Giorgione had surpassed all artists in Venice. He had a careless, easy,
limpid style. But there was decision and surety in his swinging lines,
and best of all, a depth of tenderness and pity in his faces that gave to
the whole a rich, full and melting harmony.

Giorgione's head touched heaven, and his feet were not always on earth.
Titian's feet were always on earth, and his head sometimes touched
heaven. Titian was healthy and in love with this old, happy, cruel,
sensuous world. He was willing to take his chances anywhere. He had no
quarrel with his environment, for did he not stay here a hundred years
(lacking half a year), and then die through accident? Of course he liked
it. One woman, for him, could make a paradise in which a thousand
nightingales sang. And if one particular woman liked some one else
better, he just consoled himself with the thought that "there is just as
good fish," etc. I will not quote Walt Whitman and say his feet were
tenoned and mortised in granite, but they were well planted on the
soil--and sometimes mired in clay.

Titian admired Giorgione; he admired him so much that he painted exactly
like him--or as nearly as he could.

Titian was a good-looking young man, but he was not handsome like
Giorgione. Yet Titian did his best; he patronized Giorgione's tailor,
imitated his dreamy, far-away look, used a brush with his left hand, and
painted with his thumb. His coloring was the same, and when he got a
commission to fresco the ceiling of a church he did it as nearly like
Giorgione frescoes as he could.

This kind of thing is not necessarily servile imitation--it is only
admiration tipped to t' other side. It is found everywhere in aspiring