. It has the fidelity of Gentile Bellini without his dryness.

The most delightful if not the most important monument of Renaissance Venice is unquestionably the School of St. George of the Slavonians. It is the only school that retains its primitive paintings still set in the original carved and golded wainscoting. There one sees in the ground floor the legends of St. Jerome, an odd mixture of gravity, richness, and humor. Nothing more sumptuous than the Saint in his exquisitely appointed study, or more archly comic than the scene of consternation when the Saint brings home his lion from the desert. The series was painted about 1502. Upstairs we have the chivalric legend of St. George of Cappadocia, painted some eight years later. Nothing could be more romantically entrancing than the boyish champion charging intrepidly over the sun-dried shreds and tatters of his predecessors into the very jaws of the most confidently virulent of dragons, Figure 246, unless it be the scene where he leads his tame dragon into the astounded court, or that in which he proudly baptizes his future bride and her parents while a Turkish band plays a fanfare. About the blowing of these horns of elfland there is no faintness whatever. We are in the realm of most palpable adventure and romance, and the emphasis depends on splendid color and on drawing of a magical alertness.

Carpaccio’s merit as the liveliest and most persuasive of raconteurs seems so definite that it is almost a shock to meet him in other capacities. Also a disappointment to find in the New Testament subjects from the School of the Albanians, 1504, that in such stereotyped subjects he can be almost mediocre. Certainly in the great altar-piece of the Presentation in the Temple, Figure 247, at the Academy, he shows that he fully understands the new monumentality of Giovanni Bellini. The date is 1510. The picture is of the most reverent composure, and as tender as it is grand. In the portrait of Two Courtesans on a Balcony, in the Correr, Carpaccio shows a force of character wholly modern. With a kind of irony he has taken the moral emptiness of his sitters out of doors, flooded it with sunlight and air, given it harshness and ugliness, lavishing upon the rich costumes and fair skins the most delicate pains. John Ruskin will tell you that these are honest women. Such faith is more worthy of reverence than of imitation. The greatness of Carpaccio lies in the impartiality with which he renders a certain kind of life on its own terms. The romancer is capable of appalling truthfulness.

That he was also a mystic of the most intense sort is hard to believe. Yet if the marvellous Meditation on the Passion, Figure 248, in the Metropolitan Museum, be really by him, such is the case. In a desert the Dead Christ sits in a crumbling throne, while two grim sages, St. Job and St. Onophrius, sit in rapt contemplation. Their mood has evoked the bodily vision of their Lord. Art has produced few such symbols for the hallucinative intensity of the life contemplative. These weather-beaten forms seem an emanation from the sands and blistering sunlight. They have few relations to our world. Their souls move in vast uninhabited spaces. That Carpaccio can have produced this masterpiece as late as 1520, and cast it deliberately in a style learned forty years earlier seems to me a fantastic hypothesis, even if it has enlisted grave authority. The abundant similarities of the landscape with that of the St. Francis of the Frick Collection make me feel that the invention of this picture is Giovanni Bellini’s, at his moment of highest emotional power, about 1480. Since the actual painting is evidently in large part Carpaccio’s, I am driven to the by no means satisfactory hypothesis that Carpaccio may have executed this masterpiece, and the group to which it belongs, while serving as studio assistant to Giovanni Bellini. Such a view at least expresses my conviction that the picture transcends Carpaccio’s powers.

As for his later years, his work goes off, he loses most of his Venetian patronage, and paints for the obscure Istrian and Dalmatian seaports, the critics mock him, he dies some time after 1523, leaving no deep impression. Vasari dispatches him with a few condescending lines, and nobody cares for him till young Burne-Jones came to Venice some sixty years ago. He plainly stands out of the main line of progress. He was too romantically traditional in his themes, and too minutely naturalistic in his vision to fit into the monumental development of the Renaissance. In a sense he merely brings the old narrative tradition to a splendid close. But in so doing he preserves the look of an exquisite moment—of Venice still in her mediæval gayety and splendor, not yet reduced to her ultimate magnificent decorum. In him we glimpse the eager comeliness of patrician youth, self-sufficient in love of living. And this we see between the glistening waters of the lagoon and the lambent blue heavens, with pearly domes and bell towers rising as lightly as the drifting summer clouds above. All this may or may not be apart from what the wise esteem artistic greatness. In any case it is charm of the most persuasive and durable kind.

