Champêtre_ at the Louvre.

[Illustration: _Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. Doria
Gallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq._]

It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student of
Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him
at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young
poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly
allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have hard,
clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours.
It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere of pause and
quiet that they bring with them, the way in which they indefinably take
possession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond their
radiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet we
need not mourn overmuch, or too painfully set to work to revise our
whole conception of Venetian idyllic art as matured in the first years
of the Cinquecento. True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo, not
less amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian and
Giorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the
lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they
have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no
doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more
fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular
to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic
legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of
the golden prime disdained to represent--or it may be unconsciously
shrank from representing--the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramatic
and historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. Giorgione
embodies in such a picture as the _Adrastus and Hypsipyle_, or the