r all, we find ourselves
invariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them--taking _him_ as
the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries and
successors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may be,
combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his
creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has
never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then
Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the
poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a
higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been
able to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so
incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of
a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme
limits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great
_Madonna del Carmelo_ at the Venice Academy and the magnificent
_Trinity_ in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near Udine may
be taken to prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms
to the painter of the _Assunta_, the _Entombment_ and the _Christ at
Emmaus_? Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of illumination,
a Titanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit and
placing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative not
altogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in art.
All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between the
two, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, even
though it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive the
supreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacred
drama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A not
dissimilar comparison might be instituted between the portraits of
Lorenzo Lotto and those of our master. No Venetian painter of the golden
prime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him,
while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individuality
submitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his own
tremulous sensitiveness and charm. In this way no portraits of the
sixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet in
deciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiar
temperament of the painter himself, as well as th