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Cicerone, sixth edition. Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1897, pp. 278-9. Venetian Painting at the New Gallery, 1895, p. 41. Titian, ii. 58. Gazette des Beaux Arts, loc cit. Life of Giorgione. The letters T.V. either were added after 1544, or Vasari did not interpret them as Titian's signature. La Galleria Crespi, op. cit.

Titian, watching him from beside the young woman, marvelled at the look of mystery and the strength. He leaned forward, about to speak but Giorgione stayed him with a gesture. "The Fondaco," he said, raising his hand to the gondolier. "Ho, there! Halt for the Fondaco!" The boat came slowly to rest at the foot of the great building that rose white and gray and new in the half light.

True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo, not less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian and Giorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they have interpreted in their own fashion.

Something like this seems to me to be the vraie verite about Giorgione, if I may adopt a serviceable expression, by which the French recognise those more liberal and durable impressions which, in respect of any really considerable person or subject, anything that has at all intricately occupied men's attention, lie beyond, and must supplement, the narrower range of the strictly ascertained facts about it.

Apart from tradition, very few ascertained facts are known to us as to Giorgione's life. The date of his birth is conjectural, there being but Vasari's unsupported testimony that he died in his thirty-fourth year. Now we know from unimpeachable sources that his death happened in October-November 1510, so that, assuming Vasari's statement to be correct, Giorgione will have been born in 1477.

There may be, therefore, something in the suggestion which Crowe and Cavalcaselle make that this may be the large canvas ordered of Giorgione for the audience chamber of the Council, "for which purpose," they add, "the advances made to him in the summer of 1507 and in January 1508 show that the work he had undertaken was of the highest consequence."

Flowers by Van Huysum, David, and Heim; butterflies painted by Abraham Mignon; Van Eycks, undoubted Cranachs and Albrecht Durers; the Giorgione, the Sebastian del Piombo; Backhuijzen, Hobbema, Gericault, the rarities of painting none of these things so much as aroused their curiosity; they were waiting for the sun to arise and shine upon these treasures.

So, too, is the spirit of the scene, so telling in its movement, gesture, and expression. Surely it is needless to translate all that is most characteristic of Giorgione in his most personal expression into a "Giorgionesque" mood of Titian. The former writers declare that it, "perhaps more than any other, approximates to the true style of Giorgione."

In this splendid group there is a masculine energy, a fulness of life, and a grandeur of representation which carries le grand style to its furthest limits, and if Giorgione actually completed the picture before his death, he anticipated the full splendour of the riper Renaissance.

Considering the extraordinary rapidity of the artist's development, it would be more natural to place the execution of this work a year or two earlier than 1504, but, in any case, we may accept it as typical of Giorgione's style in the first years of the century. In the field of portraiture Giorgione must have made rapid strides from the very first.