the experts admit, personally I prefer to consider that genius Giorgione.  Giorgione, who was born in 1477 and died young—­at thirty-three—­was, like Titian, the pupil of Bellini, but was greatly influenced by Leonardo da Vinci.  Later he became Titian’s master.  He was passionately devoted to music and to ladies, and it was indeed from a lady that he had his early death, for he continued to kiss her after she had taken the plague. (No bad way to die, either; for to be in the power of an emotion that sways one to such foolishness is surely better than to live the lukewarm calculating lives of most of us.) Giorgione’s claim to distinction is that not only was he a glorious colourist and master of light and shade, but may be said to have invented small genre pictures that could be earned about and hung in this or that room at pleasure—­such pictures as many of the best Dutch painters were to bend their genius to almost exclusively—­his favourite subjects being music parties and picnics.  These Moses and Solomon pictures in the Uffizi are of course only a pretext for gloriously coloured arrangements of people with rich scenic backgrounds.  No.621 is the finer.  The way in which the baby is being held in the other indicates how little Giorgione thought of verisimilitude.  The colour was the thing.

After the Giorgiones the Titians, chief of which is No.633, “The Madonna and Child with S. John and S. Anthony,” sometimes called the “Madonna of the Roses,” a work which throws a pallor over all Tuscan pictures; No.626, the golden Flora, who glows more gloriously every moment (whom we shall see again, at the Pitti, as the Magdalen); the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Nos.605 and 599, the Duchess set at a window with what looks so curiously like a deep blue Surrey landscape through it and a village spire in the midst; and 618, an unfinished Madonna and Child in which the Master’s methods can be followed.  The Child, completed save for the final bath of light, is a miracle of draughtsmanship.

The triptych by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) is of inexhaustible interest, for here, as ever, Mantegna is full of thought and purpose.  The left panel represents the Ascension, Christ being borne upwards by eleven cherubim in a solid cloud; the right panel—­by far the best, I think—­shows the Circumcision, where the painter has set himself various difficulties of architecture and goldsmith’s work for the pleasure of overcoming them, every detail being painted with Dutch minuteness and yet leaving the picture big; while the middle panel, which is concave, depicts an Adoration of the Magi that will bear much study.  The whole effect is very northern:  not much less so than our own new National Gallery Mabuse.  Mantegna also has a charming Madonna and Child, No. 1025, with pleasing pastoral and stone-quarrying activities in the distance.