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Modern criticism has recently distributed several "Giorgionesque" portraits in English collections among Licinio, Lotto, and even Polidoro! But this disintegrating process may be, and has been, carried too far. Two more small works may be mentioned which may tentatively be ascribed to Giorgione. George slaying the Dragon."
Others who, like the writer, have seen both works, agree with the older view, and regard the latter version, like the others at Berlin and Rovigo, as a contemporary repetition of Bellini's lost original. Collection of Mrs. Gardner, Boston, U.S.A. Characteristic of Giorgione is the abstract thought, the dreaminess of look, the almost furtive glance.
Other pupils of Giovanni Bellini, beside Giorgione and Titian, are found here Palma Vecchio for instance in a poor picture of Judith with the Head of Holofernes ; Rondinelli in a Portrait of a Man and a Madonna and two Saints ; Sebastiano del Piombo in the Farnesina , long given to Raphael, and the Death of Adonis . All these men, whose work is so full of splendour, came under the influence of Giorgione after passing through Bellini's bottega.
"If you take after your ancestors you will know how to defend it," she said. The new Duke sat in his closet. The walls had been stripped of their pious relics and lined with books, and above the fireplace hung the Venus of Giorgione, liberated at last from her long imprisonment. The windows stood open, admitting the soft September air.
We return to Palma Vecchio's grand composition, 1399, The Adoration of the Shepherds, which under a false signature, once passed for a Titian. 1135, Holy Family, with SS. Sebastian and Catherine, is a form of composition known as a Santa Conversazione, which Palma brought to its ultimate perfection. The official catalogue of 1903 persists in ascribing it to Giorgione.
We know that his great contemporaries, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Giorgione, never married; and we know further that there was a sentiment in the air at that time, that an artist belonged to the Church, and his life, like that of the priest, was sacred to her service.
The hand is here introduced, though Giorgione feels still compelled to account for its presence by introducing a rosary of large beads. In later years, as we shall see, the expressiveness of the human hand per se will be recognised; but Giorgione already feels its significance in portraiture, and there is not one of his portraits which does not show this.
Another day I went as far afield as Padua, also with Giorgione in mind, for Baedeker, I noticed, gives one of his pictures there a star. From Venice it is distant half an hour by fast trains, or by way of Fusina, two hours.
The country gives them all to me. He writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath repeating Collins's 'Ode to Evening, just to catch the fine quality of the moment; about smothering his face 'in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with May dews'; and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine 'pass slowly homeward through the twilight, and hearing 'the distant clank of the sheep-bell. One phrase of his, 'the polyanthus glowed in its cold bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel, is curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage is rather pretty in its way:
Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, Correggio, Giorgione, and Paul Veronese, with all the lesser masters, were stowed in the holds of frigates and despatched by way of Toulon toward the new Rome; while Monge and Berthollet ransacked the scientific collections of Milan and Parma for their rarest specimens.
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