sparks of the Promethean fire, which, with the soft intensity of its
glow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire ran
like lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth, his
contemporaries and juniors, just because their blood was of the stuff to
ignite and flame like his own.

The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a question
merely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by a
brilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that "they who were
excellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath of
life into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour of
flesh, etc."[7] It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception and
style was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as the
Pheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic life
aspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just as
the Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements of
lofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which, in
Florence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the first
years of the Cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when--to take one
instance only among many--the Ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble Venetian
Caterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordance
with the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was ever of love. In
that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina's
courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty,
Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa
illustrissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius,
the leaflets which, under the title _Gli Asolani, ne' quali si ragiona
d' amore_,[8] soon became a famous book in Italy.

[Illustration: _The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice.