later years was transformed into something very like a satellite of
Giovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather to
the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent
overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the point
of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.

What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both of
Giorgione and Titian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is not
so much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent lean
on Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves. Neither of
them is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutely
dependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for a
time held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliest
manhood held towards Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent also
of Lorenzo Lotto, who, in the earliest known examples--the so-called
_Danaë_ of Sir Martin Conway's collection, and the _St. Jerome_ of the
Louvre--is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art passes through
successive developments, he will still show himself open to more or less
enduring influences from the one side and the other. Sebastiano del
Piombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly be
accounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career out
of leading-strings. First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling _Pietà_ in
the Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authentic
inscription, "Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus
(sic)," is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece of
documentary evidence, it would even now pass as such. Next, he becomes
the most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save perhaps
Titian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in a
quasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque,
that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, have