h he entertained
his friends with music, he met a certain lady of whom he became greatly
enamoured, and "they rejoiced greatly," says Vasari, "the one and the
other, in their loves." And two quite different legends concerning it
agree in this, that it was through this lady he came by his death:
Ridolfi relating that, being robbed of her by one of his pupils, he died
of grief at the double treason;--Vasari, that she being secretly
stricken of the plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, he
took the sickness from her mortally, along with her kisses, and so
briefly departed.

But, although the number of Giorgione's extant works has been thus
limited by recent criticism, all is not done when the real and the
traditional elements in what concerns him have been discriminated; for,
in what is connected with a great name, much that is not real is often
very stimulating; and, for the aesthetic philosopher, over and above the
real Giorgione and his authentic extant works, there remains the
Giorgionesque also--an influence, a spirit or type in art, active in men
so different as those to whom many of his supposed works are really
assignable--a veritable school, which grew together out of all those
fascinating works rightly or wrongly attributed to him; out of many
copies from, or variations on him, by unknown or uncertain workmen,
whose drawings and designs were, for various reasons, prized as his; out
of the immediate impression he made upon his contemporaries, and with
which he continued in men's minds; out of many traditions of subject and
treatment, which really descend from him to our own time, and by
retracing which we fill out the original image; Giorgione thus becoming
a sort of impersonation of Venice itself, its projected reflex or ideal,
all that was intense or desirable in it thus crystallising about the
memory of this wonderful young man.

And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of this
School of Giorgione, as we may call it, which, for most of us,
notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the "new Vasari," will
still identify itself with those famous pictures at Florence, Dresden
and Paris; and in which a certain artistic ideal is defined for us--the
conception of a peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we may
understand as the Giorgionesque, wherever we find it, whether in
Venetian work generally, or in work of our own time--and of which the
Concert, that undoubted work of G