The School of Giorgione
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
"The School of Giorgione" is an essay by Walter Pater first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1877, and later was added to the third edition (1888) of Studies in the Renaissance. It is famous for its much-quoted maxim "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music."
See also
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE.
IT is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting — all the various products of art — as but trans- lations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting— of sound, in music — of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle — ^that the sensuous material of each art brings ¥dth it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind — ^is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For, as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the " imaginative reason " through the senses, there are differences of kind in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the gifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and incommunicable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibil-
285
F
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
ities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limita- tions; to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to its special material ; to note in a picture that true pictorial charm, which is neither a mere poetical thought nor sentiment, on the one hand, nor a mere result of communicable technical skill in colour or design, on the other; to define in a poem that true poetical quality, which is neither descriptive nor meditative merely, but comes of an invent- ive handling of rhythmical language — the element of song in the singing; to note in music the musical charm — that essential music, which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.
To such a philosophy of the variations of the beautiful, Lessing's analysis of the spheres of sculpture and poetry, in the Laocoon was a very important contribution. But a true appreciation of these things is possible only in the light of a whole system of such art-casuistries. And it is in the criticism of painting that this truth most needs enforcing, i
for it is in popular judgments on pictures |
286
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
that that false generalisation of all art into forms of poetry is most prevalent. To sup- pose that all is mere technical acquirement in delineation or touch, working through and addressing itself to the intelligence, on the one side, or a merely poetical, or what may be called literary interest, addressed also to the pure intelligence, on the other ; — this is the way of most spectators, and of many critics, who have never caught sight, all the time, of that true pictorial quality which lies between (unique pledge of the possession of the pictorial gift) the inventive or creative handling of pure line and colour, which, as almost always in Dutch painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veronese, is quite independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject it accompanies. It is the drawing — the design projected from that peculiar pictorial temperament or con- stitution, in which, while it may possibly be ignorant of true anatomical proportions, all things whatever, all poetry, every idea how- ever abstract or obscure, floats up as a visible scene or image: it is the colouring — that weaving as of just perceptible gold threads of light through the dress, the flesh, the
287
\
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
atmosphere, in Titian's Lctce-girl — the stain- ing of the whole fabric of the thing with a new, delightful physical quality. This drawing'^ then — ^the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying figures, by Titian's forest branches; this colouring — the magic conditions of light and hue in the atmosphere of Titian's Lace-girl or Reuben's Descent from the Cross: — ^these essential pictorial qualities must first of all delight the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragment of Venetian glass; and through this delight only be the medium of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them, in the intention of the composer. In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a moment, on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are caught in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by nature itself. And this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we may trace the coming of poetry into painting, by fine gradations upwards; from Japanese fan-painting, for instance, where
288
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
we get, first, only abstract colour; then, just a little interfused sense of the poetry of flowers; then, sometimes, perfect flower- painting; and so, onwards, until in Titian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne ^ so actually a touch of true childlike humour in the diminutive, quaint figure with its silk gown, which ascends the temple stairs, in his picture of the Presentation of the Virgin^ at Venice.
But although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions, and an untranslatable charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-streben — a partial alienation from its own limitations, by which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.
Thus some of the most delightful music seems to be always approaching to figure, to pictorial definition. Architecture, again.
289
THE SCHOOL OF GIOR6IONE
though it has its own laws — ^laws esoteric enough, as the true architect knows only too well — ^yet sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a picture, as in the Arena chapel; or of sculpture, as in the flawless unity of Giotto's tower at Florence; and often finds a true poetry, as in those strangely twisted staircases of the cbSteawc of the country of the Loire, as if it were intended that among their odd turnings the actois in a wild life might pass each other unseen: there being a poetry also of memory and of the mere effect of time, by which it often profits greatly. Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of the hard limitation of pure form towards colour, or its equivalent; poetry also, in many ways, finding guidance from the other arts, the analogy between a Greek tragedy and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a relief, of French poetry generally with the art of engraving, being more than mere figures of speech; and all the arts in common aspiring towards the principle of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art, the object of the great Anders-streben of all art, of all that is artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities.
290
V
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIO NE
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance — its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture — the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape — should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling ; that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: — this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.
