Giorgione was one of those bright luminaries that dart across our plane of vision and then go out quickly in hopeless night, leaving only the memory of a blinding light.  He died at thirty-three, which Disraeli declares is the age at which the world’s saviors have usually died—­and he names the Redeemer first in a list of twenty who passed out at the age of three-and-thirty.  Disraeli does not say that all those in his list were saviors, for the second name he records is that of Alexander the Great, the list ending with Shelley.

Giorgione died of a broken heart.

The girl he loved eloped with his friend, Morta del Feltri, to whom he had proudly introduced her a short time before.  It is an old story—­it has been played again and again to its Da Rimini finish.  The friend introduces the friend, and the lauded virtues of this friend inflames imagination, until love strikes a spark; then soon instead of three we find one—­one groping blindly, alone, dazed, stunned, bereft.

The handsome Giorgione pined away, refusing to be comforted.  And soon his proud, melancholy soul took its flight from an environment with which he was ever at war, and from a world which he never loved.  And Titian was sent for to complete the pictures which he had begun.

Surely, disembodied spirits have no control over mortals, or the soul of Giorgione would have come back and smitten the hand of Titian with palsy.

For a full year before he died Giorgione had not spoken to Titian, although he had seen him daily.

Giorgione had surpassed all artists in Venice.  He had a careless, easy, limpid style.  But there was decision and surety in his swinging lines, and best of all, a depth of tenderness and pity in his faces that gave to the whole a rich, full and melting harmony.

Giorgione’s head touched heaven, and his feet were not always on earth.  Titian’s feet were always on earth, and his head sometimes touched heaven.  Titian was healthy and in love with this old, happy, cruel, sensuous world.  He was willing to take his chances anywhere.  He had no quarrel with his environment, for did he not stay here a hundred years (lacking half a year), and then die through accident?  Of course he liked it.  One woman, for him, could make a paradise in which a thousand nightingales sang.  And if one particular woman liked some one else better, he just consoled himself with the thought that “there is just as good fish,” etc.  I will not quote Walt Whitman and say his feet were tenoned and mortised in granite, but they were well planted on the soil—­and sometimes mired in clay.

Titian admired Giorgione; he admired him so much that he painted exactly like him—­or as nearly as he could.

Titian was a good-looking young man, but he was not handsome like Giorgione.  Yet Titian did his best; he patronized Giorgione’s tailor, imitated his dreamy, far-away look, used a brush with his left hand, and painted with his thumb.  His coloring was the same, and when he got a commission to fresco the ceiling of a church he did it as nearly like Giorgione frescoes as he could.