ce, I found myself restless for this
rare spirit, and therefore arranged a little diversion to Castel Franco,
where he was born and where his great altar-piece is preserved.

But first let us look at Giorgione's career. Giorgio Barbarelli was born
at Castel Franco in 1477 or 1478. The name by which we know him
signifies the great Giorgio and was the reward of his personal charm and
unusual genius. Very little is known of his life, Vasari being none too
copious when it comes to the Venetians. What we do know, however, is
that he was very popular, not only with other artists but with the fair,
and in addition to being a great painter was an accomplished musician.
His master was Giovanni Bellini, who in 1494, when we may assume that
Giorgione, being sixteen, was beginning to paint, was approaching
seventy.

Giorgione, says Vasari in an exultant passage, was "so enamoured of
beauty in nature that he cared only to draw from life and to represent
all that was fairest in the world around him". He had seen, says the
same authority, "certain works from the hand of Leonardo which were
painted with extraordinary softness, and thrown into powerful relief, as
is said, by extreme darkness of the shadows, a manner which pleased him
so much that he ever after continued to imitate it, and in oil painting
approached very closely to the excellence of his model. A zealous
admirer of the good in art, Giorgione always selected for representation
the most beautiful objects that he could find, and these he treated in
the most varied manner: he was endowed by nature with highly felicitous
qualities, and gave to all that he painted, whether in oil or fresco, a
degree of life, softness, and harmony (being more particularly
successful in the shadows) which caused all the more eminent artists to
confess that he was born to infuse spirit into the forms of painting,
and they admitted that he copied the freshness of the living form more
exactly than any other painter, not of Venice only, but of all other
places."

Leonardo, who was born in 1452, was Giorgione's senior by a quarter of a
century and one of the greatest names--if not quite the greatest
name--in art when Giorgione was beginning to paint. A story says that
they met when Leonardo was in Venice in 1500. One cannot exactly derive
any of Giorgione's genius from Leonardo, but the fame of the great
Lombardy painter was in the air, and we must remember that his master
Verrocchio, after working