Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed, by
naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories, it had no
Giotto, no Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from the stress of
thought and sentiment, which taxed so severely the resources of
the generations of Florentine artists, those earlier Venetian
painters, down to Carpaccio and the Bellini, seem never for a
moment to have been so much as tempted to lose sight of the
scope of their art in its strictness, or to forget that painting must
be before all things decorative, a thing for the eye, a space of
colour on the wall, only more dexterously blent than the marking
of its precious stone or the chance interchange of sun and shade
upon it:--this, to begin and end with; whatever higher matter of
thought, or poetry, or religious reverie might play its part therein,
[141] between. At last, with final mastery of all the technical
secrets of his art, and with somewhat more than "a spark of the
divine fire" to his share, comes Giorgione. He is the inventor of
genre, of those easily movable pictures which serve neither for
uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historic teaching--little
groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or
landscape--morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play,
but refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses
of life from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly blent colour,
obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a mere architectural
scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall.
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