personal type, manner, dress even, which are best understood there, that "distinction" of the Concert of the Pitti Palace. Hard by his home lives Catherine of Cornara, formerly Queen of Cyprus; and up in the towers, which still remain, Tuzio Costanzo, the famous condottierestrange, picturesque remnant of medieval manners in a civilisation rapidly changing. Giorgione paints their portraits; and when Tuzio's son, Matteo, dies in early youth, adorns in his memory a chapel in the church of Castelfranco, painting on this occasion, perhaps, the altar-piece, foremost among his authentic works, still to be seen there, with the figure of the warrior saint, Liberale, for which the original little study in oil, with the delicately gleaming silver-grey armour, is one of the greater treasures of the National Gallery, and in which, as in some other knightly personages attributed to him, people have supposed the likeness of his own presumably gracious presence. Thither, at last, he is himself brought home from Venice, early dead but celebrated. It happened, about his thirty-fourth year, that in one of those parties at which he entertained his friends with music, he met a certain lady, of whom he became greatly enamoured, and "they rejoiced greatly, the one and the other, in their loves." And two quite different legends concerning it agree in this, that it was through this lady he came by his death; Ridolfi relating that being robbed of her by one of his pupils he died of grief at the double treason; Vasari, that she being secretly stricken of the plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, he took the sickness from her mortally with his kisses, and thus briefly departed.

But although the number of Giorgione's extant works has been thus limited by recent criticism, all has not been done when the real and the traditional elements in what concerns him have been discriminated; for in what is connected with a great name much that is not real is often very stimulating, and for the æsthetic philosopher, over and above the real Giorgione and his authentic extant works, there remains the Giorgionesque also, an influence, a spirit or type in art, active in men so different as those to whom those supposed works of his are really assignable—a veritable school, indeed, which grew, as a supplementary product, out of all those fascinating works rightly or wrongly attributed to him; out of many copies from, or variations on, him by unknown or uncertain workmen, whose drawings and designs were, for reasons, prized as his; out of the immediate impression he made upon his contemporaries, and with which he continued in men's minds; out of many tra ditions of subject and treatment which really descend from him to our own time, and by retracing which we fill out the original image; Giorgione thus becoming a sort of impersonation of Venice itself, its projected reflex or ideal, all that was intense or desirable

in it thus crystallizing about the memory of this wonderful young

man.

And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of this school of Giorgione, as we may say, which for most of us, notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the "new Vasari," will still identify itself with those famous pictures at Florence, Dresden, and Paris; and in which there defines itself for us a certain artistic ideal, the conception of a peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we may understand as the Giorgionesque, wherever we find it-in Venetian work generally, or in work of our own time, and of which the Concert, that undoubted work of Giorgione in the Pitti Palace, is the typical instance, and a pledge which authenticates the connexion of the school with the master.

I have spoken of a certain interpenetration of the matter or subject of a work of art with the form of it, a condition realised absolutely only in music, as the condition to which every form of art is perpetually aspiring. In the art of painting, the attainment of this ideal condition, this perfect interpenetration of the subject with colour and design, depends, of course, in great measure, on dexterous choice of that subject, or phase of subject; and such choice is one of the secrets of Giorgione's school. It is the school of genre, and employs itself mainly with "painted idylls," but, in the production of this pictorial poetry, exercises a wonderful finesse in the selecting of such matter as lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to entire expression by drawing and colour, to what I may call again the musical treatment. For although its productions are painted poems they belong to a sort of poetry which tells itself without an articulated story. The master is pre-eminent for the resolution, the ease, and quickness with which he reproduces instantaneous motion-the lacing on of armour, with the head bent back so stately; the fainting lady; the embrace rapid as the kiss caught with death itself from dying lips; the momentary conjunction of mirrors and polished armour and still water, by which all the sides of a solid image are presented together, solving that casuistical question whether painting can present an object as completely as sculpture. The sudden act, the rapid transition of thought, the passing expression-this he arrests with that vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, the fuoco Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the ideality of the highest sort of poetry that it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps, a brief and entirely concrete moment, into which, however, all the abstract motives, all the interest and efficacy of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of

the present. Such ideal instants the school of Giorgione selects with admirable finesse from that feverish, tumultuously coloured existence of the old citizens of Venice; phases of subject in themselves already volatilised almost to the vanishing point, exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of things for ever, and which are like an extract, or elixir, or consummate fifth part of life.

