f pause and
quiet that they bring with them, the way in which they indefinably take
possession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond their
radiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet we
need not mourn overmuch, or too painfully set to work to revise our
whole conception of Venetian idyllic art as matured in the first years
of the Cinquecento. True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo, not
less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian and
Giorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the
lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they
have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no
doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more
fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular
to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic
legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of
the golden prime disdained to represent--or it may be unconsciously
shrank from representing--the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic
and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. Giorgione
embodies in such a picture as the _Adrastus and Hypsipyle_, or the
_Aeneas and Evander_, not so much what has been related to him of those
ancient legends as his own mood when he is brought into contact with
them; he transposes his motive from a dramatic into a lyrical
atmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something "rich
and strange," coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmly
human fantasy. Titian, in the _Sacred and Profane Love_, as for
identification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep close
to the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. But
for all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, for
the splendour of female loveliness unveiled, for the piquant contrast of
female loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He has
presented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such a
delightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries to
decipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian in these exquisite
idylls--for so we may still dare to call them--have consciously or
unconsciously achieved, is the indissoluble union of humanity outwardly
quiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion, to