could possibly lie, for it is a typical creation of the master, usque ad unguem.  Not only in types, colour, light and shade, and particularly in feeling, is the picture characteristic, but it again shows the artist leaving work unfinished, and again reveals the fact that the work grew in conception as it was actually being painted.  I mean that the whole figure of S. Roch has been painted in over the rest, and that the S. Francis has also probably been introduced afterwards.  I have little doubt that originally Giorgione intended to paint a simple Madonna and Child, and afterwards extended the scheme.  The composition of three figures, practically in a row, is moreover most unusual, and contrary to that triangular scheme particularly favoured by the master, whereas the lovely sweep of Madonna’s dress by itself creates a perfect design on a triangular basis.  A great artist is here revealed, one whose feeling for line is so intense that he wilfully casts the drapery in unnatural folds in order to secure an artistic triumph.  The working out of the dress within this line has yet to be done, the folds being merely suggested, and this task has been left whilst forwarding other parts.  The freedom of touch and thinness of paint indicates how rapidly the artist worked.  There is little deliberation apparent:  indeed, the effect is that of hasty improvisation.  Velasquez could not have painted the stone on which S. Roch rests his foot with greater precision or more consummate mastery; the delicacy of flesh tints is amazing.  The bit of landscape behind S. Roch (invisible in the reproduction), with its stately tree trunk rising solitary beside the hanging curtain, strikes a note of romance, fit accompaniment to the bizarre figure of the saint in his orange jerkin and blue leggings.  How mysterious, too, is S. Francis!—­rapt in his own thoughts, yet strangely human.

[Illustration:  Buda-Pesth Gallery

COPY OF A PORTION OF GIORGIONE’S “BIRTH OF PARIS”]

We have now examined ten of the twelve pictures added, on Morelli’s initiative, to the list of genuine works, and we have found very little, if any, serious opposition on the part of later writers to his views.  Not so, however, with regard to the remaining two pictures.  The first of these is a fragment in the gallery of Buda-Pesth, representing two figures in a landscape.  All modern critics are agreed that Morelli has here mistaken an old copy after Giorgione for an original, a mistake we may readily pardon in consideration of the successful identification he has made of these figures with the Shepherds, in the composition seen and described by the Anonimo in 1525 as the “Birth of Paris,” by Giorgione.  This identification is fully confirmed by the engraving made by Th. von Kessel for the Theatrum Pictorium, which shows how these two figures are placed in the composition.  Where, as in the present case, the original is missing, even a partial copy is of great value, for in it we