had not completed his “Cenacolo,” and the “Mona Lisa” would not be created for another five or six years.  Giorgione’s “Caterina Cornaro,” therefore, becomes the first masterpiece of the earlier Renaissance, and proclaims a revolution in the history of portraiture.  In Venice itself we have only to look at the contemporary portraits by Alvise Vivarini and Gentile Bellini, and at the slightly earlier busts by Antonello da Messina, to see what a world of difference in feeling and interpretation there is between them and Giorgione’s portraits.  What a splendid array of artistic triumphs must have sprung up around this masterpiece!  The Cobham portrait and the National Gallery “Poet” are alone left us in much of their pristine splendour, but what of the lost portraits of the great Consalvo and of the Doge Agostino Barberigo, both of which must date from the year 1500?

Giorgione is then the Herald of the Renaissance, and never did genius arise in more fitting season.  It was the right psychological moment for such a man, and Giorgione “painted pictures so perfectly in touch with the ripened spirit of the Renaissance that they met with the success which those things only find that at the same moment wake us to the full sense of a need and satisfy it."[143] This is the secret of his overwhelming influence on succeeding painters in Venice,—­not, indeed, on his direct pupil Sebastiano del Piombo, and on his friend and associate Titian (who may fairly be called his pupil), but on such different natures as Lotto, Palma, Bonifazio, Bordone, Pordenone, Cariani, Romanino, Dosso Dossi, and a host of smaller men.  The School of Giorgione numbers far more adherents than even the School of Leonardo, or the School of Raphael, not because of any direct teaching of the master, but because the “Giorgionesque” spirit was abroad, and the taste of the day required paintings like Giorgione’s to satisfy it.  But as no revolution can be effected without a struggle, and as there are invariably people opposed to any reform, whether in art or in anything else, we need not be surprised to find the academic faction, represented by the aged Giambellini and his pupils, resisting the progress of the Newer Art.  In Giorgione’s own lifetime, the exact measure of the opposition is not easy to gauge, but it bore fruit a few years later in the machinations of the official Bellinesque party to keep Titian out of the Ducal Palace when he was seeking State recognition,[144] Nevertheless, Giambellini, even at his age, found it advisable to modulate into the newer key, as may be seen in his “S.  Giovanni Crisostomo enthroned,” where not only is the conception lyrical and the treatment romantic, but the actual composition is on the lines of the essentially Giorgionesque equilateral triangle.  This great altar-piece was painted three years after Giorgione’s death, and no more splendid testimonial to the young painter’s genius could be found than in the forced homage thus paid to his memory by the octogenarian Giambellini.[145]