in Venice on the Colleoni statue, had died
there in 1488, and that Andrea da Solario, Leonardo's pupil and
imitator, was long in Venice too. Leonardo and Giorgione share a
profound interest in the dangerous and subtly alluring; but the
difference is this, that we feel Leonardo to have been the master of his
romantic emotions, while Giorgione suggests that for himself they could
be too much.

It is not, however, influence upon Giorgione that is most interesting,
but Giorgione's influence upon others. One of his great achievements was
the invention of the _genre_ picture. He was the first lyrical painter:
the first to make a canvas represent a single mood, much as a sonnet
does. He was the first to combine colour and pattern to no other end but
sheer beauty. The picture had a subject, of course, but the subject no
longer mattered. Il fuoco Giorgionesco--the Giorgionesque fire--was the
phrase invented to describe the new wonder he brought into painting. A
comparison of Venetian art before Giorgione and after shows instantly
how this flame kindled. Not only did Giorgione give artists a liberty
they had never enjoyed before, but he enriched their palettes. His
colours burned and glowed. Much of the gorgeousness which we call
Titianesque was born in the brain of Giorgione, Titian's fellow-worker,
and (for Titian's birth date is uncertain: either 1477 or 1487) probably
his senior. You may see the influence at work in our National Gallery:
Nos. 41, 270, 35, and 635 by Titian would probably have been far
different but for Giorgione. So stimulating was Giorgione's genius to
Titian, who was his companion in Bellini's studio, that there are
certain pictures which the critics divide impartially between the two,
chief among them the "Concert" at the Pitti; while together they
decorated the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Canal. It is assumed
that Titian finished certain of Giorgione's works when he died in 1510.
The plague which killed Giorgione killed also 20,000 other Venetians,
and sixty-six years later, in another visitation of the scourge, Titian
also died of it.

Castel Franco is five-and-twenty miles from Venice, but there are so few
trains that it is practically a day's excursion there and back. I sat in
the train with four commercial travellers and watched the water give way
to maize, until chancing to look up for a wider view there were the blue
mountains ahead of us, with clouds over them and here and there a patch
of