THE VENETIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE

=I. Value of Venetian Art.=--Among the Italian schools of painting the

Venetian has, for the majority of art-loving people, the strongest and

most enduring attraction. In the course of the present brief account of

the life of that school we shall perhaps discover some of the causes of

our peculiar delight and interest in the Venetian painters, as we come

to realise what tendencies of the human spirit their art embodied, and

of what great consequence their example has been to the whole of

European painting for the last three centuries.

The Venetians as a school were from the first endowed with exquisite

tact in their use of colour. Seldom cold and rarely too warm, their

colouring never seems an afterthought, as in many of the Florentine

painters, nor is it always suggesting paint, as in some of the Veronese

masters. When the eye has grown accustomed to make allowance for the

darkening caused by time, for the dirt that lies in layers on so many

pictures, and for unsuccessful attempts at restoration, the better

Venetian paintings present such harmony of intention and execution as

distinguishes the highest achievements of genuine poets. Their mastery

over colour is the first thing that attracts most people to the painters

of Venice. Their colouring not only gives direct pleasure to the eye,

but acts like music upon the moods, stimulating thought and memory in

much the same way as a work by a great composer.

=II. The Church and Painting.=--The Church from the first took account of

the influence of colour as well as of music upon the emotions. From the

earliest times it employed mosaic and painting to enforce its dogmas and

relate its legends, not merely because this was the only means of

reaching people who could neither read nor write, but also because it

instructed them in a way which, far from leading to critical enquiry,

was peculiarly capable of being used as an indirect stimulus to moods of

devotion and contrition. Next to the finest mosaics of the first

centuries, the early works of Giovanni Bellini, the greatest Venetian

master of the fifteenth century, best fulfil this religious intention.

Painting had in his lifetime reached a point where the difficulties of

technique no longer stood in the way of the expression of profound

emotion. No one can look at Bellini's pictures of the Dead Christ upheld

by the Virgin or angels without being put into a mood of deep

contrition, nor at his earlier Madonnas without a thrill of awe and

reverence. And Giovanni Bellini does not stand alone. His

contemporaries, Gentile Bellini, the Vivarini, Crivelli, and Cima da

Conegliano all began by painting in the same spirit, and produced almost

the same effect.

The Church, however, thus having educated people to understand painting

as a language and to look to it for the expression of their sincerest

feelings, could not hope to keep it always confined to the channel of

religious emotion. People began to feel the need of painting as

something that entered into their every-day lives almost as much as we

nowadays feel the need of the newspaper; nor was this unnatural,

considering that, until the invention of printing, painting was the only

way, apart from direct speech, of conveying ideas to the masses. At

about the time when Bellini and his contemporaries were attaining

maturity, the Renaissance had ceased to be a movement carried on by

scholars and poets alone. It had become sufficiently widespread to seek

popular as well as literary utterance, and thus, toward the end of the

fifteenth century, it naturally turned to painting, a vehicle of

expression which the Church, after a thousand years of use, had made

familiar and beloved.

To understand the Renaissance at the time when its spirit began to find

complete embodiment in painting, a brief survey of the movement of

thought in Italy during its earlier period is necessary, because only

when that movement had reached a certain point did painting come to be

its most natural medium of expression.

=III. The Renaissance.=--The thousand years that elapsed between the

triumph of Christianity and the middle of the fourteenth century have

been not inaptly compared to the first fifteen or sixteen years in the

life of the individual. Whether full of sorrows or joys, of storms or

peace, these early years are chiefly characterised by tutelage and

unconsciousness of personality. But toward the end of the fourteenth

century something happened in Europe that happens in the lives of all

gifted individuals. There was an awakening to the sense of personality.

Although it was felt to a greater or less degree everywhere, Italy felt

the awakening earlier than the rest of Europe, and felt it far more

strongly. Its first manifestation was a boundless and insatiable

curiosity, urging people to find out all they could about the world and

about man. They turned eagerly to the study of classic literature and

ancient monuments, because these gave the key to what seemed an immense

store-house of forgotten knowledge; they were in fact led to antiquity

by the same impulse which, a little later, brought about the invention

of the printing-press and the discovery of America.

The first consequence of a return to classical literature was the

worship of human greatness. Roman literature, which the Italians

naturally mastered much earlier than Greek, dealt chiefly with politics

and war, seeming to give an altogether disproportionate place to the

individual, because it treated only of such individuals as were

concerned in great events. It is but a step from realising the greatness

of an event to believing that the persons concerned in it were equally

great, and this belief, fostered by the somewhat rhetorical literature

of Rome, met the new consciousness of personality more than half way,

and led to that unlimited admiration for human genius and achievement

which was so prominent a feature of the early Renaissance. The two

tendencies reacted upon each other. Roman literature stimulated the

admiration for genius, and this admiration in turn reinforced the

interest in that period of the world's history when genius was supposed

to be the rule rather than the exception; that is to say, it reinforced

the interest in antiquity.

The spirit of discovery, the never satisfied curiosity of this time, led

to the study of ancient art as well as of ancient literature, and the

love of antiquity led to the imitation of its buildings and statues as

well as of its books and poems. Until comparatively recent times

scarcely any ancient paintings were found, although buildings and

statues were everywhere to be seen, the moment anyone seriously thought

of looking at them. The result was that while the architecture and

sculpture of the Renaissance were directly and strongly influenced by

antiquity, painting felt its influence only in so far as the study of

antiquity in the other arts had conduced to better draughtsmanship and

purer taste. The spirit of discovery could thus show itself only

indirectly in painting,--only in so far as it led painters to the

gradual perfection of the technical means of their craft.

Unlimited admiration for genius and wonder that the personalities of

antiquity should have survived with their great names in no way

diminished, soon had two consequences. One was love of glory, and the

other the patronage of those arts which were supposed to hand down a

glorious name undiminished to posterity. The glory of old Rome had come

down through poets and historians, architects and sculptors, and the

Italians, feeling that the same means might be used to hand down the

achievements of their own time to as distant a posterity, made a new

religion of glory, with poets and artists for the priests. At first the

new priesthood was confined almost entirely to writers, but in little

more than a generation architects and sculptors began to have their

part. The passion for building is in itself one of the most instinctive,

and a man's name and armorial bearings, tastefully but prominently

displayed upon a church or palace, were as likely, it was felt, to hand

him down to posterity as the praise of poets or historians. It was the

passion for glory, in reality, rather than any love of beauty, that gave

the first impulse to the patronage of the arts in the Renaissance.

Beauty was the concern of the artists, although no doubt their patrons

were well aware that the more impressive a building was, the more

beautiful a monument, the more likely was it to be admired, and the

more likely were their names to reach posterity. Their instincts did not

mislead them, for where their real achievements would have tempted only

the specialist or antiquarian into a study of their career, the

buildings and monuments put up by them--by such princes as Sigismondo

Malatesta, Frederick of Urbino, or Alfonzo of Naples,--have made the

whole intelligent public believe that they were really as great as they

wished posterity to believe them.

As painting had done nothing whatever to transmit the glory of the great

Romans, the earlier generations of the Renaissance expected nothing from

it, and did not give it that patronage which the Church, for its own

purposes, continued to hold out to it. The Renaissance began to make

especial use of painting only when its own spirit had spread very

widely, and when the love of knowledge, of power, and of glory had

ceased to be the only recognised passions, and when, following the lead

of the Church, people began to turn to painting for the expression of

deep emotion. The new religion, as I have called the love of glory, is

in its very essence a thing of this world, founded as it is on human

esteem. The boundless curiosity of the Renaissance led back inevitably

to an interest in life and to an acceptance of things for what they

were,--for their intrinsic quality. The moment people stopped looking

fixedly toward heaven their eyes fell upon the earth, and they began to

see much on its surface that was pleasant. Their own faces and figures

must have struck them as surprisingly interesting, and, considering how

little St. Bernard and other mediæval saints and doctors had led them to

expect, singularly beautiful. A new feeling arose that mere living was a

big part of life, and with it came a new passion, the passion for

beauty, for grace, and for comeliness.

It has already been suggested that the Renaissance was a period in the

history of modern Europe comparable to youth in the life of the

individual. It had all youth's love of finery and of play. The more

people were imbued with the new spirit, the more they loved pageants.

