tful fancy, his
love of colour, and his gaiety of humour would have fitted him admirably
for this kind of painting. But Giorgione, the follower of both these
masters, starting with the qualities of both as his inheritance,
combined the refined feeling and poetry of Bellini with Carpaccio's
gaiety and love of beauty and colour. Stirred with the enthusiasms of
his own generation as people who had lived through other phases of
feeling could not be, Giorgione painted pictures so perfectly in touch
with the ripened spirit of the Renaissance that they met with the
success which those things only find that at the same moment wake us to
the full sense of a need and satisfy it.

Giorgione's life was short, and very few of his works--not a score in
all--have escaped destruction. But these suffice to give us a glimpse
into that brief moment when the Renaissance found its most genuine
expression in painting. Its over-boisterous passions had quieted down
into a sincere appreciation of beauty and of human relations. It would
be really hard to say more about Giorgione than this, that his pictures
are the perfect reflex of the Renaissance at its height. His works, as
well as those of his contemporaries and followers, still continue to be
appreciated most by people whose attitude of mind and spirit has most in
common with the Renaissance, or by those who look upon Italian art not
merely as art, but as the product of this period. For that is its
greatest interest. Other schools have accomplished much more in mere
painting than the Italian. A serious student of art will scarcely think
of putting many of even the highest achievements of the Italians,
considered purely as technique, beside the works of the great Dutchmen,
the great Spaniard, or even the masters of to-day. Our real interest in
Italian painting is at bottom an interest in that art which we almost
instinctively feel to have been the fittest expression found by a period
in the history of modern Europe which has much in common with youth.
The Renaissance has the fascination of those years when we seemed so
full of promise both to ourselves and to everybody else.

=VIII. The Giorgionesque Spirit.=--Giorgione created a demand which other
painters were forced to supply at the risk of finding no favour. The
older painters accommodated themselves as best they could. One of them
indeed, turning toward the new in a way that is full of singular charm,
gave his later works all the bea