for us idle figures with radiant flesh, or robed in rich
costumes, surrounded by lovely country, and we do not ask or care why
they are gathered together. We have all had dreams of Elysian fields,
"where falls not any rain, nor ever wind blows loudly," where all is
rest and freedom, where music blends with the plash of fountains, and
fruits ripen, and lovers dream away the days, and no one asks what went
before or what follows after. The Golden Age, the haunt of fauns and
nymphs: there never has been such a day, or such a land: it is a mood, a
vision: it has danced before the eyes of poets, from David to Keats and
Tennyson: it has rocked the tired hearts of men in all ages: the vision
of a resting-place which makes no demands and where the dwellers are
exempt from the cares and weakness of mortality. Needless to say, it is
an ideal born of the East; it is the Eastern dream of Paradise, and it
speaks to that strain in the temperament which recognises that life
cannot be all thought, but also needs feeling and emotion. And for the
first time in all the world the painter of Castelfranco sets that vague
dream before men's eyes. The world, with its wistful yearnings and
questionings, such as Leonardo or Botticelli embodied, said little to
his audience. Here was their natural atmosphere, though they had never
known it before. These deep, solemn tones, these fused and golden lights
are what Giorgione grasps from the material world, and as he steeps his
senses in them the subject counts but little in the deep enjoyment they
communicate. We, who have seen his manner repeated and developed through
thousands of pictures, find it difficult to realise that there had been
nothing like it before, that it was a unique departure, that when
Bellini and Titian looked at his first creations they must have
experienced a shock of revelation. The old definite style must have
seemed suddenly hard and meagre, and every time they looked on the
glorious world, the deep glow of sunset, the mysterious shades of
falling night, they must have felt they were endowed with a sense to
which they had hitherto been strangers, but which, it was at once
apparent, was their true heritage. They had found themselves, and in
them Venice found her real expression, and with Giorgione and those who
felt his impetus began the true Venetian School, set apart from all
other forms of art by its way of using and diffusing and intensifying
colour.

When Giorgione, the s