Giorgione achieved far less than Raphael (and his life was
still shorter). Even the few works said to be by him are often
contested, yet he has a hauntingly nostalgic grace found nowhere else in art. He trained in the workshop of the great
Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini whose softness of contour
and warm, glowing colour continue in Giorgione's work. He
does not belong, as Raphael does, to this world, not even in
the rarefied way that we find in his great successors, Titian
and Tintoretto. His alliance is to another spirit, yet one to
which we instinctively respond, even if we do not always understand the logic of his works.
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