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Gerald held it long and gazed seriously, with that conceit in his own judgment which made him sometimes dispute the attributions in no less a gallery than the Uffizi say that a Verocchio was not a Verocchio, a Giorgione not a Giorgione. Charlie strained to catch some syllable of what he said. Vainly. The pianist was preluding. Bertie Bentivoglio came to ask the girl in pink to dance with him.
However that may be, we can hardly fail to see how entirely the Venetian influence is obscured by that of the great Florentine, and to recognise the extraordinary genius of a painter who could do something more than imitate from such masters as Bellini, Giorgione, Raphael and Michelangelo. To this date is assigned the Portrait of a Young Man, at Hampton Court.
The last elusive, undefinable stroke of the brush, that something uniting the spirit of the beholder with the spirit of the artist, so that you feel as he felt when he wrought that is art. Burne-Jones is the avatar of Giorgione. He subdues you into silence, and you wait, expecting that one of his tall, soulful dream-women will speak, if you are but worthy holding your soul in tune.
Padua Gallery Finally, two cassone panels in the gallery at Padua have been acclaimed by Signor Venturi as the master's own, and with that view I am entirely agreed. The splendour of colour, the lurid light, the richness of effect, are in the highest degree impressive. What artist but Giorgione would have so revelled in the glories of the evening sunset, the orange horizon, the distant blue hills?
And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of this School of Giorgione, as we may call it, which, for most of us, notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the "new Vasari," will still identify itself with those famous pictures at Florence, Dresden and Paris; and in which a certain artistic ideal is defined for us the conception of a peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we may understand as the Giorgionesque, wherever we find it, whether in Venetian work generally, or in work of our own time and of which the Concert, that undoubted work of Giorgione in the Pitti Palace, is the typical instance, and a pledge authenticating the connexion of the school with the master.
One of his admirers was the Duchess Ludvika Czetvertynska, whose majestic figure and aureole of hair reminded one of the pictures of Giorgione. Her friend, the Governor of Poland, the Grand Duke Konstantin, through her introduction accepted Chopin as one of his most welcome guests; he was musical, and greatly admired Chopin's music. Whenever his violent temper carried him away, the grand duchess would send secretly for Chopin, who would seat himself at the piano, and at the first notes the grand duke would appear in the drawing-room with his temper cured. Thus was Chopin another David to a latter-day Saul. Chopin was an intimate friend of the grand duke's son, Paul, whose instructor was a Count Moriolles. It was his daughter, the Comtesse Alexandra, in whose eyes Chopin found inspiration; he improvised never so beautifully as when she sat next to him at the piano. His adoration was no secret. He was often teased on account of the beautiful "Mariolka," as he called her. In his letters to his friends, we find many allusions that prove that the young comtesse loved him in turn. But both knew that this love was hopeless, and therefore Chopin's musical expressions of his dreams for her are melancholy. One remembrance of this attachment is the Rondo
In 1507 Titian was thirty years old, not eighteen, so that both statements cannot be correct. Now it is highly improbable that Titian had already discarded the manner of Bellini as early as 1495, at the age of eighteen, and had so identified himself with Giorgione that their work was indistinguishable.
They did not copy his designs, but the beauty of his pictures made them look at the world with his romantic eyes and paint in his dreamy mood. It was almost as though Giorgione had absorbed the romance of Venice into his pictures, so that for a time no Venetian painter could express Venetian romance except in Giorgione's way.
He also bought antique marbles, pictures by Giorgione and Titian, engravings by Durer, and four volumes of Raphael's drawings, besides many other beautiful works of art. These were splendid years, years in which he was valued by his contemporaries for the work he did for them, and years in which every picture he painted for himself gave him fresh experience.
All the old town is within vast crumbling red walls built on a mound with a moat around them. Civic zeal has trimmed the mound into public "grounds," and the moat is lively with ornamental ducks; while a hundred yards farther rises the white statue of Castel Franco's greatest son, no other than Giorgione himself, a dashing cavalier-like gentleman with a brush instead of a rapier.
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