Luca Giordano, an Italian painter, born in Naples in 1632, died there, Jan. 12, 1705. He studied at first under Ribera, and afterward went to Rome and studied under Pietro da Cortona. He painted with unequalled rapidity; which circumstance, as well as his nickname of Fa Presto, was perhaps due to the avarice of his father, an inferior artist, who in Luca's youth sold his works at a high price, and was continually urging him on with the words, Luca, fa presto ("Luca, make haste"). He visited Parma, Venice, Bologna, and Florence, leaving everywhere products of his talent and facility. Invited to Madrid by Charles II., he remained in Spain a number of years, and executed an immense number of frescoes in the Escurial, and in the churches and palaces of Madrid, Toledo, etc. The skill with which he imitated the manner of other artists gained him the title of the Proteus of painting. Among the most admired of his numerous works are the "Triumph of the Church Militant in the Escurial, the Virgin and the Child Jesus" in the Pitti palace at Florence, and the "Judgment of Paris in the Louvre.

GIORGI0NE (Giorgio Barbarelli), one of the founders of the Venetian school of color-ists, born at Castelfranco, near Treviso, in 1477, died of the plague in 1511. He was called Giorgione, according to Lanzi, from a certain grandeur conferred upon him by nature, no less of mind than of form. He was educated in the school of the Bellini at Venice, where Titian was one of his fellow students; but following the bent of his genius, he broke away from their stiff and constrained manner, and formed a style of his own, distinguished by boldness of outline, grace and expression in the countenances as well as the motions of his figures, well graduated and rich coloring, and effective chiaroscuro. The last of these he probably acquired by studying the works of Leonardo da Vinci, although he approaches the style of Correggio more nearly than that of any other Italian painter. Giorgione's works in fresco, of which he executed many on the facades of Venetian palaces, are almost entirely obliterated, but his portraits in oil, among the most admirable ever painted, and remarkable for the warmth of their coloring, particularly in the flesh tints, as well as their grace and animated expression, are in good preservation, although they are not numerous.

Of his historical paintings, the "Moses rescued from the Nile," in the Pitti palace at Florence, is esteemed his chef d oeuvre.