operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open
to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness of
sensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible was
the fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over his
youthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influence
widen, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellino
himself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there could
be no question of light received back from painters of his own
generation in exchange for that diffused around him; but with Titian and
Palma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell here
in each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous
plant of the same family, yet with all its Giorgionesque colour of a
quite distinctive loveliness. Titian, we shall see, carried the style to
its highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways a
new thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in
nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than
Giorgione, Titian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to that
element of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a way
counteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interprets
the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic
attributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itself
beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this
frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this _terre à
terre_ energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early work of
Titian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was
influenced?[6] There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the
Giorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to the
everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and
this not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, in
which, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular