is difficult to resist the feeling that in the Shepherd,[1] in white shirt and grey cloak, holding a flute in his hand, we have a genuine and exquisite Giorgione.
It is a picture full of a real and unspoiled delight in life, pastoral, human, simple, pure. The sympathetic writer whose charming brochure should be in the hand of every visitor to the gallery, says: "The face is so radiantly beautiful, that even retouching and blackening have not been able to hide the fine oval, the exquisite proportions, the lovely brow, the warm eyes, the sweet mouth, the soft waving hair, and the easy poise of the head."[2]
This enthusiastic writer, following Mr. Bernhard Berenson, will allow no other picture in England to be by the hand of Giorgione, dismissing not only the National Gallery "Knight" as a "poor copy" of the figure in the famous altarpiece that Mr. Ruskin has so loftily praised, but also all the others at Hampton Court—60 and 183, as by Dosso Dossi, 87 "from the workshop of Bonifazio," 158 as of the school of Paris Bordone, and the rest as "an insult to the name of any master."
"The Concert" (No. 144), a rather sly damsel singing, and three male faces, which Mr. Berenson[3] will not admit to be a Lotto, still less a Giorgione, is assigned to the little-known Morto da Feltre. Its chief interest "lies in its mystery."
From Giorgione we pass to Titian, whose magnificent
