Of the undisputed pictures by Giorgione, the grandest is the "Monk at the Clavichord," in the Pitti Palace at Florence.[279] The young man has his fingers on the keys; he is modulating in a mood of grave and sustained emotion; his head is turned away towards an old man standing near him. On the other side of the instrument is a boy. These two figures are but foils and adjuncts to the musician in the middle; and the whole interest of his face lies in its concentrated feeling--the very soul of music, as expressed in Mr. Robert Browning's "Abt Vogler," passing through his eyes. This power of painting the portrait of an emotion, of depicting by the features a deep and powerful but tranquil moment of the inner life, must have been possessed by Giorgione in an eminent degree. We find it again in the so-called "Begrüssung" of the Dresden Gallery.[280] The picture is a large landscape, Jacob and Rachel meet and salute each other with a kiss. But the shepherd lying beneath the shadow of a chestnut tree beside a well has a whole Arcadia of intense yearning in the eyes of sympathy he fixes on the lovers. Something of this faculty, it may be said in passing, descended to Bonifazio, whose romance pictures are among the most charming products of Venetian art, and one of whose singing women in the feast of Dives has the Giorgionesque fulness of inner feeling. Fate has dealt less unkindly with Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese than with Giorgione. The works of these artists, in whom the Venetian Renaissance attained completion, have been preserved in large numbers and in excellent condition. Chronologically speaking, Titian, the contemporary of Giorgione, precedes Tintoretto, and Tintoretto is somewhat earlier than Veronese.[281] But for the purpose of criticism the three painters may be considered together as the representatives of three marked aspects in the fully developed Venetian style. Tintoretto, called by the Italians the thunderbolt of painting, because of his vehement impulsiveness and rapidity of execution, soars above his brethren by the faculty of pure imagination. It was he who brought to its perfection the poetry of _chiaroscuro_, expressing moods of passion and emotion by brusque lights, luminous half-shadows, and semi-opaque darkness, no less unmistakably than Beethoven by symphonic modulations. He too engrafted on the calm and natural Venetian manner something of the Michael Angelesque sublimity, and sought to vary by dramatic movement the romantic motives of his school. In his work, more than in that of his contemporaries, Venetian art ceased to be decorative and idyllic.