. Violent action did not attract him. Whatever the subject,
if it were possible to group the figures together at a moment when
they were beautifully doing nothing, he did so. But he liked still
more to paint ideal scenes from his own fancy, where young people sit
in easy attitudes upon the grass, conversing for an instant in the
intervals of the music they make upon pipes and guitar. He was the
first artist, so far as I know, to paint these half real, half imaginary
scenes, of which our picture may be one. In all of them landscape bears
an important part, and in some the background has become the picture
and completely subordinated the figures. In this little 'Golden Age'
the landscape is quiet in tone, tinged with melancholy, romantic, to
suit the mood of the figures. Its colouring, though rich, is subdued,
more like the tints of autumn than the fresh hues of spring. The
Venetians excelled in their treatment of colour. They lived in an
uncommon world of it. Giorgione saw his picture in his mind's eye as
a blaze of rich colour; he did not see the figures sharply outlined
against a remote background, as are the three in Raphael's 'Knight's
Dream.' That does not mean that Raphael, like the artist of the Richard
II. diptych, failed to make his figures look solid, but that he saw
beauty most in the outlines of the body and the curves of the drapery,
irrespective of colour, whereas to Giorgione's eye outline was nothing
without colour and light and shade. The body of the King upon the throne
in our picture is massed against the background, but there is no
definite outline to divide it from the tree behind. In this respect
Giorgione was curiously modern for his date, as we shall see in pictures
of a still later time.

Giorgione was only thirty-three years old when he died of the plague
in 1510, the same year as Botticelli. His master, Giovanni Bellini,
who was born in 1428, outlived him by six years, and the great Titian,
his fellow-pupil in the studio of Bellini, lived another half-century
or more.

Titian in many ways summed up all that was greatest in Venetian art.
His pictures have less romance than those of Giorgione, except during
the short space of time when he painted under the spell of his brother
artist. It is extremely difficult to distinguish then between Titian's
early and Giorgione's late work. Titian perhaps had the greater
intellect. Giorgione's pictures vary according to his mood, while
Titian's express a l