Giorgione, did we but possess enough of his authentic works to judge by, would be found the first painter of the true Renaissance among the Venetians, the inaugurate of the third and great period.[277] He died at the age of thirty-six, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown. Time has destroyed the last vestige of his frescoes. Criticism has reduced the number of his genuine easel pictures to half a dozen. He exists as a great name. The part he played in the development of Venetian art was similar to that of Marlowe in the history of our drama. He first cut painting altogether adrift from mediaeval moorings, and launched it on the waves of the Renaissance liberty. While equal as a colourist to Bellini, though in a different and more sensuous region, Giorgione, by the variety and inventiveness of his conception, proved himself a painter of the calibre of Titian. Sacred subjects he seems to have but rarely treated, unless such purely idyllic pictures as the "Finding of Moses" in the Uffizzi, and the "Meeting of Jacob and Rachel" at Dresden deserve the name. Allegories of deep and problematic meaning, the key whereof has to be found in states of the emotion rather than, in thoughts, delighted him. He may be said to have invented the Venetian species of romance picture, where an episode in a novella forms the motive of the painting.[278] Nor was he deficient in tragic power, as the tremendous study for a Lucrece in the Uffizzi collection sufficiently proves. In his drawings he models the form without outline by massive distribution of light and dark. In style they are the very opposite of Lionardo's clearly defined studies touched with the metal point upon prepared paper. They suggest colouring, and are indeed the designs of a great colourist, who saw things under the conditions of their tints and tone.