of the day did their
best to conform to it. Few authentic examples are left from his own
hand, but out of his conscious and devoted and more or less successful
imitators, there grew up a school, "out of all those fascinating works,
rightly or wrongly attributed to him; out of many copies from, or
variations on him, by unknown or uncertain workmen, whose drawings and
designs were, for various reasons, prized as his; out of the immediate
impression he made upon his contemporaries and with which he continued
in men's minds; out of many traditions of subject and treatment which
really descend from him to our own time, and by retracing which we fill
out the original image."

Summing up all these influences, he has left us the Giorgionesque;
the art of choosing a moment in which the subject and the elements of
colour and design are so perfectly fused and blended that we have no
need to ask for any more articulate story; a moment into which all the
significance, the fulness of existence has condensed itself, so that
we are conscious of the very essence of life. Those idylls of beings
wrapped into an ideal dreamland by music and the sound of water and the
beauty of wood and mountain and velvet sward, need all our conscious
apprehension of life if we are to drink in their full fascination. The
dream of the Lotos-eaters can only come with force to those who can
contrast it adequately with the experience, the complication, and the
thousand distractions of an over-civilised world. Rest and relaxation,
the power of the deeply tinted eventide, or of the fresh morning light,
and the calm that drinks in the sensations they are able to afford, are
among the precious things of life. The instinct upon which Giorgione's
work rests is the satisfying of the feeling as well as the thinking
faculty, the life of the heart, as compared to the life of the
intellect, the solution of life's problems by love instead of by
thought. It was the Eastern ideal, and its positive expression is
conveyed by means of colour, deep, restful, satisfying, fused and
controlled by chiaroscuro rather than by form.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Berlin. Portrait of a Man.
Buda-Pesth. Portrait of a Man.
Castelfranco. Duomo: Madonna with SS. Francis and Liberale.
Dresden. Sleeping Venus.
Florence. Uffizi: Trial of Moses (E.); Judgment of Solomon (E.); Knight
of Malta.
Hampton Court. A Shepherd.
Madrid. Madonna with SS. Roch and Anthony of