Giorgione, did we but possess enough of his authentic works to judge by, would be found the first painter of the true Renaissance among the Venetians, the inaugurate of the third and great period.[277] He died at the age of thirty-six, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown.  Time has destroyed the last vestige of his frescoes.  Criticism has reduced the number of his genuine easel pictures to half a dozen.  He exists as a great name.  The part he played in the development of Venetian art was similar to that of Marlowe in the history of our drama.  He first cut painting altogether adrift from mediaeval moorings, and launched it on the waves of the Renaissance liberty.  While equal as a colourist to Bellini, though in a different and more sensuous region, Giorgione, by the variety and inventiveness of his conception, proved himself a painter of the calibre of Titian.  Sacred subjects he seems to have but rarely treated, unless such purely idyllic pictures as the “Finding of Moses” in the Uffizzi, and the “Meeting of Jacob and Rachel” at Dresden deserve the name.  Allegories of deep and problematic meaning, the key whereof has to be found in states of the emotion rather than, in thoughts, delighted him.  He may be said to have invented the Venetian species of romance picture, where an episode in a novella forms the motive of the painting.[278] Nor was he deficient in tragic power, as the tremendous study for a Lucrece in the Uffizzi collection sufficiently proves.  In his drawings he models the form without outline by massive distribution of light and dark.  In style they are the very opposite of Lionardo’s clearly defined studies touched with the metal point upon prepared paper.  They suggest colouring, and are indeed the designs of a great colourist, who saw things under the conditions of their tints and tone.

Of the undisputed pictures by Giorgione, the grandest is the “Monk at the Clavichord,” in the Pitti Palace at Florence.[279] The young man has his fingers on the keys; he is modulating in a mood of grave and sustained emotion; his head is turned away towards an old man standing near him.  On the other side of the instrument is a boy.  These two figures are but foils and adjuncts to the musician in the middle; and the whole interest of his face lies in its concentrated feeling—­the very soul of music, as expressed in Mr. Robert Browning’s “Abt Vogler,” passing through his eyes.  This power of painting the portrait of an emotion, of depicting by the features a deep and powerful but tranquil moment of the inner life, must have been possessed by Giorgione in an eminent degree.  We find it again in the so-called “Begruessung” of the Dresden Gallery.[280] The picture is a large landscape, Jacob and Rachel meet and salute each other with a kiss.  But the shepherd lying beneath the shadow of a chestnut tree beside a well has a whole Arcadia of intense yearning in the eyes of sympathy he fixes on the lovers.  Something of this faculty, it may be said in passing, descended to Bonifazio, whose romance pictures are among the most charming products of Venetian art, and one of whose singing women in the feast of Dives has the Giorgionesque fulness of inner feeling.