[276] The most beautiful of these angiolini, with long flakes of flaxen hair falling from their foreheads, are in a Sacra Conversazione of Carpaccio’s in the Academy.  Gian Bellini’s, in many similar pictures, are of the same delicacy.

[277] What follows above about Giorgione is advanced with diffidence, since the name of no other great painter has been so freely used to cover the works of his inferiors.

[278] Lord Lansdowne’s Giorgionesque picture of a young man crowned with vine, playing and singing to two girls in a garden, for example.  The celebrated Concert of the Louvre Gallery, so charming for its landscape and so voluptuous in its dreamy sense of Arcadian luxury, is given by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo.  See History of Painting in North Italy, vol. ii. p. 147.

[279] Under the fire of Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s destructive criticism, it would require more real courage than I possess to speak of the “Entombment” in the Monte di Pieta at Treviso as genuine.  Coarse and unselect as are the types of the boy angels, as well as of the young athletic giant, who plays the part in it of the dead Christ, this is a truly grandiose and striking picture.  Nothing proves the average greatness of the Venetian masters more than the possibility of attributing such compositions to obscure and subordinate craftsmen of the school.

[280] Crowe and Cavalcaselle assign this picture with some confidence and with fair show of reason, to Cariani, on whom again they father the frescoes at Colleoni’s Castle of Malpaga.  I have ventured to notice it above in connection with Giorgione, since it exhibits some of the most striking Giorgionesque qualities, and shows the ascendency of his imagination over the Venetian School.

[281] Giorgione, b. 1478; d. 1511.  Titian, b. 1477, d. 1576.  Tintoretto, b. 1512; d. 1594.  Veronese, b. 1530; d. 1588.

[282] I cannot, for example, imagine Veronese painting anything like Rubens’ two pictures of the “Last Judgment” at Munich.

[283] For his sacred types see the “Marriage at Cana” in the Louvre, the little “Crucifixion” and the “Baptism” of the Pitti, and the “Martyrdom of S. Agata” in the Uffizzi.

[284] These examples are mostly chosen from the Scuola di S. Rocco and the church of S. Maria dell’ Orto at Venice; also from “Pietas,” in the Brera and the Pitti, the “Paradise” of the Ducal Palace, and a sketch for “Paradise” in the Louvre.

[285] S. Maria dell’ Orto.

[286] What is here said about Tintoretto is also true of Michael Angelo.  His sculpture in S. Lorenzo, compared with Greek sculpture, the norm and canon of the perfect in that art, may be called an invasion of the realm of poetry or music.