Part 15

But to make assurance doubly sure, something remains to be pointed out that even if all the rest could be accommodated to what we know of Giorgione, would render it incredible that he should be the author. Morelli and others have noted the curious similarity between the two musicians and certain figures in one of Titian’s frescoes in Padua. One cannot say that Titian would not have taken hints from Giorgione, but he was scarcely the man to need any one’s suggestions, especially if it was in the shape of such commonplace figures as these. There are those, however, who think he did. But now let me add that the two women bear the most striking and unquestionable likeness to the two women in Tintoretto’s (?) Rescue in Dresden, though they have lost the purity of Tintoretto’s figures. Surely no one will maintain that this at best only fanciful and pretty, but in no way striking, Fête Champêtre was the source of inspiration to the two greatest Venetian painters in their days of prime and finished power? It is impossible. The idea must be given up, and though there is no denying the charm of the musicians under the trees, let us cast the scales from our eyes and recognise its complete dissimilarity to the work of the Master of Castelfranco, and that it is merely a perfectly charming _pasticcio_.

I have now discussed the pictures spoken of by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and there are left for us to consider those to which Morelli first drew marked attention. Such are the Madonna with Sts. Antony and Roch in Madrid, Daphne and Apollo in Venice, Three Ages of Man in the Uffizi, Birth of Paris and Portrait of a Man in Buda-Pesth, Portrait of a Woman in the Borghese Gallery, Portrait of a Youth in Berlin, Allegory in Dresden, and Judith in St. Petersburg. I have already spoken of the Venus, Nymph and Satyr, and the Shepherd at Hampton Court.

The Madonna in Madrid has generally been called by the name of Pordenone, while Crowe and Cavalcaselle thought it by Francesco Vecelli. It is certainly not a Giorgione, but a mere _pasticcio_ like the Fête Champêtre. We cannot be blamed for asking some more decisive evidence of its Giorgionesque origin than Morelli gives before we agree with him. He satisfies himself with saying[67] “Doch ich muss gestehen, dass es für mich keine geringe Freude war, bei meinem Besuche von Madrid dieses Wunderwerk venetianischer Malerkunst sogleich als Schöpfung unsers Giorgione erkannt zu haben.”

This, on the surface, is too rapid and absolute a statement to be admitted without question, and as there are excellent reasons why Giorgione could not have painted the work, we may confidently strike it from the list. The composition in the main is borrowed from the picture at Castelfranco. Giorgione was hardly the man to repeat his own works. The heavy, thick, coarse painting is absolutely different from Giorgione’s work. The clumsy draperies show none of his fine feeling. The thick-set figures of the Saints do not exhibit his elegance and refinement of form. The infant, more like a Hercules than a Christ, is quite unlike his poetic and dreamy-looking children. The manner in which the foot of St. Roch is raised is awkward and unmeaning, while the fat hands, thick ears and coarse features bear no resemblance to Giorgione’s work. The work is not only crude, it is unintelligent. The wall behind the Virgin cannot be explained, the chiaroscuro is harsh, the attitude of St. Anthony, turning as he does from the main group, is senseless, and the flowers are scattered about in a childish way. It is based on Giorgione’s work, but must have been painted by an inferior artist many years after his death.

The Daphne and Apollo in Venice has been injured by repainting and by having lost the left-hand end, but one can easily see that it will take much more than a mere assertion by Morelli[68] to convince anyone that Giorgione painted it. Crowe and Cavalcaselle think the painter was probably Andrea Schiavoni. If it was not Schiavoni, it was someone of an almost precisely similar nature and talent. The generally loose drawing and painting remind one of him. The bad drawing and perspective, the proportions and shapes of the figures (note the chunky Apollo drawing his bow and the head of the woman in the middle distance), the clawlike hands and clumsy feet, and the stupid confusion of scale in which the figures are drawn, all show without any possibility of question, that neither Giorgione nor any other artist of the first rank painted the picture.

