Giorgione was one of those bright luminaries that dart across our plane
of vision and then go out quickly in hopeless night, leaving only the
memory of a blinding light. He died at thirty-three, which Disraeli
declares is the age at which the world's saviors have usually died--and
he names the Redeemer first in a list of twenty who passed out at the age
of three-and-thirty. Disraeli does not say that all those in his list
were saviors, for the second name he records is that of Alexander the
Great, the list ending with Shelley.

Giorgione died of a broken heart.

The girl he loved eloped with his friend, Morta del Feltri, to whom he
had proudly introduced her a short time before. It is an old story--it
has been played again and again to its Da Rimini finish. The friend
introduces the friend, and the lauded virtues of this friend inflames
imagination, until love strikes a spark; then soon instead of three we
find one--one groping blindly, alone, dazed, stunned, bereft.

The handsome Giorgione pined away, refusing to be comforted. And soon his
proud, melancholy soul took its flight from an environment with which he
was ever at war, and from a world which he never loved. And Titian was
sent for to complete the pictures which he had begun.

Surely, disembodied spirits have no control over mortals, or the soul of
Giorgione would have come back and smitten the hand of Titian with palsy.

For a full year before he died Giorgione had not spoken to Titian,
although he had seen him daily.