Whether Giorgione of Castelfranco is to be regarded as the last of the Venetian primitives or as the first of the men of the Renaissance is no simple problem. It is further complicated by the fact that we do not surely know what pictures he painted. According to the austerity or geniality of the critics, the lists vary from eight, Lionello Venturi’s, to over seventy, Herbert Cook’s. Naturally I also have my own list, which, with old copies, runs to twenty-four, but I am unwilling to claim demonstrative weight for what are merely strong subjective convictions. Walter Pater daintily evaded the issue by writing the most subtle of essays not on the person, but on the School of Giorgione. I shall in part imitate him in defining first the Giorgionesque mood before considering the canon of his works.

On the side of minor technique Giorgione marks a great advance. He early abandons the old frank coloring of Giovanni Bellini for a mysterious method which abolishes line, builds in mass, invests the picture with deep shadows that are marvellously warm and colorful. What contemporaries loved to call the Venetian fire originates with him about 1505. Vasari may well be right in saying that he learned the method directly from Leonardo da Vinci, who was a fugitive in Venice in the year 1500. Only Leonardo never taught him that shadow is color. That was Giorgione’s own beautiful discovery, one immensely important for all decorative painting ever since.

In his early phase, if I am right in thinking that Sir Martin Conway’s two stories of Paris, Figure 250, and the Ordeal of the Infant Moses and Judgment of Solomon in the Uffizi, are his, Giorgione was merely a graceful continuer of the slighter narrative mood of Giovanni Bellini and Carpaccio,—that is, distinctly a primitive artist. In his fully developed Arcadian vein he is neither a primitive nor fully of the Renaissance, but midway between, and his work constitutes not so much a pioneer effort as a delectable episode quite complete in itself. Unhappily we are almost without biographical details. Giorgione was born in 1478, in Castelfranco, a long day’s ride towards the Friulian Alps. The country abounds in streams, meadows, and immemorial trees—is a subalpine Arcadia. He came pretty young to Venice and worked with Giovanni Bellini. Legend tells us that he was big and handsome, amorous, and a musician. We know that he died of the plague of 1510, in his thirty-third year. The rest is conjecture from pictures some of which are his, and all of which are inspired by him.

These breathe a single mood, that of Arcadian revery. It is a world of desire indulged for its own sweetness, of day dreaming apart from will, action, and results. More blithely it had pre-existed in the Idyls of Theocritus; more pensively, in the Eclogues of Virgil. This world revives a far-away pastoral golden age, of lovers and their lasses, of nymphs and fauns, of vague ardors at once tempered and reinforced by a sympathetic nature. We are dealing with one of the oldest resources of poetry, and we can only understand this most beautiful visualization of the old theme by associating it with the tradition of literary pastoralism.

Of course the Eclogues of Virgil were read generation by generation, if not very understandingly, through the Middle Ages. Still the more sensitive felt the appeal of mountain shadows lengthening over the evening meadows and the pathos of love-lorn shepherds sighing musically for hard-hearted shepherdesses. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the pastoral mode becomes once more contemporary, incidentally in the interludes of Bocaccio’s Decameron, explicitly in his idyl of alternate prose and verse, the Ameto. These are pale lights before the dawn. Pastoralism becomes widely current in the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro, the bulk of which was ready by 1489. It is the parent of those slow-moving, sentimental, and ever lengthy romances in verse and prose of which Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia is the most familiar to the modern reader. Dante had once longed for a magic boat in which congenial souls should drift forever and do nothing but discourse of love. Transfer these discourses to a leafy nook beside a running stream, with the herds in view below the branches, and nymphs and satyrs overhearing the debate—and you have Sannazaro’s Arcadia. We have the eternal poetry and perhaps eternal fallacy of a bygone golden age where duty and effort are absent, where love and poesy reign.

In his most famous song, Alma beata, Sannazaro, celebrating a dead beauty, makes heaven itself merely an Arcadia—

You find the mood clear cut in the Venetian nobleman and prelate, Pietro Bembo, both in his Asolani and in the separate poems. These were being handed about in Giorgione’s time, from 1500 on. Thus Bembo sings of the shepherd’s life:

Naturally the denizens of such paradises live and dress in a state of nature. The nymphs are lightly clothed and readily discard their slight draperies for the joys of the bath, which they considerately take within the range of their shepherd swains. Bembo warmly praises those “courteous garments” which do not too much hide the fair throat and bosom, and roundly curses more churlish concealing fashions.

