the earliest known examples—­the so-called Danae of Sir Martin Conway’s collection, and the St. Jerome of the Louvre—­is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art passes through successive developments, he will still show himself open to more or less enduring influences from the one side and the other.  Sebastiano del Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly be accounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career out of leading-strings.  First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling Pieta in the Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authentic inscription, “Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus (sic),” is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece of documentary evidence, it would even now pass as such.  Next, he becomes the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save perhaps Titian himself.  Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in a quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque, that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, have acquired a world-wide fame.  Finally, surrendering himself body and soul to Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of early training and association, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal itself, he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the very end of his career.

Giorgione and Titian were as nearly as possible of the same age, being both of them born in or about 1477.  Lorenzo Lotto’s birth is to be placed about the year 1476—­or, as others would have it, 1480.  Palma saw the light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485.  So that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier half of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eight years—­between 1477 and 1485.

In Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s Life and Times of Titian a revolutionary theory, foreshadowed in their Painting in North Italy, was for the first time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained.  They sought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, that Palma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced and shaped the art of his contemporary Titian, instead of having been influenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artists would have induced the student to believe.  Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s theory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelli appears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to be found on a Santa Conversazione, once in the collection of M. Reiset, and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d’Aumale.  This date now proves with the artist’s signature to be a forgery, and the picture in question, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode of conception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more modern technique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma in the development