t
and sentiment, which taxed so severely the resources of the generations
of Florentine artists, those earlier Venetian painters, down to
Carpaccio and the Bellini, seem never for a moment to have been tempted
even to lose sight of the scope of their art in its strictness, or to
forget that painting must be, before all things decorative, a thing for
the eye; a space of colour on the wall, only more dexterously blent than
the marking of its precious stone or the chance interchange of sun and
shade upon it--this, to begin and end with--whatever higher matter of
thought, or poetry, or religious reverie might play its part therein,
between. At last, with final mastery of all the technical secrets of his
art, and with somewhat more than "a spark of the divine fire" to his
share, comes Giorgione. He is the inventor of genre, of those easily
movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of
allegorical or historic teaching--little groups of real men and women,
amid congruous furniture or landscape--morsels of actual life,
conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they come
to seem like glimpses of life from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly
blent colour, obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a mere
architectural scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall; he frames them
by the hands of some skilful carver, so that people may move them
readily and take with them where they go, like a poem in manuscript, or
a musical instrument, to be used, at will, as a means of self-education,
stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence, into one's
cabinet, to enrich the air as with some choice aroma, and, like persons,
live with us, for a day or a lifetime. Of all art like this, art which
has played so large a part in men's culture since that time, Giorgione
is the initiator. Yet in him too that old Venetian clearness or justice,
in the apprehension of the essential limitations of the pictorial art,
is still undisturbed; and, while he interfuses his painted work with a
high-strung sort of poetry, caught directly from a singularly rich and
high-strung sort of life, yet in his selection of subject, or phase of
subject, in the subordination of mere subject to pictorial design, to
the main purpose of a picture, he is typical of that aspiration of all
the arts towards music, which I have endeavoured to explain,--towards
the perfect identification of matter and form.

Born so near to Titian, th