CHAPTER V
ADDITIONAL PICTURES OTHER THAN PORTRAITS
I have now pointed out six portraits which, in my opinion, should be included in the roll of genuine Giorgiones. No doubt others will, in time, be identified, but I leave this fascinating quest to pass to the consideration of other paintings illustrating a different phase of the master's art.[[113]]
We know that the romantic vein in Giorgione was particularly strong, that he naturally delighted in producing fanciful pictures where his poetic imagination could find full play; we have seen how the classic myth and the mediaeval romance afforded opportunities for him to indulge his fancy, and we have found him adapting themes derived from these sources to the decoration of cassoni, or marriage chests. Another typical example of this practice is afforded by his "Orpheus and Eurydice," in the gallery at Bergamo, a splendid little panel, probably, like the "Apollo and Daphne" in the Seminario at Venice, intended as a decorative piece of applied art. Although bearing Giorgione's name by tradition, modern critics have passed it by presumably on the ground that "it is not good enough,"—that fatal argument which has thrown dust in the eyes of the learned. As if the artist would naturally expend as much care on a trifle of this kind as on the Castelfranco altar-piece, or the Dresden "Venus"! Yet what greater beauty of conception, what more poetic fancy is there in the "Apollo and Daphne" (which is generally accepted as genuine) than in this little "Orpheus and Eurydice"? Nay, the execution, which is the point contested, appears to me every whit as brilliant, and in preservation the latter piece has the advantage. Not a touch but what can be paralleled in a dozen other works—the feathery trees against the luminous sky, the glow of the horizon, the splendid effects of light and shadow, the impressive grandeur of the wild scenery, the small figures in mid-distance, even the cast of drapery and shape of limbs are repeated elsewhere. Let anyone contrast the delicacy and the glow of this little panel with several similar productions of the Venetian school hanging in the same gallery, and the gulf that separates Giorgione from his imitators will, I think, be apparent.
In the same category must be ranked two very small panels in the Gallery at Padua (Nos. 42 and 43), attributed with a query to Giorgione. These are apparently fragments of some decorative series, of which the other parts are missing. The one represents "Leda and the Swan," the other a mythological subject, where a woman is seated holding a child, and a man, also seated, holds flowers. The latter recalls one of the figures in the National Gallery "Epiphany." The charm of these fragments lies in the exquisite landscapes, which, in minuteness of finish and loving care, Giorgione has nowhere surpassed. The gallery at Padua is thus, in my opinion, the possessor of four genuine examples of Giorgione's skill as a decorator, for we have already mentioned the larger cassone pieces[[114]] (Nos. 416 and 417).
Of greater importance is the "Unknown Subject," in the National Gallery (No. 1173), a picture which, like so many others, has recently been taken from Giorgione, its author, and vaguely put down to his "School." But it is time to protest against such needless depreciation!
In spite of abrasion, in spite of the loss of glow, in spite of much that disfigures, nay disguises, the master's own touch, I feel confident that Giorgione and no other produced this beautiful picture.[[115]] Surely if this be only school work, we are vainly seeking a mythical master, an ideal who never could have existed. What more dainty figures, what more delicate hues, what more exquisite feeling could one look for than is here to be found? True, the landscape has been renovated, true, the Giorgionesque depth and richness is gone, the mellow glow of the "Epiphany," which hangs just below, is sadly wanting, but who can deny the charm of the picturesque scenery, which vividly recalls the landscape backgrounds elsewhere in the master's own work, who can fail to admire the natural and unstudied grouping of the figures, the artlessness of the whole, the loving simplicity with which the painter has done his work? All is spontaneous; the spirit is not that of a laborious imitator, painfully seeking "effects" from another's inspiration; sincerity and naïveté are too apparent for this to be the work of any but a quite young artist, and one whose style is so thoroughly "Giorgionesque" as to be none other than the young Giorgione himself. In my opinion this is one of his earliest essays into the region of romance, painted probably before his twenty-first year, betraying, like the little legendary pictures in the Uffizi, a strong affinity with Carpaccio.[[116]]