ing the quintessence of Nature's most significant beauties
without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.
Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had,
unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, and
the Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesque
influence, the true gift of the landscape-painter. Atmospheric
conditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions;
and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity of
the landscape in the great _Pieta_ of the Brera, the ominous sunset in
our own _Agony in the Garden_ of the National Gallery, the cheerful
all-pervading glow of the beautiful little _Sacred Conversation_ at the
Uffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late _Baptism of Christ_ in
the Church of S. Corona at Vicenza. To attempt a discussion of the
landscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as well
as the most fascinating of subjects--so various is it even in the few
well-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument of
expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of
his personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione--judging it from
such unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of
Castelfranco, the so-called _Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the
Soldier_[1] in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called _Three
Philosophers_ in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--has in it still a
slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection. It
was reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullest
development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the _Three Ages_ and
the _Sacred and Profane Love_. Then all himself, and with hardly a rival
in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of
earth and sky which enframe the figures in the _Worship of Venus_, the
_Bacchanal_, and, above all, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_; to give back his
impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty
which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred
Conversations. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the _St.
Peter Martyr_, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic
amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.
The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be
said to exist in the late _Jupiter and An