This abstract language becomes clear enough, if we think of actual examples. In an actual landscape we see a long white road, lost suddenly on the hill-verge. That is the matter of one of the etchings of M. Legros : only, in this etching, it is informed by an indwelling solemnity of expression, seen upon it or half-seen, within the limits of an exceptional moment, or caught from his own mood perhaps, but which he main-
291
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
tains as the very essence of the thing, throughout his work. Sometimes a momen- tary tint of stormy light may invest a homely or too familiar scene with a character which might well have been drawn from the deep places of the imagination. Then we might say that this particular effect of light, this sudden inweaving of gold thread through the texture of the haystack, and the poplars, and the grass, gives the scene artistic qualities ; that it is like a picture. And such tricks of circumstance are commonest in landscape which has little salient character of its own ; because, in such scenery, all the material details are so easily absorbed by that inform- ing expression of passing light, and elevated, throughout their whole extent, to a new and delightful effect by it. And hence the supe- riority, for most conditions of the picturesque, of a river-side in France to a Swiss valley, because, on the French river-side, mere topography, the simple material, counts for so little, and, all being so pure, untouched, and tranquil in itself, mere light and shade have such easy work in modulating it to one dominant tone. The Venetian landscape, on the other hand, has in its material condi-
292
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
tions much which is hard, or harshly definite ; but the masters of the Venetian school have shown themselves little burdened by them. Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted elements only, of cool colour and tranquUlising line; and they use its actual details, the brown windy turrets, the straw- coloured fields, the forest arabesques, but as the notes of a music which duly accompanies the presence of their men and women, pre- senting us with the spirit or essence only of a certain sort of landscape — a country of the pure reason or half-imaginative memory.
Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the first instance to the mere intelligence ; and it deals, most often, with a definite sub- ject or situation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite legitimate function in the expression of moral or political aspiration, as often in the poetry of Victor Hugo. In such instances it is easy enough for the understanding to distinguish between the matter and the form, however much the matter, the subject, the element which is addressed to the mere intelligence, has been penetrated by the informing, artistic spirit. But the ideal types of poetry are those
293
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
in which this distinction is reduced to its minimum; so that lyrical poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach the matter from the form, without a deduction of something from that matter itself, is, at least artistically, the highest and most com- plete form of poetry. And the very perfec- tion of such poetry often seems to depend, in part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through wa3rs not distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in some of the most imaginative compositions of William Blake, and often in Shakspere*s songs, as pre-emi- nently in that song of Mariana's page in Measure for Measure^ in which the kindling force and poetry of the whole play seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of music.
And this principle holds good of all things that partake in any degree of artistic quali- ties, of the furniture of our houses, and of dress, for instance, of life itself, of gesture and speech, and the details of daily inter- course ; these also, for the wise, being susceptible of a suavity and charm, caught from the way in which they are done, which
294
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
gives them a worth in themselves ; wherein, indeed, lies what is valuable and justly attrac- tive, in what is called the fashion of a time, which elevates the trivialities of speech, and manner, and dress, into " ends in themselves," and gives them a mysterious grace and attract- iveness in the doing of them.
Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composition are so welded together, that the material or subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only ; but form and matter, in their union or identity, present one single effect to the " imaginative reason," that complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-bom with its sensible analogue or symbol.
It is the art of music which most com- pletely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter. In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the
29s
THE SCHOOL OF GIOR6IONE
matter, the subject from the expression ; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be sup- posed constantly to tend and aspire. Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed, is the true t)rpe or measifre of perfected art. Therefore, although each art has its incom- municable element, its untranslatable order of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the "imaginative reason," yet the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises; and one of the chief functions of aesthetic criti- cism, dealing with the products of art, new or old, is to estimate the degree in which each of those products approaches, in this sense, to musical law.
By no school of painters have the necessary limitations of the art of painting, been so unerringly though instinctively apprehended, and the essence of what is pictorial in a picture so justly conceived, as by the school of Venice; and the train of thought sug* gested in what has been now said is, perhaps, a not unfitting introduction to a few pages
296
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
about Giorgione, who, though much has been taken by recent criticism from what was reputed to be his work, yet, more entirely than any other painter, sums up, in what we know of himself and his art, the spirit of the Venetian school.
