documentary and pictorial, coupled, I am afraid, with the recognition of the fact that much modern criticism on this point has been curiously at fault.  This is neither the time nor the place to discuss the question of Titian’s early work, but I feel sure that this chapter of art history has yet to be correctly written.[65] One of the determining factors in the discussion will be the authorship of the Pitti “Concert,” for our estimate of Giorgione or Titian must be coloured appreciably by the recognition of such an epoch-making picture as the work of one or the other.

It is, therefore, peculiarly unfortunate that the two side figures in this wonderful group are so rubbed and repainted as almost to defy certainty of judgment.  In conception and spirit they are typically Giorgionesque, and Morelli, I imagine, would scarcely have made the bold suggestion of Titian’s authorship but for the central figure of the young monk playing the harpsichord.  This head stands out in grand relief, being in a far purer state of preservation than the rest, and we are able to appreciate to some extent the extraordinarily subtle modelling of the features, the clear-cut contours, the intensity of expression.  The fine portrait in the Louvre, known as “L’homme au gant,” an undoubted early work of Titian, is singularly close in character and style, as was first pointed out by Mr. Claude Phillips,[66] and it was this general reminiscence, more than points of detail in an admittedly imperfect work that seemingly induced Morelli to suggest Titian’s name as possible author of the “Concert.”  Nevertheless, I cannot allow this plausible comparison to outweigh other and more vital considerations.  The subtlety of the composition, the bold sweep of diagonal lines, the way the figure of the young monk is “built up” on a triangular design, the contrasts of black and white, are essentially Giorgione’s own.  So, too, is the spirit of the scene, so telling in its movement, gesture, and expression.  Surely it is needless to translate all that is most characteristic of Giorgione in his most personal expression into a “Giorgionesque” mood of Titian.  No, let us admit that Titian owed much to his friend and master (more perhaps than we yet know), but let us not needlessly deprive Giorgione of what is, in my opinion at least, the great creation of his maturer years, the Pitti “Concert.”  I am inclined to place it about 1506-7, and to regard it as the earliest and finest expression in Venetian art of that kind of genre painting of which we have already studied another, though later example, “The Three Ages” (in the Pitti).  The second work where Crowe and Cavalcaselle hold a different view from Morelli is a “Portrait of a Man” in the Gallery of Rovigo (No. 11).  The former writers declare that it, “perhaps more than any other, approximates to the true style of Giorgione."[67] With such praise sounding in one’s ears it is somewhat of a shock to discover that this “grave and powerfully