There are in Padua two other cassone pictures representing the fables of Myrrha and of Erysichthon as told by Ovid in the “Metamorphoses” (VIII fab. 7 and X fab. 9). They are Giorgionesque in feeling, but are plainly derived from the woodcuts in the 1497 Venice edition of Ovid (Cf. Justi, _Giorgione_ p. 191 f). It is possible that these are two of the pictures referred to by Ridolfi (see above, No. 19).

Of the Three Ages it is perhaps sufficient to say that Morelli’s attribution has not found general acceptance.

The Allegory in Dresden in times gone by has been and by some still is considered, as Morelli thought, a copy of a work by Giorgione. There is, I believe, no real evidence in favour of this theory, which seems to me to depend solely on personal feeling.

The Judith in St. Petersburg, where it goes by the name of Moretto, presents a more difficult problem. Morelli, though he seems to have had no doubt that Giorgione was the painter, was not sure whether the picture was a copy or not. That it is a copy is Berenson’s opinion.[69] The lack of modelling and the bad drawing of parts are the reasons why Berenson and others think it a copy, and Berenson finds a trace of copyist’s work in the fact that the head is better done than the rest of the figure. Personally, I do not recognise this superiority of the head, and considering the numerous faults which he points out, I do not understand his last sentence: “En somme, la _Judith_ de l’Ermitage me parait une bonne copie, mais après tout, ce n’est qu’une copie.” If one believes these numerous faults to be due to the copyist, I should say that they proved it to be a pretty poor copy. Study of the work itself will, however, convince anyone that it is not a copy, but the original picture, and the artist can be no other than Giorgione. The panel on which it was painted was originally broader on the right side.[70] The uncertain drawing is what one would expect to find in an early work. The drapery is not so simple as usual in its folds, and at first sight the way it is drawn aside, leaving one leg bare, seems affected. But when one thinks of the bleeding head on the ground, this action is seen to be natural and the contrast of nude and draped parts is of the same unexpected and original character as one sees in the woman of the Giovanelli picture.

The fragment in Buda-Pesth which Morelli thought was part of the picture representing the Birth of Paris is, as Berenson points out in the article already referred to, only a copy, and a poor one at that. But even poor copies of lost Giorgiones are works to be carefully cherished.

Morelli also thought he knew of three portraits by Giorgione. Of these three (the Woman in the Borghese, the Man in the Buda-Pesth Gallery, and the Youth in Berlin), the first two may be seriously questioned. To my eye the Borghese portrait is by no means so strikingly Giorgionesque as Morelli considered it. While it is true that a brow here and a mouth there can be found scattered among the figures in the true Giorgiones that resemble the features of this woman, the type of face shows little likeness to Giorgione’s work. Nor does the muddy colour indicate the palette of an artist of more than mediocre ability. Who will look at Giorgione’s masterpieces and then say he thinks the same artist produced two such shapeless hands holding such a formless swab of cloth? Have we any reason to think Giorgione had so poor an understanding of perspective as to be unable to draw correctly the line of the parting of the hair? Such sloping shoulders were never natural and the fashion of drawing them so is not characteristic of Giorgione’s work. Could not Giorgione paint better drapery, or would he ever have been satisfied with such a shoelace-like ribbon round the waist? Finally, were such gauze caps known in Giorgione’s day? It is the purest fancy that discovers a shadow of greatness in this dull work. Drawing, colour, design, all proclaim it the product of a commonplace artist. The work is unlike Giorgione’s in every particular except the shape of the brow.

Morelli’s judgment about the portrait in Buda-Pesth is a perfectly sound one. It occurs only in the English translation and not in the original German.[71] “The picture,” he says, “has suffered much, and the master is not to be recognised in the technical qualities of the painting, but the whole feeling ... and the conception seem to point to Giorgione. The impression which it made upon me ten years ago was that of a thoroughly Giorgionesque work, but one executed by a later hand rather than by the master himself. Competent critics who have examined the picture in the meantime insist, however, that it is a true original by Giorgione. I must leave the final decision of the point to others.” Unfortunately it is next to impossible to arrive at final decisions in such matters. For one, I believe that Morelli’s idea, that the work was executed by a follower of Giorgione, is borne out by its main characteristics, particularly by the self-conscious pose of the head, and by the gesture of the hand—both much like what is found in portraits by the men of the generation after Giorgione.

