terly
foreign to his nature; he records an impression, frankly surrendering
his spirit to the sense of joy and beauty. He is not seldom incoherent,
and may even grow careless, but in power of imagination and exuberance
of fancy he is always supreme.

In one respect, however, Giorgione shows himself a greater than Schubert
or Keats. He has a profounder insight into human nature in its varying
aspects than either the musician or the poet. He is less a visionary,
because his experience of men and things is greater than theirs; his
outlook is wider, he is less self-centred. This power of grasping
objective truth naturally shows itself most readily in the portraits he
painted, and it was due to the force of circumstances, as I believe,
that this faculty was trained and developed. Had Giorgione lived aloof
from the world, had not his natural reticence and sensitiveness been
dominated by outside influences, he might have remained all his life
dreaming dreams, and seeing visions, a lyric poet indeed, but not a
great and living, influence in his generation. Yet such undoubtedly he
was, for he effected nothing short of a revolution in the contemporary
art of Venice. Can the same be said of Schubert or Keats? The truth is
that Giorgione had opportunities of studying human nature such as the
others never enjoyed; fortune smiled upon him in his earliest years, and
he found himself thrust into the society of the great, who were eager to
sit to him for their portraits. How the young Castelfrancan first
achieved such distinction is not told us by the historians, but I have
ventured to connect his start in life with the presence of the ex-Queen
of Cyprus, Caterina Cornaro, at Asolo, near Castelfranco; I think it
more than probable that her patronage and recommendation launched the
young painter on his successful career in Venice. Certain it is that he
painted her portrait in his earlier days, and if, as I have sought to
prove, Signor Crespi's picture is the long-lost portrait of the great
lady, we may well understand the instant success such an achievement
won.

Here, if anywhere, we get Giorgione's great interpretative qualities,
his penetration into human nature, his reading of character. It is an
astonishing thing for one so young to have done, explicable
psychologically on the existence of a lively sympathy between the great
lady and the poet-painter. Had we other portraits of the fair sex by
Giorgione, I venture to think we shoul