The pageant was an outlet for many of the dominant passions of the

time, for there a man could display all the finery he pleased, satisfy

his love of antiquity by masquerading as Cæsar or Hannibal, his love of

knowledge by finding out how the Romans dressed and rode in triumph, his

love of glory by the display of wealth and skill in the management of

the ceremony, and, above all, his love of feeling himself alive. Solemn

writers have not disdained to describe to the minutest details many of

the pageants which they witnessed.

We have seen that the earlier elements of the Renaissance, the passion

for knowledge and glory, were not of the kind to give a new impulse to

painting. Nor was the passion for antiquity at all so direct an

inspiration to that art as it was to architecture and sculpture. The

love of glory had, it is true, led such as could not afford to put up

monumental buildings, to decorate chapels with frescoes in which their

portraits were timidly introduced. But it was only when the Renaissance

had attained to a full consciousness of its interest in life and

enjoyment of the world that it naturally turned, and indeed was forced

to turn, to painting; for it is obvious that painting is peculiarly

fitted for rendering the appearances of things with a glow of light and

richness of colour that correspond to and express warm human emotions.

=IV. Painting and the Renaissance.=--When it once reached the point

where its view of the world naturally sought expression in painting, as

religious ideas had done before, the Renaissance found in Venice clearer

utterance than elsewhere, and it is perhaps this fact which makes the

most abiding interest of Venetian painting. It is at this point that we

shall take it up.

The growing delight in life with the consequent love of health, beauty,

and joy were felt more powerfully in Venice than anywhere else in Italy.

The explanation of this may be found in the character of the Venetian

government which was such that it gave little room for the satisfaction

of the passion for personal glory, and kept its citizens so busy in

duties of state that they had small leisure for learning. Some of the

chief passions of the Renaissance thus finding no outlet in Venice, the

other passions insisted all the more on being satisfied. Venice,

moreover, was the only state in Italy which was enjoying, and for many

generations had been enjoying, internal peace. This gave the Venetians a

love of comfort, of ease, and of splendour, a refinement of manner, and

humaneness of feeling, which made them the first really modern people in

Europe. Since there was little room for personal glory in Venice, the

perpetuators of glory, the Humanists, found at first scant encouragement

there, and the Venetians were saved from that absorption in archæology

and pure science which overwhelmed Florence at an early date. This was

not necessarily an advantage in itself, but it happened to suit Venice,

where the conditions of life had for some time been such as to build up

a love of beautiful things. As it was, the feeling for beauty was not

hindered in its natural development. Archæology would have tried to

submit it to the good taste of the past, a proceeding which rarely

promotes good taste in the present. Too much archæology and too much

science might have ended in making Venetian art academic, instead of

letting it become what it did, the product of a natural ripening of

interest in life and love of pleasure. In Florence, it is true, painting

had developed almost simultaneously with the other arts, and it may be

due to this very cause that the Florentine painters never quite realised

what a different task from the architect's and sculptor's was theirs. At

the time, therefore, when the Renaissance was beginning to find its best

expression in painting, the Florentines were already too much attached

to classical ideals of form and composition, in other words, too

academic, to give embodiment to the throbbing feeling for life and

pleasure.

Thus it came to pass that in the Venetian pictures of the end of the

fifteenth century we find neither the contrition nor the devotion of

those earlier years when the Church alone employed painting as the

interpreter of emotion, nor the learning which characterised the

Florentines. The Venetian masters of this time, although nominally

continuing to paint the Madonna and saints, were in reality painting

handsome, healthy, sane people like themselves, people who wore their

splendid robes with dignity, who found life worth the mere living and

sought no metaphysical basis for it. In short, the Venetian pictures of

the last decade of the century seemed intended not for devotion, as they

had been, nor for admiration, as they then were in Florence, but for

enjoyment.

