[Illustration:  “THE GOLDEN AGE” From the picture by Giorgione, in the National Gallery, London]

Giorgione painted a few sacred pictures and many mythological scenes, besides several very beautiful portraits of dreamy-looking poets and noblemen.  But even when he illustrated some well-known tale, he did not care to seize upon the dramatic moment that gives the crisis of the story, as Giotto would have done, and as the painter of our next picture does.  Violent action did not attract him.  Whatever the subject, if it were possible to group the figures together at a moment when they were beautifully doing nothing, he did so.  But he liked still more to paint ideal scenes from his own fancy, where young people sit in easy attitudes upon the grass, conversing for an instant in the intervals of the music they make upon pipes and guitar.  He was the first artist, so far as I know, to paint these half real, half imaginary scenes, of which our picture may be one.  In all of them landscape bears an important part, and in some the background has become the picture and completely subordinated the figures.  In this little ‘Golden Age’ the landscape is quiet in tone, tinged with melancholy, romantic, to suit the mood of the figures.  Its colouring, though rich, is subdued, more like the tints of autumn than the fresh hues of spring.  The Venetians excelled in their treatment of colour.  They lived in an uncommon world of it.  Giorgione saw his picture in his mind’s eye as a blaze of rich colour; he did not see the figures sharply outlined against a remote background, as are the three in Raphael’s ’Knight’s Dream.’  That does not mean that Raphael, like the artist of the Richard II. diptych, failed to make his figures look solid, but that he saw beauty most in the outlines of the body and the curves of the drapery, irrespective of colour, whereas to Giorgione’s eye outline was nothing without colour and light and shade.  The body of the King upon the throne in our picture is massed against the background, but there is no definite outline to divide it from the tree behind.  In this respect Giorgione was curiously modern for his date, as we shall see in pictures of a still later time.

Giorgione was only thirty-three years old when he died of the plague in 1510, the same year as Botticelli.  His master, Giovanni Bellini, who was born in 1428, outlived him by six years, and the great Titian, his fellow-pupil in the studio of Bellini, lived another half-century or more.

Titian in many ways summed up all that was greatest in Venetian art.  His pictures have less romance than those of Giorgione, except during the short space of time when he painted under the spell of his brother artist.  It is extremely difficult to distinguish then between Titian’s early and Giorgione’s late work.  Titian perhaps had the greater intellect.  Giorgione’s pictures vary according to his mood, while Titian’s express a less changeable personality.  In spite of his youth, Giorgione made a profound impression upon all the artists of his time.  They did not copy his designs, but the beauty of his pictures made them look at the world with his romantic eyes and paint in his dreamy mood.  It was almost as though Giorgione had absorbed the romance of Venice into his pictures, so that for a time no Venetian painter could express Venetian romance except in Giorgione’s way.