[Illustration:  Anderson photo.  Padua Gallery

FRONTS OF TWO CASSONES, WITH MYTHOLOGICAL SCENES]

Finally, two cassone panels in the gallery at Padua have been acclaimed by Signor Venturi as the master’s own,[72] and with that view I am entirely agreed.  The stories represented are not easily determinable (as is so often the case with Giorgione), but probably refer to the legends of Adonis.[73] The splendour of colour, the lurid light, the richness of effect, are in the highest degree impressive.  What artist but Giorgione would have so revelled in the glories of the evening sunset, the orange horizon, the distant blue hills?  The same gallery affords several instances of similar decorative pieces by other Venetian artists which serve admirably to show the great gulf fixed in quality between Giorgione’s work and that of the Schiavones, the Capriolis, and others who imitated him.[74]

NOTES: 

[11] Oxford Lecture, reported in the Pall Mall Gazette, Nov. 10, 1884.

[12] See postea, p. 63.

[13] Bellini adopted it later in his S. Giov.  Crisostomo altar-piece of 1513.

[14] All the more surprising is it that it receives no mention from Vasari, who merely states that the master worked at Castelfranco.

[15] I unhesitatingly adopt the titles recently given to these pictures by Herr Franz Wickhoff (Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, Heft. i. 1895), who has at last succeeded in satisfactorily explaining what has puzzled all the writers since the days of the Anonimo.

[16] Statius:  Theb. iv. 730 ff.  See p. 135.

[17] Aen. viii. 306-348.

[18] Fry:  Giovanni Bellini, p. 39.

[19] ii. 214.

[20] Ridolfi mentions the following as having been painted by Giorgione:—­“The Age of Gold,” “Deucalion and Pyrrha,” “Jove hurling Thunderbolts at the Giants,” “The Python,” “Apollo and Daphne,” “Io changed into a Cow,” “Phaeton, Diana, and Calisto,” “Mercury stealing Apollo’s Arms,” “Jupiter and Pasiphae,” “Cadmus sowing the Dragon’s Teeth,” “Dejanira raped by Nessus,” and various episodes in the life of Adonis.

[21] In the Venice Academy.

[22] Archivio, Anno VI., where reproductions of the two are given side by side, fasc. vi. p. 412.

[23] The Berlin example (by the Pseudo-Basaiti) is reproduced in the Illustrated Catalogue of the recent exhibition of Renaissance Art at Berlin; the Rovigo version (under Leonardo’s name!) is possibly by Bissolo.

Two other repetitions exist, one at Stuttgart, the other in the collection of Sir William Farrer. (Venetian Exhibition, New Gallery, 1894, No. 76.)

[24] Gentile Bellini’s three portraits in the National Gallery (Nos. 808, 1213, 1440) illustrate this growing tendency in Venetian art; all three probably date from the first years of the sixteenth century.  Gentile died in 1507.