The Church itself, as has been said, had educated its children to

understand painting as a language. Now that the passions men dared to

avow were no longer connected with happiness in some future state only,

but mainly with life in the present, painting was expected to give voice

to these more human aspirations and to desert the outgrown ideals of the

Church. In Florence, the painters seemed unable or unwilling to make

their art really popular. Nor was it so necessary there, for Poliziano,

Pulci, and Lorenzo dei Medici supplied the need of self-expression by

addressing the Florentines in the language which their early enthusiasm

for antiquity and their natural gifts had made them understand better

than any other--the language of poetry. In Venice alone painting

remained what it had been all over Italy in earlier times, the common

tongue of the whole mass of the people. Venetian artists thus had the

strongest inducements to perfect the processes which painters must

employ to make pictures look real to their own generation; and their

generation had an altogether firmer hold on reality than any that had

been known since the triumph of Christianity. Here again the comparison

of the Renaissance to youth must be borne in mind. The grasp that youth

has on reality is not to be compared to that brought by age, and we must

not expect to find in the Renaissance a passion for an acquaintance with

things as they are such as we ourselves have; but still its grasp of

facts was far firmer than that of the Middle Ages.

Painting, in accommodating itself to the new ideas, found that it could

not attain to satisfactory representation merely by form and colour, but

that it required light and shadow and effects of space. Indeed, venial

faults of drawing are perhaps the least disturbing, while faults of

perspective, of spacing, and of colour completely spoil a picture for

people who have an every-day acquaintance with painting such as the

Venetians had. We find the Venetian painters, therefore, more and more

intent upon giving the space they paint its real depth, upon giving

solid objects the full effect of the round, upon keeping the different

parts of a figure within the same plane, and upon compelling things to

hold their proper places one behind the other. As early as the beginning

of the sixteenth century a few of the greater Venetian painters had

succeeded in making distant objects less and less distinct, as well as

smaller and smaller, and had succeeded also in giving some appearance of

reality to the atmosphere. These are a few of the special problems of

painting, as distinct from sculpture for instance, and they are problems

which, among the Italians, only the Venetians and the painters closely

connected with them solved with any success.

=V. Pageant Pictures.=--The painters of the end of the fifteenth century

who met with the greatest success in solving these problems were

Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Cima da Conegliano, and Carpaccio, and we

find each of them enjoyable to the degree that he was in touch with the

life of his day. I have already spoken of pageants and of how

characteristic they were of the Renaissance, forming as they did a sort

of safety-valve for its chief passions. Venice, too, knew the love of

glory, and the passion was perhaps only the more intense because it was

all dedicated to the State. There was nothing the Venetians would not do

to add to its greatness, glory, and splendour. It was this which led

them to make of the city itself that wondrous monument to the love and

awe they felt for their Republic, which still rouses more admiration and

gives more pleasure than any other one achievement of the art-impulse in

man. They were not content to make their city the most beautiful in the

world; they performed ceremonies in its honour partaking of all the

solemnity of religious rites. Processions and pageants by land and by

sea, free from that gross element of improvisation which characterised

them elsewhere in Italy, formed no less a part of the functions of the

Venetian State than the High Mass in the Catholic Church. Such a

function, with Doge and Senators arrayed in gorgeous costumes no less

prescribed than the raiments of ecclesiastics, in the midst of the

fairy-like architecture of the Piazza or canals, was the event most

eagerly looked forward to, and the one that gave most satisfaction to

the Venetian's love of his State, and to his love of splendour, beauty,

and gaiety. He would have had them every day if it were possible, and,

to make up for their rarity, he loved to have representations of them.

So most Venetian pictures of the beginning of the sixteenth century

tended to take the form of magnificent processions, if they did not

actually represent them. They are processions in the Piazza, as in

Gentile Bellini's "Corpus Christi" picture, or on the water, as in

Carpaccio's picture where St. Ursula leaves her home; or they represent

what was a gorgeous but common sight in Venice, the reception or

dismissal of ambassadors, as in several pictures of Carpaccio's St.

Ursula series; or they show simply a collection of splendidly costumed

people in the Piazza, as in Gentile's "Preaching of St. Mark." Not only

the pleasure-loving Carpaccio, but the austere Cima, as he grew older,

turned every biblical and saintly legend into an occasion for the

picture of a pageant.

But there was a further reason for the popularity of such pictures. The

decorations which were then being executed by the most reputed masters

in the Hall of Great Council in the Doge's Palace, were, by the nature

of the subject, required to represent pageants. The Venetian State

encouraged painting as did the Church, in order to teach its subjects

its own glory in a way that they could understand without being led on

to critical enquiry. Venice was not the only city, it is true, that used

painting for political purposes; but the frescoes of Lorenzetti at Siena

were admonitions to govern in accordance with the Catechism, while the

pictures in the Great Hall of the Doge's Palace were of a nature to

remind the Venetians of their glory and also of their state policy.

