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As it happens, too, Titian stands in much the same relation to Giorgione as Shakespeare did to Marlowe. Giorgione was really the great innovator, and Giorgione died young, leaving Titian to carry on the work.
But Boltraffios, Bernardino Luinis, even a putative Giorgione, could not divert her mind from its human problem. What was he doing at Castel Sant' Alessina, the property, according to her guide-book, of an Austrian prince? Was he its tenant? He couldn't, surely, this well-dressed, high-bred, cultivated young compatriot, he couldn't be a mere employé, a steward or curator? No: probably a tenant.
Three of his rare works there are scarcely more than some fifteen in the world are here in the Uffizi, the two very early pictures but all his works were early, for he died in 1510 the Trial of Moses , and the Judgment of Solomon , and the beautiful portrait of a Knight of Malta . Giorgione was the dayspring of the Renaissance in Venice.
Moreover, let no one say that Cariani executed what Giorgione designed, for, in spite of its imperfect condition, the technique reveals a painter groping his way as he works, altering contours, and making corrections with his brush; in fact, it has all the spontaneity which characterises an original creation.
It sounds almost ludicrous when an otherwise competent observer considers Clement VII to be of a melancholy temperament, but defers his judgement to that of the physicians, who declare the Pope of a sanguine-choleric nature; or when we read that the same Gaston de Foix, the victor of Ravenna, whom Giorgione painted and Bambaia carved, and whom all the historians describe, had the saturnine temperament.
Let anyone contrast the delicacy and the glow of this little panel with several similar productions of the Venetian school hanging in the same gallery, and the gulf that separates Giorgione from his imitators will, I think, be apparent. These are apparently fragments of some decorative series, of which the other parts are missing.
Of all art like this, art which has played so large a part in men's culture since that time, Giorgione is the initiator.
It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like this is really aspiring and, in the school of Giorgione, the perfect moments of music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or its accompaniment, are themselves prominent as subjects. On that background of the silence of Venice, which the visitor there finds so impressive, the world of Italian music was then forming.
Correggio's Danaë, his Io, his Leda, his Venus, are in their exquisite grace of form and movement farther removed from the mere fleshly beauty of the undraped model than are the goddesses and women of Giorgione. The passion and throb of humanity are replaced by a subtler and less easily explicable charm; beauty becomes a perfectly balanced and finely modulated harmony.
These identifications are all-important, not only in connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first time satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students of Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of the Venetian idyll generally.
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