The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiif, half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration, and are but the introduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo of Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. And throughout the course of its later development, always sub- ordinate to architectural effect, the work of the Venetian school never escaped from the influence of its beginnings. Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed, by naturalism, relig- ious mysticism, philosophical theories, it had no Giotto, no Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from the stress of thought and sentiment, which taxed so severely the resources of the generations of Florentine artists, those earlier Venetian painters, down to Carpaccio and the Bellini, seem never for a moment to have been tempted even to lose sight of the scope of their art in its strictness, or to forget that
297
I
1
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
painting must be before all things decorative, a thing for the eye, a space of colour on the wall, only more dexterously blent than the marking of its precious stone or the chance interchange of sun and shade upon it — ^this, to begin and end with — whatever higher matter of thought, or poetry, or religious reverie might play its part therein, between. At last, with final mastery of all the technical secrets of his art, and with somewhat more than *' a spark of the divine fire " to his share, comes Giorgione. He is the inventor of genre^ of those easily movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historic teaching — ^little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape — ^morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly blent colour, obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a mere archi- tectural scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall ; he frames them by the hands of some skilful carver, so that people may move them readily and take with them where they go, like a poem in manuscript, or a musical
298
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
instrument, to be used, at will, as a means of self-education, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence, into one's cabinet, to enrich the air as with some choice aroma, and, like persons, live with us, for a day or a lifetime. Of all art like this, art which has played so large a part in men's culture since that time, Giorgione is the initiator. Yet in him too that old Venetian clearness or justice, in the apprehension of the essential limitations of the pictorial art, is still undis- turbed ; and, while he interfuses his painted work with a high-strung sort of poetry, caught directly from a singularly rich and high-strung sort of life, yet in his selection of subject, or phase of subject, in the subordination of mere subject to pictorial design, to the main pur- pose of a picture, he is typical of that aspira- tion of all the arts towards music, which I have endeavoured to explain, — towards the perfect identification of matter and form.
Bom so near to Titian, though a little before him, that these two companion pupils of the aged Giovanni Bellini may almost be called contemporaries, Giorgione stands to Titian in something like the relationship of Sordello to Dante, in Mr. Browning's poem.
299
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
Titian, when he leaves Bellini, becomes, in turn, the pupil of Giorgione; he lives in constant labour more than sixty years after Giorgione is in his grave; and with such fruit, that hardly one of the greater towns of Europe is without some fragment of it. But the slightly older man, with his so limited actual product (what remains to us of it seeming, when narrowly examined, to reduce itself to almost one picture, like Sordello's one fragment of lovely verse), yet expresses, in elementary motive and principle, that spirit — ^itself the final acquisition of all the long endeavours of Venetian art — ^which Titian spreads over his whole life's activity. And, as we might expect, something fab- ulous and iUusive has always mingled itself in the brilliancy of Giorgione's fame. The exact relationship to him of many works — drawings, portraits, painted idylls— -often fas- cinating enough, which in various collections went by his name, was from the first uncer- tain. Still, six or eight famous pictures at Dresden, Florence and the Louvre, were undoubtedly attributed to him, and in these, if anywhere, something of the splendour of the old Venetian humanity seemed to have
300
THE SCHOOL OF 6IORGIONE
been preserved. But of those six or eight famous pictures it is now known that only one is certainly from Giorgione*s hand. The accomplished science of the subject has come at last, and, as in other instances, has not made the past more real for us, but assured us that we possess of it less than we seemed to possess. Much of the work on which Giorgione's immediate fame depended, work done for instantaneous effect, in all probabil- ity passed away almost within his own age, like the frescoes on the fa9ade of \>Ck.^ fondaco del Tedeschi at Venice, some crimson traces of which, however, still give a strange addi- tional touch of splendour to the scene of the Rialto. And then there is a barrier or border land, a period about the middle of the six- teenth century, in passing through which the tradition miscarries, and the true outlines of Giorgione's work and person become obscured. It became fashionable for wealthy lovers of art, with no critical standard of authenticity, to collect so-called works of Giorgione, and a multitude of imitations came into circulation. And now, in the " new Vasari," ' the great traditional reputa-
I Crowe and Cavalcaselle : History of Painting in North Italy.
301
y
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
tion, woven with so profuse demand on men's admiration, has been scrutinised thread by thread ; and what remains of the most vivid and stimulating of Venetian masters, a live flame, as it seemed, in those old shadowy times, has been reduced almost to a name by his most recent critics.
Yet enough remains to explain why the legend grew up, above the name, why the name attached itself, in many instances, to the bravest work of other men. The Concert in the PitH Palace, in which a monk, with cowl and tonsure, touches the keys of a harpsichord, while a clerk, placed behind him, grasps the handle of a viol, and a third, with cap and plume, seems to wait upon the true interval for beginning to sing, is undoubt- edly Giorgione*s. The outline of the lifted finger, the trace of the plume, the very threads of the fine linen, which fasten them- selves on the memory, in the moment before they are lost altogether in that calm unearthly glow, the skill which has caught the waves of wandering sound, and fixed them for ever on the lips and hands — these are indeed the master's own ; and the criticism which, while dismissing so much hitherto believed to be
302
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
Giorgione's, has established the claims of this one picture, has left it among the most precious things in the world of art.
