have had a more express origin. The father, we are told, poverty-stricken and greedy of gain, was perpetually urging his boy to exertion with the phrase, “Luca, fa. presto.” The youth obeyed his parent to the letter, and would actu- ally not so much as pause to snatch a hasty meal, but received into his month, while he still worked on, the food which his father’s hand supplied. He copied nearly twenty times the Battle of Constantine by J ulio Ilomano, and with proportionate frequency several of the great works of Raphael and Michelangelo. His rapidity, which belonged as much to invention as to mere handiwork, and his versa— tility, which enabled him to imitate other painters decep- tively, earned for him two other epithets, “The Thunderbolt” (Fulniine), and “The Proteus,” of Painting. He shortly visited all the main seats of the Italian school of art, and formed for himself a style combining in a certain measure the ornamental pomp of Paul Veronese and the contrasting Compositions and large schemes of chiaroscuro of Pietro da ('ortona. He was noted also for lively and showy colour. Icturning to Naples, and accepting every sort of commis- sion by which money was to be made, he practised his art with so much applause that Charles II. of Spain towards 1637 invited him over to Madrid, where he remained thirteen years. Giordano was very popular at the Spanish court, being a sprightly talker along with his other marvel- lously facile gifts, and the king created him a cavaliere. ()ne anecdote of his rapidity of work is that the queen of Spain having one day made some inquiry about his Wife, he at once showed Her Majesty what the lady was like by painting her portrait into the picture on which he was en— gagcd. After the death of Charles in 1700 Giordano, gorged with wealth, returned to Naples. He spent large sums in acts of munificence, and was particularly liberal to his poorer brethren of the art. He again visited various parts of Italy, and died in Naples on 12th January 1705, his last Words being “O N apoli, sospiro mio ” (O Naples, my heart’s love I). One of his maxims was that the good painter is the one whom the public like, and that the public
are attracted more by colour than by design.At the present day, when the question is not how quickly Giordano could do his work, but what the work itself amounts to, his reputation has run down like the drops of heavy rain off a window, or like one of the figures in his own paintings, in which he was wont to use an excessive quantity of oil. His astonishing readiness and facility must, however, be recognized, spite of the general commonness and superficiality of his performances. He left many works in Rome, and far more in Naples. Of the latter one of the most renowned is Christ expelling the Traders from the Temple, in the church of the Padri Girolamini, a colossal work, full of expressive lazzaroni; also the frescos of S. Martino, and those in the Tesoro della Certosa, including the subject of Moses and the Brazen Serpent; and the cupola—paintings in the Church of S. Brigida, which con- tains the artist’s own tomb. In Spain he executed a surprising number of works,~—continuing in the Escorial the series commenced by Cambiasi, and painting frescos of the Triumphs of the Church, the Genealogy and Life of the Madonna, the stories of Moses, Gideon, David, and Solomon, and the Celebrated Women of Scripture, all works of large dimensions. His pupils, Aniello Rossi and Matteo Pacelli, assisted him in Spain. In Madrid he worked more in oil- colour, 9. Nativity there being one of his best productions. Another superior example is the Judgment of Paris in the Berlin Museum. In Florence, in his closing days, he painted the Cappella Corsini,’the Galleria Riccardi, and other works. In youth he etched with considerable skill some of his own paintings, such as the Slaughter of the Priests of Baal. He also painted much on the crystal borderings of looking-glasses, cabinets, &c., seen in many Italian palaces, and was, in this form of art, the master of Pietro Garofolo. His best pul-il, in painting of the ordinary kind, was Paolo de M atteis.
his contemporaries and by posterity for one of the most renowned of Italian painters, signifies George the Big, or Great, and was given him, according to Yasari, “because of the gifts of his person and the greatness of his mind.” Like Lionardo da Vinci, Giorgione appears to have been of illegitimate birth. His father belonged certainly to the gentle family of the Barbarella, of Castelfranco in the T revisan ; his mother, it seems probable, was a peasant girl of the neighbouring village of V edelago ; and he was born in or shortly before the year 1477. In histories and catalogues he is now commonly styled Giorgio Barbarella of Castelfranco ; but it seems clear that he was humbly reared, and only acknowledged by his father’s family when his genius had made him famous. Twenty-seven years after his death, the brothers Matteo and Ercole Barbarella were glad to inscribe the name of Giorgione among the members of their family in whose honour they built and dedicated a monument in the church of San Liberale in their native town. Presently this church was demolished and replaced by a new one. In the course of this operation the inscription in question perished. Not so a more important memorial of Giorgione’s greatness, in the shape of an altar- piece which he painted for the same church on the commission of Tuzio Costanzo. Tuzio Costanzo was a famous captain of free lances, who had followed his mistress, the Queen Cornaro, from Cyprus to her retirement in the Trevisan, and at the beginning of the 16th century was settled at Castelfranco. The altar-piece with which Giorgione adorned the chapel of this patron in the old church of San Liberale, was afterwards transferred to the new church, where it remains to this day, so that there is something more than the mere memory of the great painter to attract the lover of art on a pilgrimage to his native town. Castelfranco is a hill fort standing in the midst of a rich and broken plain at some distance from the last slopes of the Venetian Alps. Giorgione’s ideal of luxuriant pastoral scenery, the country of pleasant copses, glades, and brooks, amid which his personages love to wander or recline with lute and pipe, was derived, no doubt, from these natural surroundings of his childhood. We cannot tell how long he remained in their midst, nor what were the circumstances which led him, while still, it seems, a boy, to Veniee. Once there, we do not hear of him until his genius is, so to speak, full—fledged. He appears all at once as a splendid presence, the observed of all observers; an impassioned musician, singer, lover; and, above all, as a painter winning new conquests for his art. His progress from obscurity to fame, probably under the teaching of Giovanni Bellini, must have been extraordinarily rapid, as he was still very young when he was employed to paint the portraits of two successive doges, and of great captains and princesses such as Gonzalvo of Cordova and Catharina Cornaro. Giorgione effected, in the Venetian school, a change analogous to that effected by Lionardo in the school of Florence,—a change, that is, which was less a revolution than a crowning of the edifice. He added the last accom- plishments of freedom and science to an art that at his advent only just fell short of both. Venetian painting towards 1495 had reached the height of religious dignity in the great altar-pieces of Bellini, the height of romantic sentiment and picturesque animation in Carpaccio’s series from the legend of St Ursula. The efforts of the school for nearly half a century had been concentrated on the develop- ment, with the help of the new medium of oil, of colour as the great element of emotional expression in painting.
Giorgione came to enrich the art with a more faultless