Fig. 247. Carpaccio. The Presentation.—Venice.
That he was also a mystic of the most intense sort is hard to believe. Yet if the marvellous Meditation on the Passion, Figure [248], in the Metropolitan Museum, be really by him, such is the case. In a desert the Dead Christ sits in a crumbling throne, while two grim sages, St. Job and St. Onophrius, sit in rapt contemplation. Their mood has evoked the bodily vision of their Lord. Art has produced few such symbols for the hallucinative intensity of the life contemplative. These weather-beaten forms seem an emanation from the sands and blistering sunlight. They have few relations to our world. Their souls move in vast uninhabited spaces. That Carpaccio can have produced this masterpiece as late as 1520, and cast it deliberately in a style learned forty years earlier seems to me a fantastic hypothesis, even if it has enlisted grave authority. The abundant similarities of the landscape with that of the St. Francis of the Frick Collection make me feel that the invention of this picture is Giovanni Bellini’s, at his moment of highest emotional power, about 1480. Since the actual painting is evidently in large part Carpaccio’s, I am driven to the by no means satisfactory hypothesis that Carpaccio may have executed this masterpiece, and the group to which it belongs, while serving as studio assistant to Giovanni Bellini. Such a view at least expresses my conviction that the picture transcends Carpaccio’s powers.
Fig. 248.—Ascribed to Carpaccio, perhaps Giovanni Bellini’s Design. Desert Hermits Meditating the Passion.—New York.
As for his later years, his work goes off, he loses most of his Venetian patronage, and paints for the obscure Istrian and Dalmatian seaports, the critics mock him, he dies some time after 1523, leaving no deep impression. Vasari dispatches him with a few condescending lines, and nobody cares for him till young Burne-Jones came to Venice some sixty years ago. He plainly stands out of the main line of progress. He was too romantically traditional in his themes, and too minutely naturalistic in his vision to fit into the monumental development of the Renaissance. In a sense he merely brings the old narrative tradition to a splendid close. But in so doing he preserves the look of an exquisite moment—of Venice still in her mediæval gayety and splendor, not yet reduced to her ultimate magnificent decorum. In him we glimpse the eager comeliness of patrician youth, self-sufficient in love of living. And this we see between the glistening waters of the lagoon and the lambent blue heavens, with pearly domes and bell towers rising as lightly as the drifting summer clouds above. All this may or may not be apart from what the wise esteem artistic greatness. In any case it is charm of the most persuasive and durable kind.
Whether Giorgione of Castelfranco is to be regarded as the last of the Venetian primitives or as the first of the men of the Renaissance is no simple problem. It is further complicated by the fact that we do not surely know what pictures he painted. According to the austerity or geniality of the critics, the lists vary from eight, Lionello Venturi’s, to over seventy, Herbert Cook’s. Naturally I also have my own list, which, with old copies, runs to twenty-four, but I am unwilling to claim demonstrative weight for what are merely strong subjective convictions. Walter Pater daintily evaded the issue by writing the most subtle of essays not on the person, but on the School of Giorgione. I shall in part imitate him in defining first the Giorgionesque mood before considering the canon of his works.
Fig. 249. Giorgione. Portrait of a Youth.—Berlin.
On the side of minor technique Giorgione marks a great advance. He early abandons the old frank coloring of Giovanni Bellini for a mysterious method which abolishes line, builds in mass, invests the picture with deep shadows that are marvellously warm and colorful. What contemporaries loved to call the Venetian fire originates with him about 1505. Vasari may well be right in saying that he learned the method directly from Leonardo da Vinci, who was a fugitive in Venice in the year 1500. Only Leonardo never taught him that shadow is color. That was Giorgione’s own beautiful discovery, one immensely important for all decorative painting ever since.