acquired a world-wide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soul
to Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of early
training and association, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal itself,
he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to the
very end of his career.

Giorgione and Titian were as nearly as possible of the same age, being
both of them born in or about 1477. Lorenzo Lotto's birth is to be
placed about the year 1476--or, as others would have it, 1480. Palma saw
the light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485. So
that most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlier
half of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eight
years--between 1477 and 1485.

In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Life and Times of Titian_ a revolutionary
theory, foreshadowed in their _Painting in North Italy_, was for the
first time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained. They
sought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, that
Palma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced and
shaped the art of his contemporary Titian, instead of having been
influenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artists
would have induced the student to believe. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's
theory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelli
appears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to be
found on a _Santa Conversazione_, once in the collection of M. Reiset,
and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d'Aumale. This date now
proves with the artist's signature to be a forgery, and the picture in
question, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode of
conception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more modern
technique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma in