* * *

We have now taken the three universally accepted Giorgiones; how are we
to proceed in our investigations? The simplest course will be to take
the pictures acknowledged by those modern writers who have devoted most
study to the question, and examine them in the light of the results to
which we have attained. Those writers are Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who
published their account of Giorgione in 1871, and Morelli, who wrote in
1877. Now it is notorious that the results at which these critics
arrived are often widely divergent, but a great deal too much has been
made of the differences and not enough of the points of agreement.
As a matter of fact, Morelli only questions three of the thirteen
Giorgiones accepted definitely by Crowe and Cavalcaselle. Leaving these
three aside for the moment, we may take the remaining ten (three of
which we have already examined), and after deducting three others in
English collections to which Morelli does not specifically refer, we are
left with four more pictures on which these rival authorities are
agreed.

[Illustration: _Alinari photo. Uffizi Gallery, Florence_

THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON]

These are the two small works in the Uffizi, representing the "Judgment
of Solomon" and the "Trial of Moses," the "Knight of Malta," also in the
Uffizi, and the "Christ bearing the Cross," till lately in the Casa
Loschi at Vicenza, and now belonging to Mrs. Gardner of Boston, U.S.A.

The two small companion pictures in the Uffizi, The "Judgment of
Solomon" and the "Trial of Moses," or "Ordeal by Fire," as it is also
called, connect in style closely with the "Adrastus and Hypsipyle." They
are conceived in the same romantic strain, and carried out with scarcely
less brilliance and charm. The story, as in the previous pictures, is
not insisted upon; the biblical episode and the rabbinical legend are
treated in the same fantastic way as the classic myth. Giovanni Bellini
had first introduced this lyric conception in his treatment of the
mediaeval allegory, as we see it in his picture, also in the Uffizi,
hanging near the Giorgiones; all three works were originally together in
the Medici residence of Poggio Imperiale, and there can be little doubt
are intimately related in origin to one another. Bellini's latest
biographer, Mr. Roger Fry, places this Allegory about the years 1486-8,
a date which points to a very early origin for the other two.[18] For
it is extremely likely that