It is noticeable that the " distinction " of this Concert, its sustained evenness of per- fection, alike in design, in execution, and in choice of personal type, becomes for the "new Vasari" the standard of Giorgione's genuine work. Finding here enough to explain his influence, and the true seal of mastery, its authors assign to Pellegrino da San Daniele the Holy Family in the Louvre, for certain points in which it comes short of that standard, but which will hardly diminish the spectator's enjoyment of a singular charm of liquid air, with which the whole picture seems instinct, filling the eyes and lips, the very garments, of its sacred personages, with some wind-searched brightness and energy; of which fine air the blue peak, clearly defined in the distance, is as it were, the visible pledge. Similarly, another favourite picture in the Louvre, the subject of a sonnet by a poet whose own painted work often comes to mind as one ponders over these precious things — ^the Fete Cbampetre, is assigned to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo; and the
303
THE SCHOOL OF GEORGIONS
Tempest^ in the Academy at Venice (a slighter loss, perhaps, though not without its pleasant effect of clearing weather, towards the left, its one untouched morsel), to Paris Bordone, or perhaps to " some advanced craftsman of the sixteenth century." From the gallery at Dresden, the Knight embracing a La4y^ where the knight's broken gauntlets seem to mark some well known pause in a story we would willingly hear the rest of, is conceded to "a Brescian hand," and Jacob meeting Rachel to a pupil of Palma ; and, whatever their charm, we are called on to give up the Ordealy and the Finding of Moses with its jewel-like pools of water, perhaps to BellinL Nor has the criticism, which thus so freely diminishes the number of his authentic works, added an3rthing important to the well-known outline of the life and personality of the man : only, it has fixed one or two dates, one or two circumstances, a little more exactly. Giorgione was bom before the year 1477, and spent his childhood at Castelfranco, where the last crags of the Venetian Alps break down romantically, with something of parklike grace, to the plain. A natural child of the family of the Barbarelli by a peasant-
304
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
girl of Vedelago, he finds his way early into the drcle of notable persons — people of courtesy; and becomes initiated into those differences of personal type, manner, and even of dress, which are best understood there — ^that "distinction" of the Concert of the PitH Palace. Not far from his home lives Catherine of Comara, formerly Queen of Cyprus ; and, up in the towers which still remain, Tuzio Costanzo, the famous condot- tiere — a picturesque remnant of medieval manners, amid a civilisation rapidly changing. Giorgione paints their portraits; and when Tuzio*s son, Matteo, dies in early youth, adorns in his memory a chapel in the church of Castelfranco, painting on this occasion, perhaps, the altar-piece, foremost among his authentic works, still to be seen there, with the figure of the warrior-saint, Liberale, of which the original little study in oil, with the delicately gleaming, silver-grey armour, is one of the greater treasures of the National Gallery, and in which, as in some other knightly personages attributed to him, people have supposed the likeness of his own pre- sumably gracious presence. Thither, at last, he is himself brought home from Venice,
30s
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
early dead, but celebrated. It happened, about his thirty-fourth year, that in one of those parties at which he entertained his friends with music, he met a certain lady of whom he became greatly enamoured, and "they rejoiced greatly," says Vasari, "the one and the other, in their loves." And two quite different legends concerning it agree in this, that it was through this lady he cam^ by his death: Ridolfi relating that, being robbed of her by one of his pupils, he died of grief at the double treason ; — Vasari, that she being secretly stricken of the plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, he took the sickness from her mortally, along with her kisses, and so briefly departed.
But, although the number of Giorgione's extant works has been thus limited by recent criticism, all is not done when the real and the traditional elements in what concerns him have been discriminated; for, in what is connected with a great name, much that is not real is often very stimulating; and, for the aesthetic philosopher, over and above the real Giorgione and his authentic extant works, there remains the Giorgionesque also— an influence, a spirit or type in art, active in
306
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
men so different as those to whom many of his supposed works are really assignable — a veritable school, which grew together out of all those fascinating works rightly or wrongly attributed to him ; out of many copies from, or variations on him, by unknown or uncertain workmen, whose drawings and designs were, for various reasons, prized as his ; out of the immediate impression he made upon his con- temporaries, and with which he continued in men's minds ; out of many traditions of sub- ject and treatment, which really descend from him to our own time, and by retracing which we fill out the original image; Giorgione thus becoming a sort of impersonation of Venice itself, its projected reflex or ideal, all that was intense or desirable in it thus crystallising about the memory of this won- derful young man.
