ght. Then
comes the dragon breathing out flames and smoke, the most awesome
dragon that ever was seen; and there too is the picture of St.
Tryphonius taming the terrible basilisk. The little boy-saint has
folded his hands together, and looks upward in prayer, paying little
heed to the evil glare of the basilisk, who prances at his feet. A
crowd of gaily dressed courtiers stand whispering and watching behind
the marble steps, and here again in the background we have the canals
and bridges of Venice, the marble palaces and gay carpets hung from out
the windows. Everything is of the very best of its kind, and painted
with the greatest care, even to the design of the inlaid work on the
marble steps.

As we pass from picture to picture, we wish we had known this
Carpaccio, for he must have been a splendid teller of stories; and how
he would have made us shiver with his dragons and his basilisks, and
laugh over the antics of his little boys and girls, his scarlet parrots
and green lizards.

But although we cannot hear him tell his stories, he still speaks
through those wonderful old pictures which you will some day see when
you visit the fairyland of Italy, and pay your court to Venice, Queen
of the Sea.

GIORGIONE

As we look back upon the lives of the great painters we can see how
each one added some new knowledge to the history of Art, and unfolded
fresh beauties to the eyes of the world. Very gradually all this was
done, as a bud slowly unfolds its petals until the full-blown flower
shows forth its perfect beauty. But here and there among the painters
we find a man who stands apart from the rest, one who takes a new and
almost startling way of his own. He does not gradually add new truths
to the old ones, but makes an entirely new scheme of his own. Such a
man was Giorgione, whose story we tell to-day.

It was at the same time as Leonardo da Vinci was the talk of the
Florentine world, that another great genius was at work in Venice,
setting his mark high above all who had gone before. Giorgio Barbarelli
was born at Castel Franco, a small town not far from Venice, and it was
to the great city of the sea that he was sent as soon as he was old
enough, there to be trained under the famous Bellini. He was a handsome
boy, tall and well-built, and with such a royal bearing that his
companions at once gave him the name of Giorgione, or George the Great.
And, as so often happened in those days, the nickname clung to him