These mural paintings represented such subjects as the Doge bringing

about a reconciliation between the Pope and the Emperor Barbarossa, an

event which marked the first entry of Venice into the field of

Continental politics, and typified as well its unchanging policy, which

was to gain its own ends by keeping a balance of power between the

allies of the Pope and the allies of his opponents. The first edition,

so to speak, of these works had been executed at the end of the

fourteenth century and in the beginning of the fifteenth. Toward the end

of that century it no longer satisfied the new feeling for reality and

beauty, and thus had ceased to serve its purpose, which was to glorify

the State. The Bellini, Alvise Vivarini, and Carpaccio were employed to

make a second rendering of the very same subjects, and this gave the

Venetians ample opportunity for finding out how much they liked pageant

pictures.

It is curious to note here that at the same time Florence also

commissioned its greatest painters to execute works for its Council

Hall, but left them practically free to choose their own subjects.

Michelangelo chose for his theme "The Florentines while Bathing

Surprised by the Pisans," and Leonardo "The Battle of the Standard."

Neither of these was intended in the first place to glorify the

Florentine Republic, but rather to give scope to the painter's genius,

Michelangelo's for the treatment of the nude, Leonardo's for movement

and animation. Each, having given scope to his peculiar talents in his

cartoon, had no further interest, and neither of the undertakings was

ever completed. Nor do we hear that the Florentine councillors enjoyed

the cartoons, which were instantly snatched up by students who turned

the hall containing them into an academy.

=VI. Painting and the Confraternities.=--It does not appear that the Hall

of Great Council in Venice was turned into a students' academy, and,

although the paintings there doubtless gave a decided incentive to

artists, their effect upon the public, for whom they were designed, was

even greater. The councillors were not allowed to be the only people to

enjoy fascinating pictures of gorgeous pageants and ceremonials. The

Mutual Aid Societies--the Schools, as they were called--were not long in

getting the masters who were employed in the Doge's Palace to execute

for their own meeting places pictures equally splendid. The Schools of

San Giorgio, Sant' Ursula, and Santo Stefano, employed Carpaccio, the

Schools of San Giovanni and San Marco, Gentile Bellini, and other

Schools employed minor painters. The works carried out for these Schools

are of peculiar importance, both because they are all that remain to

throw light upon the pictures in the Doge's Palace destroyed in the fire

of 1576, and because they form a transition to the art of a later day.

Just as the State chose subjects that glorified itself and taught its

own history and policy, so the Schools had pictures painted to glorify

their patron saints, and to keep their deeds and example fresh. Many of

these pictures--most in fact--took the form of pageants; but even in

such, intended as they were for almost domestic purposes, the style of

high ceremonial was relaxed, and elements taken directly from life were

introduced. In his "Corpus Christi," Gentile Bellini paints not only the

solemn and dazzling procession in the Piazza, but the elegant young men

who strut about in all their finery, the foreign loungers, and even the

unfailing beggar by the portal of St. Mark's. In his "Miracle of the

True Cross," he introduces gondoliers, taking care to bring out all the

beauty of their lithe, comely figures as they stand to ply the oar, and

does not reject even such an episode as a serving-maid standing in a

doorway watching a negro who is about to plunge into the canal. He

treats this bit of the picture with all the charm and much of that

delicate feeling for simple effects of light and colour that we find in

such Dutch painters as Vermeer van Delft and Peter de Hoogh.

Episodes such as this in the works of the earliest great Venetian master

must have acted on the public like a spark on tinder. They certainly

found a sudden and assured popularity, for they play a more and more

important part in the pictures executed for the Schools, many of the

subjects of which were readily turned into studies of ordinary Venetian

life. This was particularly true of the works of Carpaccio. Much as he

loved pageants, he loved homelier scenes as well. His "Dream of St.

