The Immortal Lure

by Cale Young Rice

GIORGIONE

Scene: A work-room of Giorgione on the edge of the Lagoon in which lie the Campo Santo and Murano. It is littered with brushes, canvases, casts, etc., and its walls are frescoed indiscriminately with saints and bacchantes, satyrs and Madonnas, on backgrounds religious or woodland. A door is on the right back; and foliate Gothic windows, in the rear, reveal the magic water with its gliding gondolas. On a support toward the centre of the room is a picture—covered, and not far from it, a couch.

Late Afternoon.

Giorgione, who has been sitting anguished on the couch, rises with determined bitterness. As he does so, Bellini enters anxiously.

Bellini. Giorgione!
Giorgione (turning). It is you?
Bellini.Your word came to me,
In San Lazzario where I labored late,
And shakes my troubled heart. You will not do this!
Giorgione. Yes!
Bellini.How my son! her picture! as a wanton's!
Giorgione. Tho it has been till now my adoration!
The fairest of my dreams and the most holy!
Yes, by the virtue of all honest women,
If such there be in Venice,
I swear it shall be borne by ribald hands
Thro the very streets.
Bellini.My son!
Giorgione.A public thing!

[Points to picture.

Fit for the most lascivious! who now
Shall gaze on what I had beheld alone,
On what was purer to me than the Virgin!
The very pimps and panders of the Piazza
Shall if they will whet appetite upon it,
And smack their losel lips.
Bellini.And to what end?
Giorgione. Her shame!
Bellini.The deeds of wounded pride and love
Work not so, but fall back upon the doer—
Or on some other.
Giorgione.I care not!
Bellini.Nor have,
Ever, to heed me! as Aretino,
Who turns your praise to Titian, has told.
For your wild will runs ever without curb,
And I who reared you, as my very own,
Must pay the fall.
Giorgione.No!
Bellini.And the piety
I would have won you to in the past days
Is wasted. The Madonnas
I painted with a heart inspired of Heaven
You paint with pride.
Giorgione.But with all gratitude!
Ah yes, believe me,
And with a rich remembrance!
For scarce oblivion could wipe from me
How as a wasted lad I came to Venice—
A miserable, patched and pallid waif,
With but an eye to see and hand to shape!
You took me from the streets and taught me all
The old can teach the young, until my name
Is high in Venice—
Linked with that of Beauty—
"Giorgione! our Giorgione!" do they cry
On the canals, the very gondoliers.
And in a little while it should have glowed
Immortal on the breast of Italy,
As does Apelles on the page of Greece,
For I was half-divine, until——
Bellini.Until
A girl whom you had fixed your heart upon
With boundless folly, you who should have lived
With but one passion—that of brain and brush—
Until she——
Giorgione. Say it!
Bellini.This Isotta——
Giorgione.Ai!
Whom I had chosen o'er a hundred others
To soar with!
To soar and then in wedded peace to prize!
This false Isotta
Whom in poverty
I found, as you found me, and loved to madness.
This fair Isotta
Whom I would have made
All Venice to be a halo for—as were
Cities of old for queens of sceptred love:
Until she leaves, departs, forsakes me, goes
Away, worthless away, from my true arms,
With Luzzi, a lank boy.
Bellini.So. And most strange.
Giorgione. No, nothing a woman does is ever strange!
Will they not cloak a lie in innocence,
A treachery in veiling soft caresses—
Tho to the Mass unceasingly they fare
And say like her their aves night and noon?
Have they a want that wantons not with guile,
A tear that is not turgid with deceit?
Are not their passions blown by every wind?
Have they not all the straying heart of Helen?
Then why must I,
Who had in me a hope
That rivalled Raphael's or Leonardo's,
Keep, cozened so, that I contemn her shame?
Bellini. Because she is a woman—whom you tempted,
Tho with all trust to wed her—and you know not
Whether her going was of shamelessness.
Giorgione (laughing bitterly). Or whether she may not yet return, today,
And with a heart that is a nymph's, a soul
That is a nun's,
Beguile me back to doting?
Whether she may not—
With that body God
Might once, deceived, have moulded angels after—?
Then flaunt her thralling of me to the world,
Whose ready lips should laugh where'er we went
And whisper, "Isotta, there! Giorgione's mistress!
Who makes a mocking of him?"
Bellini.Never! never!
Only your unrelenting brain would think it.
For this I know of her, that tho she has
Deserted you for what must seem to be
Only a new-found passion—
Yet is she womanly, and did you give her,
As now you mean, to avid lusting eyes,
Life would be smitten from her.
Giorgione.As it should!
Bellini. And then from you, repentant of her fate?
No, no, my son, I have not seen you rise,
A planet from the sea, the world's first painter,
To set in this:
You owe my fathering more.
And listen, I have brought to you a way
Of laurels for forgetting. I have come
With a commission from the Signoria,

[Takes it from his breast.

Which names you the chief glory of this city
And votes you proud permission to adorn
San Marco's highest altar with perfection.
Giorgione. And which I spurn, an insult in its pity!