In landscape his pre-eminence is even more absolute and unquestioned.  He had great precursors here, but no equal; and until Claude Lorrain long afterwards arose, there appeared no successor capable, like himself, of expressing the quintessence of Nature’s most significant beauties without a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.  Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had, unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, and the Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesque influence, the true gift of the landscape-painter.  Atmospheric conditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions; and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity of the landscape in the great Pieta of the Brera, the ominous sunset in our own Agony in the Garden of the National Gallery, the cheerful all-pervading glow of the beautiful little Sacred Conversation at the Uffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late Baptism of Christ in the Church of S. Corona at Vicenza.  To attempt a discussion of the landscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as well as the most fascinating of subjects—­so various is it even in the few well-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument of expression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods of his personages.  Yet even the landscape of Giorgione—­judging it from such unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece of Castelfranco, the so-called Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and the Soldier[1] in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called Three Philosophers in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna—­has in it still a slight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection.  It was reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullest development to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the Three Ages and the Sacred and Profane Love.  Then all himself, and with hardly a rival in art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects of earth and sky which enframe the figures in the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal, and, above all, the Bacchus and Ariadne; to give back his impressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beauty which so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and Sacred Conversations.  It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the St. Peter Martyr, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academic amplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.  The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may be said to exist in the late Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo) of the Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose and Giorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late Rape of Europa, the bold sweep and the rainbow hues of the landscape in which recall the much earlier