Sannazaro describes with a confusing mixture of metaphors what may be called a fortunate bath fall.

Earlier painters than Giorgione^[77] had essayed these pastoral themes. Botticelli, Signorelli; in a sardonic way, Piero di Cosimo; Giovanni Bellini and even Andrea Mantegna had variously attempted this sort of painted poesy. But the flavor of the Giorgionesque poesy is fuller and richer. His beauty is that of languor, revery, dream. Whatever the ostensible theme may be, his painting is Arcadian. His people have not merely no relation to our world, but slight and ambiguous relations to each other within the picture. They are isolated in their own musings, rarely look at each other, never suggest an action, but only a mood. Even the portraits suggest rather temperament than character or will. The proud youth, at Berlin, Figure 249, withdraws himself from purpose and deed. It is an early Giorgione. The Shepherd with a Flute, at Hampton Court, is bemused with his own fancy. It is of the later years. The fastidious patrician, at New York, reveals an almost worried and sickly detachment. If indeed a Giorgione, which I cannot doubt, it is of his latest manner.

Take the little Carpaccian idyls at Florence which cannot be much later than 1500. How far we are from real narrative! In the Ordeal of Moses, Figure 251, a child is thrusting his tender fingers among live coals. Ladies and gentlemen stand languidly about and bask in the pleasantness of their own thoughts. There is a similar nonchalance in the Judgment of Solomon where a newborn babe is threatened with the sword. The horror is treated as a negligible incident of an al fresco party.

Again what is the meaning of the mysterious idyl in Prince Giovanelli’s gallery? Figure 252. In view of the picturesque walls and moat of Castelfranco, a half nude mother, oblivious of a coming thunder shower, nurses her child. Equally oblivious of her and the weather, a fashionably dressed youth turns away. Ruins reflect the ominous lightning flashes. Old records call this (one of the few certain Giorgiones) The Soldier and the Gipsy—evidently a bad guess. A learned Viennese professor chooses to think that this is Prince Adrastus finding the forsaken Princess Hypsiphile. Nobody can prevent such conjectures or disprove them. It is safer to imagine that coming rain and thunder at Venice recalls some old memory of similar weather and state of mind at Castelfranco, evokes some old desire of which this richly fanciful masterpiece is the enigmatic symbol. Some story of loving and parting surely underlies the poesy, it would be foolish to be more specific than Giorgione himself has chosen to be. The Three Philosophers, at Vienna, Figure 253, again has been explained as Aeneas surveying the future site of Rome. What we actually have is a glowing nook at eventide in which three grave men of different ages go separately about some task requiring thought and mathematical calculation. And even this duty is yielding to the spell and mystery of the evening hour. These pictures are probably a little earlier than the altar-piece of 1504 at Castelfranco.

That lovely work, Figure 254, has much of the intimacy of Bellini’s altar-piece at S. Zaccaria, in formal arrangement it is rather monumental. The mood, however, is one of revery. St. Francis of Assisi makes his gesture only for himself, and St. George, exponent of the active life, broods moodily beneath his slackly held pennon. The Arcadian landscape quietly reinforces the idyllic feeling. Externally the thing is splendid in color, and as saturated with atmosphere as it is with mood.

From now on the question of chronology becomes at once difficult, and, since we are dealing only with five years or so, relatively unimportant. The sleeping Venus at Dresden, Figure 255, may have been designed about 1505. A Cupid slumbering at the Goddess’s feet has been painted out, and the landscape was finished by Titian. The noble sleeping body, to use a word of Lucretius which Montaigne commends, seems “poured out” on the receptive earth—so grandly and easily it lies. The gestures are unconscious caresses. The Goddess dreams of old joys. What faun or sylvan even would not respect that dream? Not with passion, then, though himself knowing all its sting, does Giorgione deal, but with ardors sublimated in memory. The marvellous lines of this Venus, as sweeping as the curves of hills or river currents, were imitated again and again, but neither Titian, Palma Vecchio, nor the rest ever recaptured the evasive poetry of their model.

