[Illustration:  The Louvre, Paris

MADONNA AND SAINTS]

Comparisons of detail may be noted, such as the resemblance in posture and type of the Accuser with the S. Roch of the Madrid picture, the figure of the Adulteress with that of the False Mother in the Kingston Lacy picture, the pointing forefingers, the typical landscape, the cast of the draperies, details which the reader can find often repeated elsewhere.  But it is in the treatment of the subject that the most characteristic features are revealed.  The artist was required—­we know not why—­to paint this dramatic scene; he had to produce a “set piece,” where action and graphic representation was urgently needed.  How little to his taste!  How uncongenial the task!  The case is exactly paralleled by the “Judgment of Solomon,” the only other dramatic episode Giorgione appears to have attempted, and the result in each case is the same—­no real dramatic unity, but an accidental arrangement of the figures, with rhetorical action.  The want of repose in the Christ offends, the stageyness of the whole repels.  How different when Giorgione worked con amore!  For it seems this composition gave him much trouble.  Of this we have a most interesting proof in an almost contemporary Venetian version of the same subject, where the scheme has been recast.  This picture belongs to Sir Charles Turner, in London, and, so far as intelligibleness of composition goes, may be said to be an improvement on the Glasgow version.  It is highly probable that this painting derives from some alternative drawing for the original picture.  That the Glasgow version acquired some celebrity we have further proof in an almost exact copy (with one more figure added on the right), which hangs in the Bergamo Gallery under Cariani’s name, a painting which, in all respects, is utterly inferior to the original.[134]

The “Christ and the Adulteress,” then, becomes for us a revelation of the painter’s nature, of his methods and aims; but, with all its technical excellences, shall we not also frankly recognise the limitations of his art?[135]

The “Madonna and Saints” of the Louvre, which persistently bears Giorgione’s name, in spite of modern negative criticism, is marked by a lurid splendour of colour and a certain rough grandeur of expression, well calculated to jar with any preconceived notion of Giorgionesque sobriety or reserve.  Yet here, if anywhere, we get that fuoco Giorgionesco of which Vasari speaks, that intensity of feeling, rendered with a vivacity and power to which the artist could only have attained in his latest days.  In this splendid group there is a masculine energy, a fulness of life, and a grandeur of representation which carries le grand style to its furthest limits, and if Giorgione actually completed the picture before his death, he anticipated the full splendour of the riper Renaissance.  To him is certainly due the general composition, with its superb lines,