Then, too, the cold ashen colour is very unlike Giorgione’s palette, but I would not lay great weight on this fact as the picture has been much repainted. The picture is of further interest because it shows the fallacy of one of Morelli’s most firm statements. In the Introduction[72] to his chapters on the Borghese Gallery he says: “Ich erlaube mir bei dieser Gelegenheit sogar zu bemerken, dass die den _grossen Meistern_ eigenthümliche _Grundform_ der Hand und des Ohres nicht nur auf ihren Bildern, sondern selbst auf den von ihnen nach dem Leben gemalten Porträts sich vorfindet.” With these words in one’s mind one looks at the Buda-Pesth portrait and finds neither hand, ear, eye, nose or mouth exhibiting the _Grundform_ shown in the unquestioned pictures. Morelli was carried away by his theories in this point, for while every one will readily admit that many cases, especially among the works of the primitive and early masters, can be found to fit his rule, yet the numberless exceptions to this rule, particularly among the fully developed masters, make it quite plain that, at best, its application requires to be strictly limited.[73]

The Portrait of a Youth at Berlin is the last of the Morellian Giorgiones to be studied. As was too often the case, Morelli speaks off-hand of this work as “ein glänzendes Porträt des Giorgione,” as though it was so manifestly by him that he was absolved from the labour of adducing proof; but the matter is not so simple. It is surely enough Giorgionesque, but do the details bear out the general impression so strongly as to make the attribution beyond all reasonable doubt? Not one of the master’s certain works shows a head like this. It is sharper and harder than anything of his except the Uffizi panels, but between these, sharp and hard as they seem to have been, and the Berlin portrait, there is an important and essential difference. The figures on the panels are not only hard, they are stiff; that is, they show one of the chief characteristics of youthful work.[74] If now the portrait be by Giorgione, it is self-evidently an early work. That is, there are among his undoubted works some that show vastly greater ease than this. But this portrait does not show any stiffness.

The attitude is easy, and the painting, particularly of the drapery, is distinctly free, one might even say sketchy. The work shows, perhaps, not so much the characteristics of a young artist of great power as those of one who has attained some facility but not the complete and all-round ease of the greatest masters. Then what do the letters V. V. mean, painted on the shelf behind which the figure stands? Is it not possible they are the initial letters of the artist’s name? Can they stand for an as yet unknown imitator, another _Vincentius Venezianus_? As Morelli said of the Portrait in Buda-Pesth, “I must leave the final decision of the point to others”—others better qualified than myself. Whoever the artist, the picture is a splendid one, and may well be regarded as showing the Giorgione point of view in portraiture, which, however, is a very different matter from being a work by him.

I have already had occasion to refer to an article by Berenson in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ in which he speaks of pictures he considers as copies of lost Giorgiones. These are:

The David in Vienna. The Judith in St. Petersburg. The Birth of Paris in Buda-Pesth. Orpheus and Eurydice, a cassone at Bergamo. Portrait of a Man, formerly in the Doetsch collection. Portrait of a Lady, belonging to Signor Crespi at Milan.

Of the first three I have already spoken. To maintain his thesis about the Orpheus and Eurydice, Berenson mentions only vague sentiments such as “Qui donc, autre que lui, a su traduire, comme nous le voyons ici, un mythe grec dans l’esprit de la Renaissance?” We might reply that Bellini, Titian, Tintoret, to mention merely Venetians, all showed a rather marked ability to do this very thing, so it was not a personal peculiarity of Giorgione. “Qui donc, autre que lui, avait le don de fondre le paysage et les figures dans une aussi charmante harmonie?” Again the ability to do this was possessed by many artists, and so vague a phrase as _aussi charmante_ proves nothing whatever. Continuing, he finds many details which betray very certainly the work of Cariani (an undoubted imitator of Giorgione), and decides that the work is a copy by Cariani of a lost Giorgione. But when much is admittedly unlike Giorgione and everything suits Cariani, why not consider Cariani the artist? Apparently because “si nous étions nous-même des artistes très doués, nous pourrions remplacer chaque détail _carianesque_ par un détail _giorgionesque_, emprunté aux œuvres du maître les plus voisines.” This has no force. We might as well “remplacer chaque détail _carianesque_ par un détail _michelangelesque_,” and what would be shown thereby? Nothing.

