Among the varied mischief poured into this country by the rapacious sophistry of traders and the ambitious cullibility of wealthy collectors, no fraud perhaps has been more destructive to the genuine appreciation of original styles than the baptism of pictures with names not their own: by this prolific method worse ones than those of Luini, Aretusi, Timoteo della Vite, Bonifacio, are daily graced with the honours due to Lionardo, Correggio, Raffaello, Tizian; though none have suffered more by the multiplication than Giorgione, whom shortness of life, a peculiar fatality of circumstances, and the ravages of time, have conspired to render one of the scarcest as well as least authenticated artists even in Italy: to whom his earliest and latest biographers have been as critically unjust as chronologically inattentive; Vasari by transferring to another his principal work; Fiorillo by making him paint the portrait of Calvin the Reformer.[92] To form our opinion therefore of Giorgione's chiaroscuro from a few portraits or single figures, if legitimate, often restored, or from the crumbling remnants of his decayed frescoes, would be to form an estimate of a magnificent fabric from some loose fragment or stone: to do full justice to his powers we must have recourse to his surprising work in the School of S. Marco at Venice; a composition whose terrific graces Vasari descants on with a fervour inferior only to the artist's own inspiration, though he unaccountably ascribes it to the elder Palma.[93] "In the School of S. Marco he painted the story of the ship which conducts the body of St. Mark through a horrible tempest, with other barges assailed by furious winds; and besides, groups of aërial apparitions, and various forms of fiends who vent their blasts against the vessels, that by dint of oars and energy of arms strive to force their way through the mountainous and hostile waves which threaten to submerge them. You hear the howling blast, you see the grasp and fiery exertion of the men, the fluctuation of the waves, the lightning that bursts the clouds, the oars bent by the flood, the flood broke by the oars, and dashed to spray by the sinews of the rowers. What more? In vain I labour to recollect a picture that equals the terrors of this whose design, invention, and colour make the canvass tremble! Often when he finishes, an artist, absorbed in the contemplation of parts, forgets the main point of a design, and as the spirits cool, loses the vein of his enthusiasm; but this man, never losing sight of the subject, guided his conceit to perfection."