THE DEL PUENTE GIORGIONE


The train swung down a tawny New England river towards Prestonville as I
reviewed the stages of a great curiosity. At last I was to see the Del
Puente Giorgione. Long before, when the old pictures first began to speak
to me, I had learned that the critic Mantovani, the master of us all,
owned an early Giorgione, unfinished but of marvellous beauty. At his
death, strangely enough, it was not found among his pictures, which were
bequeathed as every one knows to the San Marcello Museum. The next word I
had of it was when Anitchkoff, Mantovani's disciple and successor,
reported it in the Del Puente Castle in the Basque mountains. He added a
word on its importance though avowedly knowing it only from a photograph.
It appeared that Mantovani in his last days had given the portrait to his
old friend the Carlist Marquesa del Puente, in whose cause--picturesque
but irrelevant detail--he had once drawn sword. Anitchkoff's full
enthusiasm was handsomely recorded after he had made the pilgrimage to
the Marquesa's crag. One may still read in that worthy but short-lived
organ of sublimity, "Le Mihrab," his appreciation of the Del Puente
Giorgione, which he describes as a Giambellino blossoming into a Titian,
with just the added exquisiteness that the world has only felt since Big
George of Castelfranco took up the brush. How the panel exchanged the
Pyrenees for the North Shore passed dimly through my mind as barely worth
recalling. It was the usual story of the rich and enterprising American
collector. Hanson Brooks had bought it and hung it in "The Curlews,"
where it bid fair to become legendary once more, but at last had lent it
with his other pictures to the Prestonville Museum of Science and the
Fine Arts, the goal of my present quest. While the picture lay _perdu_ at