Leonardo, who was born in 1452, was Giorgione’s senior by a quarter of a century and one of the greatest names—­if not quite the greatest name—­in art when Giorgione was beginning to paint.  A story says that they met when Leonardo was in Venice in 1500.  One cannot exactly derive any of Giorgione’s genius from Leonardo, but the fame of the great Lombardy painter was in the air, and we must remember that his master Verrocchio, after working in Venice on the Colleoni statue, had died there in 1488, and that Andrea da Solario, Leonardo’s pupil and imitator, was long in Venice too.  Leonardo and Giorgione share a profound interest in the dangerous and subtly alluring; but the difference is this, that we feel Leonardo to have been the master of his romantic emotions, while Giorgione suggests that for himself they could be too much.

It is not, however, influence upon Giorgione that is most interesting, but Giorgione’s influence upon others.  One of his great achievements was the invention of the genre picture.  He was the first lyrical painter:  the first to make a canvas represent a single mood, much as a sonnet does.  He was the first to combine colour and pattern to no other end but sheer beauty.  The picture had a subject, of course, but the subject no longer mattered.  Il fuoco Giorgionesco—­the Giorgionesque fire—­was the phrase invented to describe the new wonder he brought into painting.  A comparison of Venetian art before Giorgione and after shows instantly how this flame kindled.  Not only did Giorgione give artists a liberty they had never enjoyed before, but he enriched their palettes.  His colours burned and glowed.  Much of the gorgeousness which we call Titianesque was born in the brain of Giorgione, Titian’s fellow-worker, and (for Titian’s birth date is uncertain:  either 1477 or 1487) probably his senior.  You may see the influence at work in our National Gallery:  Nos. 41, 270, 35, and 635 by Titian would probably have been far different but for Giorgione.  So stimulating was Giorgione’s genius to Titian, who was his companion in Bellini’s studio, that there are certain pictures which the critics divide impartially between the two, chief among them the “Concert” at the Pitti; while together they decorated the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Canal.  It is assumed that Titian finished certain of Giorgione’s works when he died in 1510.  The plague which killed Giorgione killed also 20,000 other Venetians, and sixty-six years later, in another visitation of the scourge, Titian also died of it.

Castel Franco is five-and-twenty miles from Venice, but there are so few trains that it is practically a day’s excursion there and back.  I sat in the train with four commercial travellers and watched the water give way to maize, until chancing to look up for a wider view there were the blue mountains ahead of us, with clouds over them and here and there a patch of snow.  Castel Franco is one of the last cities of the plain; Browning’s Asolo is on the slope above it, only four or five miles away.