er, saying nothing, but staring
hard at me (as I could feel) with gimlet eyes; while a few feet distant
I sat too, peering through the glasses at Giorgione's masterpiece, of
which I give a reproduction on the opposite page.

It is very beautiful; it grows more beautiful; but it does not give me
such pleasure as the Giovanelli pastoral. I doubt if Giorgione had the
altar-piece temperament. He was not for churches; and indeed there were
so many brushes for churches, that his need never have been called upon.
He was wholly individual, wistful, pleasure-seeking and
pleasure-missing, conscious of the brevity of life and the elusiveness
of joy; of the earth earthy; a kind of Keats in colour, with, as one
critic--I think Mr. Ricketts--has pointed out, something of Rossetti
too. Left to himself he would have painted only such idylls as the
Giovanelli picture.

[Illustration: ALTAR-PIECE
BY GIORGIONE
_At Castel Franco_]

Yet this altar-piece is very beautiful, and, as I say, it grows more
beautiful as you look at it, even under such conditions as I endured,
and even after much restoration. The lines and pattern are Giorgione's,
howsoever the re-painter may have toiled. The two saints are so kind and
reasonable (and never let it be forgotten that we may have, in our
National Gallery, one of the studies for S. Liberale), and so simple and
natural in their movements and position; the Madonna is at once so sweet
and so little of a mother; the landscape on the right is so very
Giorgionesque, with all the right ingredients--the sea, the glade, the
lovers, and the glow. If anything disappoints it is the general colour
scheme, and in a Giorgione for that to disappoint is amazing. Let us
then blame the re-painter. The influence of Giovanni Bellini in the
arrangement is undoubtable; but the painting was Giorgione's own and his
the extra touch of humanity.

Another day I went as far afield as Padua, also with Giorgione in mind,
for Baedeker, I noticed, gives one of his pictures there a star. Of
Padua I want to write much, but here, at this moment, Giotto being
forgotten, it is merely as a casket containing two (or more) Giorgiones
that the city exists. From Venice it is distant half an hour by fast
trains, or by way of Fusina, two hours. I went on the occasion of this
Giorgione pilgrimage by fast train, and returned in the little tram to
Fusina and so, across the lagoon, into Venice, with the sun behind me,
and the red bricks of