atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the landscape background, in the breadth of the draperies, it is already Giorgionesque.  Nay, even here Titian, above all, asserts himself, and lays the foundation of his own manner.  The type of the divine Bambino differs widely from that adopted by Giorgione in the altar-pieces of Castelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid.  The virgin is a woman beautified only by youth and intensity of maternal love.  Both Giorgione and Titian in their loveliest types of womanhood are sensuous as compared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters as Cavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini.  But Giorgione’s sensuousness is that which may fitly characterise the goddess, while Titian’s is that of the woman, much nearer to the everyday world in which both artists lived.

In the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is a beautiful Madonna and Child in a niche of coloured marble mosaic, which is catalogued as an early Titian under the influence of Giovanni Bellini.  Judging only from the reproduction on a large scale done by Messrs. Braun and Co., the writer has ventured to suggest elsewhere[9]—­prefacing his suggestions with the avowal that he is not acquainted with the picture itself—­that we may have here, not an early Titian, but that rarer thing an early Giorgione.  From the list of the former master’s works it must at any rate be struck out, as even the most superficial comparison with, for instance, La Zingarella suffices to prove.  In the notable display of Venetian art made at the New Gallery in the winter of 1895 were included two pictures (Nos. 1 and 7 in the catalogue) ascribed to the early time of Titian and evidently from the same hand.  These were a Virgin and Child from the collection, so rich in Venetian works, of Mr. R.H.  Benson (formerly among the Burghley House pictures), and a less well-preserved Virgin and Child with Saints from the collection of Captain Holford at Dorchester House.  The former is ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the early time of the master himself.[10] Both are, in their rich harmony of colour and their general conception, entirely Giorgionesque.  They reveal the hand of some at present anonymous Venetian of the second order, standing midway between the young Giorgione and the young Titian—­one who, while imitating the types and the landscape of these greater contemporaries of his, replaced their depth and glow by a weaker, a more superficial prettiness, which yet has its own suave charm.

[Illustration:  Virgin and Child, known as “La Zingarella.”  Imperial Gallery, Vienna.  From a Photograph by Loewy.]