The change which now comes over painting is not so much a technical one as a change of temper, a new tendency in human thought, and we link it with Giorgione because he was the channel through which the deep impulse first burst into the light. We have tried to trace the growth of the early Venetian School, but it does not develop logically like that of Florence; it is not the result of long endeavour, adding one acquisition and discovery to another. Venetian art was peculiarly the outcome of personalities, and it did not know its own mind till the sixteenth century. Then, like a hidden spring, it bubbles irresistibly to the surface, and the spot where it does so is called by the name of a man. There are beings in most great creative epochs who, with peculiar facility, seem to embody the purpose of their age and to yield themselves as ready instruments to its design. When time is ripe they appear, and are able, with perfect ease, to carry out and give voice to the desires and tendencies which have been straining for expression. These desires may owe their origin to national life and temperament; it may have taken generations to bring them to fruition, but they become audible through the agency of an individual genius. A genius is inevitably moulded by his age. Rome, in the seventeenth century, drew to her in Bernini a man who could with real power illustrate her determination to be grandiose and ostentatious, and, at the height of the Renaissance, Venice draws into her service a man whose sensuous feeling was instilled, accentuated, and welcomed by every element around him. More conclusively than ever, at this time, Venice, the world's great sea-power, was in her full glory as the centre of the world's commerce and its art and culture. Vasco da Gama had discovered the sea route to India in 1498, but the stupendous effect which this was to exert on the whole current of power did not become apparent all at once. Venice was still the great emporium of the East, linked to it by a thousand ties, Oriental in her love of Eastern richness. It would be exaggerating to say that the Venetians of the sixteenth century could not draw. As there were Tuscans who understood beautiful harmonies of colour, so there were Venetians who knew a good deal about form; but the other Italians looked upon colour as a charming adjunct, almost, one might say, as an amiable weakness: they never would have allowed that it might legitimately become the end and aim in painting, and in the same way form, though respected and considered, was never the principal object of the Venetians. Up to this time Venice had fed her emotional instincts by pageants and gold and velvets and brocades, but with Giorgione she discovered that there was a deeper emotional vehicle than these superficial glories,--glowing depths of colour enveloped in the mysterious richness of chiaroscuro which obliterated form, and hid and suggested more than it revealed.