, but not in kind.
The real reason, therefore, why it is impossible for certain pictures to
be by Giorgione is, not that they are not _good_ enough for him, but
that they are not _characteristic_. I insist on this point, because in
the matter of genuineness the touchstone of authenticity is so often to
be looked for in an answer to the question: Is this or that
characteristic? The personal equation is the all-important factor to be
recognised; it is the connecting link which often unites apparently
diverse phenomena, and explains what would otherwise appear to be
irreconcilable.

There is an intimate relation then between the artist and his work, and,
rightly interpreted, the latter can tell us much about the former.

Let us turn to Giorgione's work. Here we are brought face to face with
an initial difficulty, the great difficulty, in fact, which has stood so
much in the way of a more comprehensive understanding of the master, I
mean, that scarcely anything of his work is authenticated. Three
pictures alone have never been called in question by contending critics;
outside this inner ring is more or less debatable ground, and on this
wider arena the battle has raged until scarcely a shred of the painter's
work has emerged unscathed. The result has been to reduce the figure of
Giorgione to a shadowy myth, whose very existence, at the present rate
at which negative criticism progresses, will assuredly be called in
question.

If Bacon wrote Shakespeare, then Giorgione can be divided up between a
dozen Venetian artists, who "painted Giorgione." Fortunately three
pictures survive which refuse to be fitted in anywhere else except under
"Giorgione." This is the irreducible minimum, [Greek: _o anankaiotatos_]
Giorgione, with which we must start.

* * * * *

Of the three universally accepted pictures, first and foremost comes the
Castelfranco altar-piece, according to Mr. Ruskin "one of the two most
perfect pictures in existence; alone in the world as an imaginative
representation of Christianity, with a monk and a soldier on either side
... "[11] This great picture was painted before 1504, when the artist
was only twenty-seven years of age,[12] a fact which clearly proves that
his genius must have developed early. For not even a Giorgione can
produce such a masterpiece without a long antecedent course of training
and accomplishment. This is not the place to inquire into the nature and
charact