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Giorgione, and not Titian, painted the still lovely head of Christ, and Giorgione, not Titian, drew the arm and hand of the Jew who is dragging at the rope. Characteristic touches are to be seen in the turn of the head, the sloping axis of the eyes, and especially the fine oval of the face, and bushy hair.

Jephson, the artist, had assured her that this period would make a perfect background for her fresh and rather voluptuous coloring; it had not become so banal as any of the French Louis'. And so Arabella had been instructed to drum into her head the names of the geniuses of that time, and their works, and she could now babble sweetly all about Giorgione, Paolo Veronese and Titian's later works without making a single mistake.

The freedom of handling, and the mastery of technique certainly suggests a rather later stage, but I am inclined to believe Giorgione was capable of this accomplishment before 1500.

The conception is wholly Giorgionesque, but the hardness of contour and the comparative lack of quality in the touch betrays another and an inferior hand. Nevertheless the portrait is of great interest, for could we but imagine it as fine in execution as in conception we should have an original Giorgione portrait before us. The features are curiously like those of the Barberigo gentleman.

He now, therefore, devoted himself to this purpose, and in a short time so closely imitated Giorgione that his pictures were sometimes taken for those of that master.... At the time when Titian began to adopt the manner of Giorgione, being then not more than eighteen, he took the portrait," etc. Thus in two places out of three Vasari is consistent in fixing 1489-90 as the date.

As a fact, it is an astonishing thing that we have no documentary evidence about Titian before 1511; but does he not share this fate with very many of his great countrymen, with Bellini, Giorgione, Sebastiano, and others? An unfriendly chance has left us entirely in the dark as to the early years of nearly all the great Venetian painters.

Mature as Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for the last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest.

The rich impasting of Titian and Giorgione combines something of the advantages of both these styles, the felicity of the one with the carefulness of the other, and is perhaps to be preferred to either. The painter not only takes a delight in nature, he has a new and exquisite source of pleasure opened to him in the study and contemplation of works of art

Their father, who was also an artist, came from Padua to Venice in the early part of the fifteenth century, bringing his two young sons, both of whom grew to be greater painters than the father. They opened a school, and Giorgione and Titian, who, you well know, are two supreme names in Venetian painting, were among their pupils.

Vasari, in his Life of Titian, in the course of a somewhat confused account of the artist's earliest years, tells us how Titian, "having seen the manner of Giorgione, early resolved to abandon that of Gian Bellino, although well grounded therein.