as 1495? Michel
Angelo was just twenty years old, and he had not yet carved his "Pieta"
for S. Peter's. Leonardo, a man of forty-three, had not completed his
"Cenacolo," and the "Mona Lisa" would not be created for another five or
six years. Giorgione's "Caterina Cornaro," therefore, becomes the first
masterpiece of the earlier Renaissance, and proclaims a revolution in
the history of portraiture. In Venice itself we have only to look at the
contemporary portraits by Alvise Vivarini and Gentile Bellini, and at
the slightly earlier busts by Antonello da Messina, to see what a world
of difference in feeling and interpretation there is between them and
Giorgione's portraits. What a splendid array of artistic triumphs must
have sprung up around this masterpiece! The Cobham portrait and the
National Gallery "Poet" are alone left us in much of their pristine
splendour, but what of the lost portraits of the great Consalvo and of
the Doge Agostino Barberigo, both of which must date from the year 1500?

Giorgione is then the Herald of the Renaissance, and never did genius
arise in more fitting season. It was the right psychological moment for
such a man, and 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."[143] This is the secret of his
overwhelming influence on succeeding painters in Venice,--not, indeed,
on his direct pupil Sebastiano del Piombo, and on his friend and
associate Titian (who may fairly be called his pupil), but on such
different natures as Lotto, Palma, Bonifazio, Bordone, Pordenone,
Cariani, Romanino, Dosso Dossi, and a host of smaller men. The School of
Giorgione numbers far more adherents than even the School of Leonardo,
or the School of Raphael, not because of any direct teaching of the
master, but because the "Giorgionesque" spirit was abroad, and the taste
of the day required paintings like Giorgione's to satisfy it. But as no
revolution can be effected without a struggle, and as there are
invariably people opposed to any reform, whether in art or in anything
else, we need not be surprised to find the academic faction, represented
by the aged Giambellini and his pupils, resisting the progress of the
Newer Art. In Giorgione's own lifetime, the exact measure of the
opposition is not easy to gauge, but it bore fruit a few years la