in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of fleets, as the background suggests—­is one of the most characteristic portraits of the Giorgionesque school.  Its pathos, its intensity, contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same Baffo in the renowned Madonna di Casa Pesaro, painted twenty-three years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari.  It is the first in order of a great series, including the Ariosto of Cobham, the Jeune Homme au Gant, the Portrait of a Man in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous Concert of the Pitti, ascribed to Giorgione.  Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. Georges Lafenestre[12] have called attention to the fact that the detested Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot well have been executed after that time.  He would have been a bold man who should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI. into a votive picture painted immediately after his death!  How is it possible to assume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless assume, that the Sacred and Profane Love, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art, was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at the latest, in 1502?  Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque.  He had not painted his Castelfranco altar-piece, his Venus, or his Three Philosophers (Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas).  Old Gian Bellino himself had not entered upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S. Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.[13]

It is impossible on the present occasion to give any detailed account of the fresco decorations painted by Giorgione and Titian on the facades of the new Fondaco de’ Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down on the 28th of January 1505.  Full particulars will be found in Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s often-quoted work.  Vasari’s many manifest errors and disconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do not predispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strained relations between Giorgione and our painter, to which this particular business is supposed to have given rise.  That they together decorated with a series of frescoes which acquired considerable celebrity the exterior of the Fondaco is all that is known for certain, Titian being apparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master.  Of these frescoes only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, and facing the Grand Canal, has been preserved, in a much-damaged condition—­the few fragments that remained of those facing the side canal having been destroyed in 1884.[14] Vasari shows us a Giorgione angry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior beauty of some work on the “facciata di verso la Merceria,” which in reality belongs to Titian, and thereupon implacably cutting short their connection and friendship.  This version