ctures for private
gentlemen. Another, was to paint pictures of sheer loveliness with no
concern either with Scripture or history; and this is one of his
loveliest. It has all kinds of faults--and it is perfect. The drawing is
not too good; the painting is not too good; that broken pillar is both
commonplace and foolish; and yet the work is perfect because a perfect
artist made it. It is beautiful and mysterious and a little sad, all at
once, just as an evening landscape can be, and it is unmistakably the
work of one who felt beauty so deeply that his joyousness left him and
the melancholy that comes of the knowledge of transitoriness took its
place. Hence there is only one word that can adequately describe it and
that is Giorgionesque.

The picture is known variously as "The Tempest," for a thunderstorm is
working up; as "The Soldier and the Gipsy," as "Adrastus and Hypsipyle,"
and as "Giorgione's Family". In the last case the soldier watching the
woman would be the painter himself (who never married) and the woman the
mother of his child. Whatever we call it, the picture remains the same:
profoundly beautiful, profoundly melancholy. A sense of impending
calamity informs it. A lady observing it remarked to me, "Each is
thinking thoughts unknown to the other"; and they are thoughts of
unhappy morrows.

This, the Giovanelli Giorgione, which in 1817 was in the Manfrini palace
and was known as the "Famiglia di Giorgione," was the picture in all
Venice--indeed the picture in all the world--which most delighted Byron.
"To me," he wrote, "there are none like the Venetian--above all,
Giorgione." _Beppo_ has some stanzas on it. Thus:--

They've pretty faces yet, those same Venetians,
Black eyes, arched brows, and sweet expressions still
Such as of old were copied from the Grecians,
In ancient arts by moderns mimicked ill;
And like so many Venuses of Titian's
(The best's at Florence--see it, if ye will),
They look when leaning over the balcony,
Or stepped from out a picture by Giorgione,

Whose tints are Truth and Beauty at their best;
And when you to Manfrini's palace go,
That picture (howsoever fine the rest)
Is loveliest to my mind of all the show;
It may perhaps be also to _your_ zest
And that's the cause I rhyme upon it so,
'Tis but a portrait of his Son and Wife,
And self, but _such_ a Woman! Love in life;

Love in full life and lengt