[109] Morelli, ii. 19, note.

[110] Crowe and Cavalcaselle:  Titian, p. 425.

[111] Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1893, p. 135.

[112] It is customary to cite the Prague picture of 1525 as his work.  The clumsy signature CAM was probably intended for Campi, the real author, and its genuineness is not above suspicion.  It is a curious quid pro quo.

CHAPTER V

ADDITIONAL PICTURES OTHER THAN PORTRAITS

I have now pointed out six portraits which, in my opinion, should be included in the roll of genuine Giorgiones.  No doubt others will, in time, be identified, but I leave this fascinating quest to pass to the consideration of other paintings illustrating a different phase of the master’s art.[113]

We know that the romantic vein in Giorgione was particularly strong, that he naturally delighted in producing fanciful pictures where his poetic imagination could find full play; we have seen how the classic myth and the mediaeval romance afforded opportunities for him to indulge his fancy, and we have found him adapting themes derived from these sources to the decoration of cassoni, or marriage chests.  Another typical example of this practice is afforded by his “Orpheus and Eurydice,” in the gallery at Bergamo, a splendid little panel, probably, like the “Apollo and Daphne” in the Seminario at Venice, intended as a decorative piece of applied art.  Although bearing Giorgione’s name by tradition, modern critics have passed it by presumably on the ground that “it is not good enough,”—­that fatal argument which has thrown dust in the eyes of the learned.  As if the artist would naturally expend as much care on a trifle of this kind as on the Castelfranco altar-piece, or the Dresden “Venus”!  Yet what greater beauty of conception, what more poetic fancy is there in the “Apollo and Daphne” (which is generally accepted as genuine) than in this little “Orpheus and Eurydice”?  Nay, the execution, which is the point contested, appears to me every whit as brilliant, and in preservation the latter piece has the advantage.  Not a touch but what can be paralleled in a dozen other works—­the feathery trees against the luminous sky, the glow of the horizon, the splendid effects of light and shadow, the impressive grandeur of the wild scenery, the small figures in mid-distance, even the cast of drapery and shape of limbs are repeated elsewhere.  Let anyone contrast the delicacy and the glow of this little panel with several similar productions of the Venetian school hanging in the same gallery, and the gulf that separates Giorgione from his imitators will, I think, be apparent.

[Illustration:  Taramelli photo.  Bergamo Gallery ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE]