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.
This kind of thing is not necessarily servile imitation—it is only admiration tipped to t' other side. It is found everywhere in aspiring youth and in every budding artist.
As in the animal kingdom, genius has its prototype. In the National Gallery at London you will see in the Turner Room a "Claude Lorraine" and a "Turner" hung side by side, as provided for in Turner's will. You would swear, were the pictures not labeled, that one hand did them both. When thirty, Turner admired Claude to a slavish degree; but we know there came a time when he bravely set sail on a chartless sea, and left the great Claude Lorraine far astern.
Titian loved Giorgione so well that he even imitated his faults. At first this high compliment was pleasing to Giorgione; then he became indifferent, and finally disgusted. The very sight of Titian gave him a pain.
He avoided his society. He ceased to speak to him when they met, and forbade his friends to mention the name "Titian" in his presence.
It was about this time that Giorgione's ladylove won fame by discarding him in that foolish, fishwife fashion. He called his attendants and instructed them thus: "Do not allow that painter from Cadore—never mind his name—to attend my funeral—you understand?"