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 fabulous and illusive has always
mingled itself in the brilliancy of Giorgione's fame. The exact
relationship to him of many works--drawings, portraits, painted
idylls--often fascinating enough, which in various collections went by
his name, was from the first uncertain. 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 been preserved. But of those
six or eight famous pictures it is now known that only one is certainly
from Giorgione's hand.
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