iorgione in the Pitti Palace, is the
typical instance, and a pledge authenticating the connexion of the
school with the master.

I have spoken of a certain interpretation of the matter or subject of a
work of art with the form of it, a condition realised absolutely only in
music, as the condition to which every form of art is perpetually
aspiring. In the art of painting, the attainment of this ideal
condition, this perfect interpretation of the subject with colour and
design, depends, of course, in great measure, on dexterous choice of
that subject, or phase of subject; and such choice is one of the secrets
of Giorgione's school. It is the school of genre, and employs itself
mainly with "painted idylls," but, in the production of this pictorial
poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter as
lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to complete
expression by drawing and colour. For although its productions are
painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells itself
without an articulated story. The master is pre-eminent for the
resolution, the ease and quickness, with which he reproduces
instantaneous motion--the lacing-on of armour, with the head bent back
so stately--the fainting lady--the embrace, rapid as the kiss caught,
with death itself, from dying lips--the momentary conjunction of mirrors
and polished armour and still water, by which all the sides of a solid
image are presented at once, solving that casuistical question whether
painting can present an object as completely as sculpture. The sudden
act, the rapid transition of thought, the passing expression--this he
arrests with that vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, il fuoco
Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the ideality of the
highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of
profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a
smile, perhaps--some brief and wholly concrete moment--into which,
however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long
history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and
future in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants
the school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that
feverish, tumultuously coloured life of the old citizens of
Venice--exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be
spectators of all the fulness of existence, and which are l