I have elsewhere dwelt upon the precocity of Giorgione’s talent, with its accompanying qualities of versatility, inequality, and productiveness, and I have pointed out the analogous phenomena in music and poetry.  Giorgione, Schubert, and Keats are alike in temperament and quality of expression.  They are curiously alike in the shortness of their lives,[139] and the fever-heat of their production.  But they are strangely distinct in the manner of their lives.  The disparity of outward circumstances accounts for the healthy tone of Giorgione’s art, when contrasted with the morbid utterances of Keats.  Schubert suffered privations and poverty, and his song was wrung from him alike at moments of inspiration and of necessity.  But Giorgione is all aglow with natural energy; he suffered no restraints, nor is his art forced or morbid.  Confine his spirit, check the play of his fancy, set him a task prescribed by convention or hampered by conditions, and you get proof of the fretfulness, the impatience of restraint which the artist felt.  The “Judgment of Solomon” and “The Adulteress before Christ,” the only two “set” pieces he ever attempted, eloquently show how he fell short when struggling athwart his genius.  For to register a fact was utterly foreign to his nature; he records an impression, frankly surrendering his spirit to the sense of joy and beauty.  He is not seldom incoherent, and may even grow careless, but in power of imagination and exuberance of fancy he is always supreme.

In one respect, however, Giorgione shows himself a greater than Schubert or Keats.  He has a profounder insight into human nature in its varying aspects than either the musician or the poet.  He is less a visionary, because his experience of men and things is greater than theirs; his outlook is wider, he is less self-centred.  This power of grasping objective truth naturally shows itself most readily in the portraits he painted, and it was due to the force of circumstances, as I believe, that this faculty was trained and developed.  Had Giorgione lived aloof from the world, had not his natural reticence and sensitiveness been dominated by outside influences, he might have remained all his life dreaming dreams, and seeing visions, a lyric poet indeed, but not a great and living, influence in his generation.  Yet such undoubtedly he was, for he effected nothing short of a revolution in the contemporary art of Venice.  Can the same be said of Schubert or Keats?  The truth is that Giorgione had opportunities of studying human nature such as the others never enjoyed; fortune smiled upon him in his earliest years, and he found himself thrust into the society of the great, who were eager to sit to him for their portraits.  How the young Castelfrancan first achieved such distinction is not told us by the historians, but I have ventured to connect his start in life with the presence of the ex-Queen of Cyprus, Caterina Cornaro, at Asolo, near Castelfranco; I think it more than probable that her patronage and recommendation launched the young painter on his successful career in Venice.  Certain it is that he painted her portrait in his earlier days, and if, as I have sought to prove, Signor Crespi’s picture is the long-lost portrait of the great lady, we may well understand the instant success such an achievement won.