aracter through some too severe process of cleaning, but Venetian art
has hardly anything more magnificent to show than the costume, with the
quilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin which occupies so prominent a
place in the picture.

[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery.
From a Photograph by Hanfstaengl_.]

The so-called _Concert_ of the Pitti Palace, which depicts a young
Augustinian monk as he plays on a keyed instrument, having on one side
of him a youthful cavalier in a plumed hat, on the other a bareheaded
clerk holding a bass-viol, was, until Morelli arose, almost universally
looked upon as one of the most typical Giorgiones.[31] The most gifted
of the purely aesthetic critics who have approached the Italian
Renaissance, Walter Pater, actually built round this _Concert_ his
exquisite study on the School of Giorgione. There can be little doubt,
notwithstanding, that Morelli was right in denying the authorship of
Barbarelli, and tentatively, for he does no more, assigning the so
subtly attractive and pathetic _Concert_ to the early time of Titian. To
express a definitive opinion on the latter point in the present state of
the picture would be somewhat hazardous. The portrait of the modish
young cavalier and that of the staid elderly clerk, whose baldness
renders tonsure impossible--that is just those portions of the canvas
which are least well preserved--are also those that least conclusively
suggest our master. The passion-worn, ultra-sensitive physiognomy of the
young Augustinian is, undoubtedly, in its very essence a Giorgionesque
creation, for the fellows of which we must turn to the Castelfranco
master's just now cited _Antonio Broccardo_, to his male portraits in
Berlin and at the Uffizi, to his figure of the youthful Pallas, son of
Evander, in the _Three Philosophers_. Closer to it, all the same, are
the _Raffo_ and the two portraits in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and
closer still is the supremely fine _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the Salon
Carre, that later production of Vecelli's early time. The _Concert_ of
the Pitti, so far as it can be judged through the retouches that cover
it, displays an art certainly not finer or more delicate, but yet in its
technical processes broader, swifter, and more synthetic than anything
that we can with certainty point to in the life-work of Barbarelli. The
large but handsome and flexible hands of the player are much nearer in
type and treat