Into all his work Giorgione infused his own soul—and do you know what the power to do that is? It is genius. To be able to make a statue is little, but to breathe into its nostrils the breath of life—ah! that is something else! The last elusive, undefinable stroke of the brush, that something uniting the spirit of the beholder with the spirit of the artist, so that you feel as he felt when he wrought—that is art. Burne-Jones is the avatar of Giorgione. He subdues you into silence, and you wait, expecting that one of his tall, soulful dream-women will speak, if you are but worthy—holding your soul in tune.
Giorgione never wrought so well as Burne-Jones, because he lived in a different age—all art is an evolution. Painting is a form of expression, just as language is a form of expression. Every man who writes English is debtor to Shakespeare. Every man who paints and expresses something of that which his soul feels is debtor to Giorgione and Botticelli. But to judge of the greatness of an artist—mind this—you must compare him with his contemporaries, not with those who were before or those who came after. The old masters are valuable, not necessarily for beauty, but because they reveal the evolution of art.
Between Burne-Jones and Giorgione came Botticelli. Now, Botticelli builded on Giorgione, while Burne-Jones builded on Botticelli. Aubrey Beardsley, dead at the age at which Keats died, builded on both, but he perverted their art and put a leer where Burne-Jones placed faith and abiding trust. Aubrey Beardsley got the cue for his hothouse art from one figure in Botticelli's "Spring," I need not state which figure: a glance at the picture and you behold sulphur fumes about the face of one of the women.
Did Aubrey Beardsley infuse his own spirit into his work? Yes, I think he did. Mrs. Jameson says, "There are no successful imitations of Giorgione, neither can there be, for the spirit of the man is in every face he drew, and the people who try to draw like him always leave that out."
There are various pictures in the Louvre, the National Gallery, and the Pinacothek at Munich, signed with Giorgione's name, but Mrs. Jameson declares they are not his, "because they do not speak to your soul with that mild, beseeching look of pity," Possibly we should make allowance for Mrs. Jameson's warm praise—other women talked like that when Giorgione was alive.
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.