d find in them his reading of the
human soul even more plainly evidenced than in the male portraits we
actually possess.[140] For it is clear that the artist was
"impressionable," and he would have given us more sympathetic
interpretations of the fair sex than those which Titian has left us. The
so-called "Portrait of the Physician Parma" (at Vienna) is another
instance of Giorgione's grasp of character, the virility and suppressed
energy being admirably seized, the conception approaching more nearly to
Titian's in its essential dignity than is usually the case with
Giorgione's portraits. It is a matter of more regret, therefore, that
the likenesses of the Doges Agostino Barberigo and Leonardo Loredano are
missing, for in them we might have had specimens of work comparable to
the Caterina Cornaro, which, in my opinion at all events, is Giorgione's
masterpiece of portraiture.

I have given reasons elsewhere for dating this portrait at latest 1500.
It is probably anterior by a few years to the close of the century. This
deduction, if correct, has far-reaching consequences: it becomes
actually the first _modern_ portrait ever painted, for it is the
earliest instance of a portrait instinct with the newer life of the
Renaissance. And this brings us to the question: What was Giorgione's
relation to that great awakening of the human spirit which we call the
Renaissance? Mr. Berenson answers the question thus: "His pictures are
the perfect reflex of the Renaissance at its height."[141] If this be
taken to mean that Giorgione _anticipated_ the aspirations and ideals of
the riper Renaissance, I think we may acquiesce in the phrase; but that
the onward movement of this great revival coincided only with the
artist's years, and culminated at his death, is not historically
correct. The wave had not reached its highest point by the year 1510,
and Titian was yet to rise to a fuller and grander expression of the
human soul. But Giorgione may rightly be called the Herald of the
Renaissance, not only by virtue of the position he holds in Venetian
painting, but by priority of appearance on the wider horizon of Italian
Art.

Let us take the four great representative exponents of Italian Art at
its best, Raphael, Correggio, Leonardo, and Michel Angelo.
Chronologically, Giorgione precedes Raphael and Correggio, though
Leonardo and Michel Angelo were born before him.[142] But had either of
the latter proclaimed a new order of things as early