The reasons given for believing the Portrait from the Doetsch collection[75] to be a copy of a Giorgione are quite as vague and undefinable as those for the Orpheus and Eurydice. The consideration of details is no more convincing than the sentiments and fanciful writing that precede. “Si l’auteur de l’original en question n’était pas Giorgione, ce devrait être quelque imitateur servile du maître, comme Licinio ou Beccaruzzi. Mais ces peintres de second ordre ne pouvaient qu’imiter et non créer, et le portrait de la collection Doetsch est bien une création,” and yet he has just said that this portrait “est le même type que celui du jeune homme de Buda-Pesth,”—the picture mentioned by Morelli. Berenson’s definition of ‘création’ must differ from that ordinarily employed; and Licinio at his best was not so uncreative as Berenson would have us believe. He gives one, however, further surprises in asserting that this portrait agrees in all details with the one in Berlin! Not only the same head and brow, but “le même sentiment dans la bouche!”

Even were this all so, and I cannot see that it is in the least, what would be proved? To compare one doubtful work to another of a similar nature does not, as I have said above, prove the authorship of either. Furthermore, though one can find strong likenesses to the Berlin head in the true works by Giorgione, in these same works one cannot find any likeness whatever to the Doetsch portrait. To compare this overemphasised portrait, this person who seems half brigand and half Shylock, to the sad, poetical-looking man at Buda-Pesth, or to the clean, vigorous, manly youth in Berlin, is going pretty far, and the limit is plainly over-stepped in the endeavour to attach to the picture a value it does not possess by giving to it the name of one of the greatest artists.

For the painter of the Crespi Portrait of a Lady we shall do better to look in the direction of Titian than Giorgione. The owner, Signor Crespi, believes, according to Berenson, that Titian was the author, and certainly the likeness which the figure bears to other women by Titian, and the initials T. V. make it difficult to admit any other origin. Neither ecstasies nor comparisons serve to show any likeness to Giorgione’s work.

Of all the portraits attributed to Giorgione the finest by far is the one owned by the Hon. Edward Wood of Temple Newsam. Attention was first drawn to this by Cook and his attribution has been accepted by every one. It is a masterpiece of the greatest beauty (Plate LXVIII).

We have now reviewed the most important criticisms that have been passed on Giorgione’s work; and though it is only too evident that as yet there is no really sound common standard by which to govern our judgments, we can come very near to forming one if we accept the more sober part of the work of these criticisms and disregard their more extravagant and hypothetical attributions.[76] The following list, I venture to think, embraces works differing much less among themselves in regard to style than the lists of the critics that I have discussed.

1. Vienna—David (copy).

2. Venice—Fondaco dei Tedeschi (fragment still visible, but compare Zanetti’s engraving).

3. Venice—Chiesa di San Rocco, Christ carrying the Cross (much damaged).

4. Venice, Giovanelli Palace, Soldier and Woman, known as The Tempest.

5. Castelfranco, Madonna Enthroned.

6. Dresden, Venus.

7. Kingston Lacy, Judgment of Solomon (unfinished).

8. Vienna, Three Philosophers.

9. Buda-Pesth, Birth of Paris (fragment of a copy).

10. Florence, Uffizi, Judgment of Solomon.

11. Florence, Uffizi, Fire-test of Moses.

12. Florence, Uffizi, Knight of Malta.

13. Boston, Mass., Mrs. Gardner’s Collection (formerly Vicenza), Head of Christ.

14. London, National Gallery, Study for the San Liberale of the Castelfranco picture.

15. London, National Gallery, Epiphany.

16. London, Mr. Benson, Holy Family.

17. London, Lord Allandale, Shepherd’s Offering.

18. Temple Newsam, Hon. Mr. Wood. Portrait of a Man.

19. St. Petersburg, Judith.

20. Berlin, Portrait of a Youth (?).

Excluding the last one as being open to doubt, nineteen pictures, two probably copies, remain as our heritage of this most noble painter’s work. With these nineteen in our mind, it becomes more evident than ever why such works as the Louvre Concert, the Borghese Lady, or the Doetsch Man are not to be thought of in connection with Giorgione’s name.

