diptych, failed to make his figures look solid, but that he saw beauty most in the outlines of the body and the curves of the drapery, irrespective of colour, whereas to Giorgione's eye outline was nothing without colour and light and shade.

The body of the King upon the throne in our picture is massed against the background, but there is no definite outline to divide it from the tree behind.

In this respect Giorgione was curiously modern for his date, as we shall see in pictures of a still later time.
Giorgione was only thirty-three years old when he died of the plague in 1510, the same year as Botticelli.

His master, Giovanni Bellini, who was born in 1428, outlived him by six years, and the great Titian, his fellow-pupil in the studio of Bellini, lived another half-century or more.
Titian in many ways summed up all that was greatest in Venetian art.
His pictures have less romance than those of Giorgione, except during the short space of time when he painted under the spell of his brother artist.

It is extremely difficult to distinguish then between Titian's early and Giorgione's late work.