In his early phase, if I am right in thinking that Sir Martin Conway’s two stories of Paris, Figure [250], and the Ordeal of the Infant Moses and Judgment of Solomon in the Uffizi, are his, Giorgione was merely a graceful continuer of the slighter narrative mood of Giovanni Bellini and Carpaccio,—that is, distinctly a primitive artist. In his fully developed Arcadian vein he is neither a primitive nor fully of the Renaissance, but midway between, and his work constitutes not so much a pioneer effort as a delectable episode quite complete in itself. Unhappily we are almost without biographical details. Giorgione was born in 1478, in Castelfranco, a long day’s ride towards the Friulian Alps. The country abounds in streams, meadows, and immemorial trees—is a subalpine Arcadia. He came pretty young to Venice and worked with Giovanni Bellini. Legend tells us that he was big and handsome, amorous, and a musician. We know that he died of the plague of 1510, in his thirty-third year. The rest is conjecture from pictures some of which are his, and all of which are inspired by him.
Fig. 250. Giorgione. The Infant Paris found by Shepherds.—Sir Martin Conway. Maidstone, England.
These breathe a single mood, that of Arcadian revery. It is a world of desire indulged for its own sweetness, of day dreaming apart from will, action, and results. More blithely it had pre-existed in the Idyls of Theocritus; more pensively, in the Eclogues of Virgil. This world revives a far-away pastoral golden age, of lovers and their lasses, of nymphs and fauns, of vague ardors at once tempered and reinforced by a sympathetic nature. We are dealing with one of the oldest resources of poetry, and we can only understand this most beautiful visualization of the old theme by associating it with the tradition of literary pastoralism.
Of course the Eclogues of Virgil were read generation by generation, if not very understandingly, through the Middle Ages. Still the more sensitive felt the appeal of mountain shadows lengthening over the evening meadows and the pathos of love-lorn shepherds sighing musically for hard-hearted shepherdesses. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the pastoral mode becomes once more contemporary, incidentally in the interludes of Bocaccio’s Decameron, explicitly in his idyl of alternate prose and verse, the Ameto. These are pale lights before the dawn. Pastoralism becomes widely current in the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro, the bulk of which was ready by 1489. It is the parent of those slow-moving, sentimental, and ever lengthy romances in verse and prose of which Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia is the most familiar to the modern reader. Dante had once longed for a magic boat in which congenial souls should drift forever and do nothing but discourse of love. Transfer these discourses to a leafy nook beside a running stream, with the herds in view below the branches, and nymphs and satyrs overhearing the debate—and you have Sannazaro’s Arcadia. We have the eternal poetry and perhaps eternal fallacy of a bygone golden age where duty and effort are absent, where love and poesy reign.
In his most famous song, Alma beata, Sannazaro, celebrating a dead beauty, makes heaven itself merely an Arcadia—
“Other mountains, other plains,
Other groves and streamlets
In heaven I see, and withal new blossoms.
Other fauns and sylvans, through sweet summer places,