There yet remains something more to be said of Giorgione. I think that there are still some pictures to be added to this list. The first to which I desire to call attention is the so-called Gypsy Madonna in Vienna. This picture is spoken of by every one as a Titian, but the longer I study it the more strong becomes my conviction that Giorgione was the artist; that it is one of his early works; that it is one of the “many pictures of the Virgin” of which Vasari speaks. The Giorgione spirit seems to me to underlie the whole feeling just as the Giorgione technique underlies the completed performance, that is, wherever the repainting allows it to be seen (Plate LXIX).

Evidently, from the lack of decision of the drawing, the coarse modelling of the drapery, and the heavy, undetailed landscape the picture is an early work of the master, be he Titian or Giorgione. To my mind the likeness between this and unquestioned early Titians is a superficial one. This picture shows none of the ease that is a characteristic of even his early works, nor does it exhibit any of the dramatic quality, expressed either by the actions or in the faces of the figures, that is another most noticeable feature of his work. If, on the other hand, one seeks for similarities to Giorgione’s work, they are most readily found. Details and style coincide closely with his pictures. The shape of the Virgin’s head and the manner in which the hair is drawn over the brow are nearly identical with what one sees in the Uffizi panels or the Castelfranco picture. The sharply marked eyelids, the richly modelled mouth and long nose, are strongly resemblant to the same features in the Castelfranco Madonna, the Giovanelli Gypsy, the Uffizi panels, and the Knight of Malta.

Notice, too, the large hand, the feet of the child with the strongly developed toes which are just what one finds in Giorgione’s works. So, also, the landscape with its plumelike trees, and the slim figure seated on the grass is such as one finds in many of his works, but not so often in those of Titian. Finally, and of more importance than separate details, is the fact that the peaceful spirit of the group, the undramatic, unTitianesque quality, is exactly what is most characteristic of Giorgione. Titian, when he painted the Christ Child, even in his earliest days, painted a figure more representing the infant Hercules than the Salvator Mundi. Invariably, He leaps about in his Mother’s arms, and though the small chubby face may be keenly intelligent, there is hardly ever a suggestion of the imaginative powers and prophetic instinct of the Reformer. It is here that Giorgione shows his very exceptional genius, for he was able to depict a purely human man child in such wise that were the figures cut from his canvases, no one could mistake them for mere ordinary offspring.

Giorgione used none of the affected graces or sentimentalities of Raphael, nor did he depend upon such weirdness as Leonardo chose; as a result, his figures are as much more satisfying to the inquiring intellect as a living fountain is compared with the mirage of the desert. His means are simple. There is no exaggeration of action, as in the Titian Child, but all is essentially delicate and infantine. There is no exaggeration of expression, but a slightly dreamy, far-away look as of powers still unwakened, and one feels, as before no other representations of the Child, that such as He might attain to even Calvary. Taken in connection with the agreement of the details, this spiritual similarity of the work to others that we know are by Giorgione must give him pause who should think to name Titian as the author.[77]

Another picture which, I believe, deserves more attention than has yet been given it hangs, under the name of Giovanni Bellini, in the _Museo Correr_ in Venice. The picture represents the dead Christ, seated on the edge of the tomb, upheld by three angels. In the background is a landscape, with a church on the right. It is painted on a panel about four feet high. The Anonimo Morelli says that in the year 1530 in the house of Gabriel Vendramin: “El Cristo morto sopra el sepolcro, con l’Anzolo che el sostenta, fu de man de Zorzi da Castelfranco, reconzato da Tiziano.” The picture in the Correr Museum represents this same scene, but there are three angels instead of one. This difference between the picture and the description need not make us hesitate to consider the question whether Giorgione was the author of the work, if there are other reasons to render such authorship possible.