ough a little before him, that these two
companion pupils of the aged Giovanni Bellini may almost be called
contemporaries, Giorgione stands to Titian in something like the
relationship of Sordello to Dante, in Mr. Browning's poem. Titian, when
he leaves Bellini, becomes, in turn, the pupil of Giorgione; he lives in
constant labour more than sixty years after Giorgione is in his grave;
and with such fruit, that hardly one of the greater towns of Europe is
without some fragment of it. But the slightly older man, with his so
limited actual product (what remains to us of it seeming, when narrowly
examined, to reduce itself to almost one picture, like Sordello's one
fragment of lovely verse), yet expresses, in elementary motive and
principle, that spirit--itself the final acquisition of all the long
endeavours of Venetian art--which Titian spreads over his whole life's
activity.

And, as we might expect, something fabulous and illusive has always
mingled itself in the brilliancy of Giorgione's fame. The exact
relationship to him of many works--drawings, portraits, painted
idylls--often fascinating enough, which in various collections went by
his name, was from the first uncertain. Still, six or eight famous
pictures at Dresden, Florence and the Louvre, were undoubtedly
attributed to him, and in these, if anywhere, something of the splendour
of the old Venetian humanity seemed to have been preserved. But of those
six or eight famous pictures it is now known that only one is certainly
from Giorgione's hand. The accomplished science of the subject has come
at last, and, as in other instances, has not made the past more real for
us, but assured us that we possess of it less than we seemed to possess.
Much of the work on which Giorgione's immediate fame depended, work done
for instantaneous effect, in all probability passed away almost within
his own age, like the frescoes on the facade of the fondaco dei Tedeschi
at Venice, some crimson traces of which, however, still give a strange
additional touch of splendour to the scene of the Rialto. And then there
is a barrier or borderland, a period about the middle of the sixteenth
century, in passing through which the tradition miscarries, and the true
outlines of Giorgione's work and person become obscured. It became
fashionable for wealthy lovers of art, with no critical standard of
authenticity, to collect so-called works of Giorgione, and a multitude
of imitations came into circu