Who, in some such perfect moment, when the harmony of things inward and outward beat itself out so truly, and with a sense of receptivity, as if in that deep accord, with entire inaction on our part, some messenger from the real soul of things must be on his way to one, has not felt the desire to perpetuate all that, just so, to suspend it in every particular circumstance, with the portrait of just that one spray of leaves lifted just so high against the sky, above the well, for ever?-a desire how bewildering with the question whether there be indeed any place wherein these desirable moments take permanent refuge. Well! in the school of Giorgione you drink water, perfume, music, lie in receptive humour thus for ever, and the satisfying moment is assured.

It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like this is really aspiring; and in the school of Giorgione those perfect moments of music, the making or hearing of it, song or the accompaniment of song, are themselves prominent as subjects. On that background of the silence of Venice, which the visitor there finds so impressive, the world of Italian music was then forming itself. In choice of subject, as in all besides, the Concert of the Pitti Palace is typical of all that Giorgione, himself an admirable musician, touched with his influence; and in sketch, or finished picture, in various collections, we may follow it through many intricate variations— men fainting at music, music heard at the pool-side while people fish, or mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks; the tuning of instruments; people with intent faces as if listening, like those in Plato, to detect the smallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air, as it is said gifted ears may catch the note of the bat; feeling for music in thought, on a stringless instrument, ear and finger refining themselves infinitely in the appetite for sweet sound; a momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passes through some unfamiliar room, in a chance company.

In such favourite incidents, then, of Giorgione's school, music or music-like intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening-listening to music, to the reading of Bandello's novels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies. Often such moments are really our moments of play, and we are surprised at the unexpected blessedness of what may seem our least important part of time; not

merely because play is in many instances that to which people really apply their own best powers, but also because at such times the stress of our servile, every-day attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers in things without us are permitted free passage, and have their way with us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often to play which is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but play at real life, like children "dressing-up," disguised in the strange old Italian dresses, parti-coloured, or fantastic with purfling and furs, of which the master was so curious a designer, and which, above all the spotless white linen at wrist and throat, he painted so dexterously.

And when people are happy in this thirsty land, water will not be far off; and in the school of Giorgione the presence of water-the well or marble-rimmed pool, the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours it from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the Fête Champêtre, listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it falls, blent with the music of the pipes-is as characteristic, and almost as suggestive, as that of music itself. And the landscape feels and is glad of it alsoa landscape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh rain newly passed through the air, and collected into its grassy channels; the air, too, in the school of Giorgione, being as vivid as the souls which breathe it, and literally empyrean, its impurities burnt out of it, no taint, no trace or floating particle of aught but its own clear elements, allowed to subsist within it.

Its scenery is such as in England we call "park scenery," with some undefined refinement felt about the rustic buildings, the choice grass, the grouped trees, the undulations deftly economised for graceful effect. Only, in Italy all natural things are woven through and through with gold thread, even the cypress revealing it among the folds of its blackness. And it is with gold dust or gold thread that these Venetian painters seem to work, spinning its fine filaments through the solemn human flesh, out away into the white plastered walls of the thatched huts. The harsher details of the mountains. recede to a harmonious distance, the one peak of rich blue above the horizon remaining but as the visible warrant of that due coolness which is all we need ask here of the Alps, with their dark soul of rains and streams. Yet what real, airy distance, as the eye passes from level to level, through the long-drawn valley in which Jacob embraces Rachel, the fiery point of passion, to which all the rest turns up, opening and closing about them, yearningly. Nowhere is there a truer instance of that balance, that modulated unison of landscape and persons the earth being here but a "second body," a garment as exactly conformed to and spiritually expressive of the human presence on it, of the "first body," as that "first body" is of the soul -a unison of the human image and its accessories, already noted as

characteristic of the Venetian school, so that in it neither personage nor scenery is ever a mere pretext for the other.

Something like this seems to me to be the vraie vérité about Giorgione, to adopt a serviceable expression by which the French recognise those more liberal and durable impressions which, in respect of any really considerable person or subject, anything that has at all intricately occupied men's attention, lie beyond and must supplement the narrower range of the strictly ascertained and numerable facts about it. In this, Giorgione is but an illustration of a valuable general caution we may abide by in all criticism. As regards Giorgione himself, we have indeed to take note of all those negations and exceptions by which, at first sight, a new Vasari seems merely to have confused our apprehension of a delightful object, to have explained out of our inheritance from past time what seemed of high value there. Yet it is not with a full understanding even of those exceptions that one can leave off just there. Set in their true perspective such negations become but a salt of genuineness in our knowledge; for, beyond all those strictly deducible facts, we must take note of that indirect influence by which one like Giorgione, for instance, enlarges his permanent efficacy, and really makes himself felt in our culture; and in a just impression of that is the essential truth, the vraie vérité, concerning him.

WALTER H. PATER.