In 1508, working with Titian, Giorgione finished certain frescoes for the outside of the German Warehouse. The remaining red blurs, and Zanetti’s fragmentary copies, tell us that the postures begin to have the breadth and conscious counterpoise of the advancing Renaissance, but that the mood is still that of languor. Very like one of these figures is the fascinating Judith, at Petrograd, Figure 256. After the horrors of the night, she stands dreamily. Her lovely left leg escapes from the courteous draperies, and the foot touches lightly the brow of the peaceful, severed head of Holophernes. The touch of the foot is almost careless, as if merely to assure herself that the portent is really true. Her head bends gently, her nerveless beautiful fingers barely feel her girdle or support her great sword. Behind her, morning forests and fields stretch towards a tranquil sea and sky. The gestures are those of one between sleeping and waking, irresolutely feeling for some basis in reality. We are in a realm where the most awful deeds and experiences count only as raw material for delicate imaginings.

In the later works problems multiply, and a critic is pretty well reduced to personal intuitions. No doubt, however, should attach to the pathetic and nearly effaced Christ of St. Roch. The Christ is nobler than the earlier example at Fenway Court, the feeling more expansive. Still nobody, not even the executioner, seems to will the atrocity of the deed. The thing is not an act but a vision, pervaded by a dreamy tenderness.

The completely repainted Pastoral Concert, Figure 257, at the Louvre is never the less fraught with Giorgione’s peculiar poetry. A courtly lover has struck a chord on the lute, and gazes intently, perhaps sadly, at a shepherd sitting close to him. A rustic, nude nymph whose back only is seen takes the pipe from her lips to listen. A proud beauty turns toward a fountain, light draperies slip away from her superb form, and with a graceful gesture of idleness she pours back into the fountain a tinkling jet from a crystal pitcher, while she bends to note the ripple and catch the pleasant, idle sound. This strange scene takes place on the edge of a vale that winds down to a glittering sea, affording a path to a shepherd and his flocks. The meaning? Modern criticism is loath to look beyond contrasts of nude and clothed forms, swing of tree-tops and of sky, subtle interplay of light and shade. My own reading is merely based on the contrast between the rustic and urban lovers, and an intuition that the courtier in peering so wistfully at the shepherd is merely seeing himself in a former guise. In lassitude, perhaps in satiety, beside a courtly mistress who is absent from him in spirit, there rises the vision of earlier simpler love and of a devoted shepherdess who once piped for him in the shade. The vision rises as his listless hand sweeps the lute strings in a chord unmarked by the far lovelier mistress at the fountain. The golden age of love, like Arcady itself, is ever in the past. Such may be the reading of this poesy. Indeed all Giorgione’s pictures are less facts than apparitions born of roving thought in idleness,—such stuff as dreams are made of.

The famous Concert, Figure 258, of the Pitti since Morelli’s time has been generally classed as an early Titian, I think erroneously. The precise and powerful execution of the Monk’s head is certainly his, but I question if the motive itself lay within the scope of his lucid and uncomplicated imagination. An Augustinian monk holds the initial harmony on the clavichord and turns towards the ’cellist while the singer waits impassively. And this simple theme becomes a universal symbol for thwarted desire. The player asks a kind of sympathy which this world rarely affords, which certainly these companions cannot give. As in the Pastoral Symphony, the music awakens impossible longings, is the accompaniment of inadequacy. Titian was too robust ever to have imagined such a thing, and I feel we need only modify the old tradition to the extent of giving Titian a hand in an unfinished Giorgione to account for this poignant and most characteristic masterpiece.

There remains old and good tradition for crediting Giorgione with the design of the altar-piece in San Giovanni Crisostomo. The execution is unquestionably by Sebastiano del Piombo. If this view be correct, Giorgione attained the external features of the coming Renaissance style, missing its athleticism. Certainly the abstraction of the saint and the unmotivated appearance of the three virtues, and their unrelated gracefulness, is entirely in Giorgione’s manner, while the whole invention is alien to Sebastiano’s heavy and forthright talent.

For the view I have tried to give of this poet picture-maker I may claim at least the merit of consistency. There is only one theme—languor of love and of remembered happiness; and there is only one setting—the Arcadia of the pastoral poets. Giorgione is the first painter who realized Leonardo’s definition of painting as “mute poetry,” yet not quite mute for there is generally a suggestion of music. And the music is less heard than contemplated, as is the case in one of his latest pictures, the Shepherd Boy, Figure 259, who hesitates to set the flute to his lips lest the melody fall short of that which the imagination has already heard.