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Dying as he did at the age of thirty-three, Giorgone must have left many pictures unfinished, which Titian, his friend and disciple almost, may well have completed, and even signed, in an age when works, almost wholly untouched by a master, were certainly sold as his.
A simple list of the pictures to be found here would cover many pages in print, embracing the names of such artists as Salvator Rosa, Giorgone, Bassano, Perugino, Carlo Dolce, Guido Reni, Rembrandt, Andrea del Sarto, Van Dyck, etc. All of these paintings are high in artistic merit; many of them are admirable, and all are beyond price in money.
He was dressed entirely in black, rather short, but slenderly made; sallow, but clear, with long black curls and a Murillo face, and looked altogether like a young Jesuit or a Venetian official by Giorgone or Titian. His countenance was reserved and his manner not easy: yet, on the whole, his face indicated intellect and his figure blood. The features haunted the Duke's memory.
From an often-cited passage in the Anonimo, describing Giorgione's great Venus now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year 1525, when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn that it was finished by Titian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda, che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo da Castelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." The Cupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but the landscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance to those which enframe the figures in the Three Ages, Sacred and Profane Love, and the "Noli me tangere" of the National Gallery. The same Anonimo in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice a Dead Christ supported by an Angel, from the hand of Giorgone, which, according to him, had been retouched by Titian. It need hardly be pointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing in common with the coarse and thoroughly second-rate Dead Christ supported by Child-Angels, still to be seen at the Monte di Piet
It was this Giustinian who had been carried in triumph on the shoulders of the people, before the Doge and the Signoria who had been the hero when that solemn Mass, in honor of the victory, had been offered up in the ducal chapel when the Rialto and the Merceria, for the extravagant joy of Venice, were draped in blue and scarlet and gold, bound laurel wreaths and decorated with the art treasures of Titian and Giorgone.
Indeed, it is from 1454 to 1572, between the institution of state inquisitors and the battle of Lepanto, between the accomplishment of internal despotism and the last of the great outward victories, that the brilliant productions of Venetian art appear. John Bellini was born in 1426, Giorgone died in 1511, Titian in 1578, Veronese in 1572 and Tintoretto in 1594.
The early work of the greatest painter of Italy, of the world, greatest in the variety, number, and splendour of his pictures, is represented in the Pitti, happily enough by one of the most lovely of all Italian paintings, the Concert , so long given to Giorgone.
But indeed one might think that, even with Morelli, Crowe, and Cavalcaselle, and Berenson against us, not to name others who have done much for the history of painting in Italy, we might still believe, not altogether without reason, that Giorgone had some part in the Concert, which, after all, passed as his altogether for two hundred and fifty years; was bought, indeed, as his in 1654, only seventy-eight years after Titian's death, by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici from Paolo del Sera, the Florentine collector in Venice.
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