And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of this School of Giorgioney as we may call it, which, for most of us, notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the " new Vasari," will still identify itself with those famous pictures at Florence, Dresden and Paris; and in which a certain artistic ideal is defined for us — ^the conception of a
307
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we may understand as the Giorgionesquey wherever we find it, whether in Venetian work generally, or in work of our own time — and of which the Concert^ that undoubted work of Giorgione in the Fitti Palace, is the typical instance, and a pledge authenticating the connexion of the school with the master.
I have spoken of a certain interpenetration of the matter or subject of a work of art with the form of it, a condition realised absolutely only in music, as the condition to which every form of art is perpetually aspiring. In the art of painting, the attain- ment of this ideal condition, this perfect interpenetration of the subject with colour and design, depends, of course, in great measure, on dexterous choice of that subject, or phase of subject; and such choice is one of the secrets of Giorgione*s school. It is the school of genrey and employs itself mainly with " painted idylls,'* but, in the production of this pictorial poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter as lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to complete expression by drawing and colour. For although its productions are
308
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells itself without an articulated story. The master is pre-eminent for the resolution, the ease and quickness, with which he reproduces instantaneous motion — the lacing-on of armour, with the head bent back so stately — ^the fainting lady — ^the embrace, rapid as the kiss caught, with death itself, from dying lips — the momentary conjunction of mirrors and polished armour and still water, by whidi all the sides of a solid image are presented at once, solving that casuistical question whether painting can present an object as completely as sculpture. The sudden act, the rapid transition of thought, the passing expression — this, he arrests with that vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him // fuoco Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps — some brief and wholly con- crete moment — ^into which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an
309
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
intense consdousness of the present. Such ideal instants the school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuously coloured life of the old citizens of Venice — exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life.
It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like this is really aspiring; and, in the school of Giorgione, the perfect moments of music itself, the making or hear- ing of music, song or its accompaniment, are themselves prominent as subjects. On that background of the silence of Venice, which the visitor there finds so impressive, the world of Italian music was then forming. In choice of subject, as in all besides, the Concert of the PitH Palace is typical of all that Giorgione, himself an admirable musician, touched with his influence; and in sketch or finished picture, in various collections, we may follow it through many intricate varia- tions — men fainting at music, music heard at the pool-side while people fish, or mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the well, or
310
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
heard across ninning water, or among the flocks; the tuning of instruments — ^people with intent faces, as if listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage, to detect the smallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument, ear and finger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite for sweet soimd — a momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passes through some unfa- miliar room, in a chance company.
In such favourite incidents, then, of Gior- gione*s school, music or music-like intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening — listening to music, to the reading of Bandello's novels, to the sound of water, to time. as it flies. Often such moments are really our moments of play, and we are surprised at the unexpected blessedness of what may seem our least important part of time ; not merely because play is in many instances that to which people really apply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the stress of our servile, every-day attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers in things without
3"
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
of that balance, that modulated unison of landscape and persons — of the human image and its accessories — already noticed as char- acteristic of the Venetian school, so that, in it, neither personage nor scenery is ever a mere pretext for the other.
Something like this seems to me to be the vraie vSrite about Giorgione, if I may adopt a serviceable expression, by which the French recognise those more liberal and durable impressions which, in respect of any really considerable person or subject, anything that has at all intricately occupied men's atten- tion, lie beyond, and must supplement, the narrower range of the strictly ascertained facts about it. In this, Giorgione is but an illustration of a valuable general caution we may abide by in all criticism. As regards Giorgione himself, we have indeed to take note of all those negations and exceptions, by which, at first sight, a "new Vasari" seems merely to have confused our appre- hension of a delightful object, to have explained away out of our inheritance from past time what seemed of high value there. Yet it is not with a full understanding even of those exceptions that one can leave off
314
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
just at this point. Properly qualified, such exceptions are but a salt of genuineness in our knowledge ; and beyond all those strictly ascertained facts, we must take note of that indirect influence by which one like Giorgione, for instance, enlarges his permanent efficacy and really makes himself felt in our culture. In a just impression of that, is the essential truth, the vraie viritg concerning him.