Ursula" shows us a young girl asleep in a room filled with the quiet

morning light. Indeed, it may be better described as the picture of a

room with the light playing softly upon its walls, upon the flower-pots

in the window, and upon the writing-table and the cupboards. A young

girl happens to be asleep in the bed, but the picture is far from being

a merely economic illustration to this episode in the life of the saint.

Again, let us take the work in the same series where King Maure

dismisses the ambassadors. Carpaccio has made this a scene of a

chancellery in which the most striking features are neither the king nor

the ambassadors, but the effect of the light that streams through a side

door on the left and a poor clerk labouring at his task. Or, again, take

St. Jerome in his study, in the Scuola di San Giorgio. He is nothing but

a Venetian scholar seated in his comfortable, bright library, in the

midst of his books, with his little shelf of bric-à-brac running along

the wall. There is nothing in his look or surroundings to speak of a

life of self-denial or of arduous devotion to the problems of sin and

redemption. Even the "Presentation of the Virgin," which offered such a

splendid chance for a pageant, Carpaccio, in one instance, turned into

the picture of a simple girl going to her first communion. In other

words, Carpaccio's quality is the quality of a painter of _genre_, of

which he was the earliest Italian master. His _genre_ differs from Dutch

or French not in kind but in degree. Dutch _genre_ is much more

democratic, and, as painting, it is of a far finer quality, but it deals

with its subject, as Carpaccio does, for the sake of its own pictorial

capacities and for the sake of the effects of colour and of light and

shade.

=VII. Easel Pictures and Giorgione.=--At the beginning of the Renaissance

painting was almost wholly confined to the Church. From the Church it

extended to the Council Hall, and thence to the Schools. There it

rapidly developed into an art which had no higher aim than painting the

sumptuous life of the aristocracy. When it had reached this point, there

was no reason whatever why it should not begin to grace the dwellings of

all well-to-do people.

In the sixteenth century painting was not looked upon with the

estranging reverence paid to it now. It was almost as cheap as printing

has become since, and almost as much employed. When the Venetians had

attained the point of culture where they were able to differentiate

their sensations and distinguish pleasure from edification, they found

that painting gave them decided pleasure. Why should they always have to

go to the Doge's Palace or to some School to enjoy this pleasure? That

would have been no less a hardship than for us never to hear music

outside of a concert-room. This is no merely rhetorical comparison, for

in the life of the Venetian of the sixteenth century painting took much

the same place that music takes in ours. He no longer expected it to

tell him stories or to teach him the Catechism. Printed books, which

were beginning to grow common, amply satisfied both these needs. He had

as a rule very little personal religion, and consequently did not care

for pictures that moved him to contrition or devotion. He preferred to

have some pleasantly coloured thing that would put him into a mood

connected with the side of life he most enjoyed--with refined

merrymaking, with country parties, or with the sweet dreams of youth.

Venetian painting alone among Italian schools was ready to satisfy such

a demand, and it thus became the first genuinely modern art: for the

most vital difference that can be indicated between the arts in

antiquity and modern times is this--that now the arts tend to address

themselves more and more to the actual needs of men, while in olden

times they were supposed to serve some more than human purpose.

The pictures required for a house were naturally of a different kind

from those suited to the Council Hall or the School, where large

paintings, which could be filled with many figures, were in place. For

the house smaller pictures were necessary, such as could easily be

carried about. The mere dimensions, therefore, excluded pageants, but,

in any case, the pageant was too formal a subject to suit all moods--too

much like a brass band always playing in the room. The easel picture had

to be without too definite a subject, and could no more permit being

translated into words than a sonata. Some of Giovanni Bellini's late

works are already of this kind. They are full of that subtle, refined

poetry which can be expressed in form and colour alone. But they were a

little too austere in form, a little too sober in colour, for the gay,

care-free youth of the time. Carpaccio does not seem to have painted

many easel pictures, although his brilliancy, his delightful fancy, his

love of colour, and his gaiety of humour would have fitted him admirably

for this kind of painting. But Giorgione, the follower of both these

masters, starting with the qualities of both as his inheritance,

combined the refined feeling and poetry of Bellini with Carpaccio's

gaiety and love of beauty and colour. Stirred with the enthusiasms of

his own generation as people who had lived through other phases of

feeling could not be, Giorgione painted pictures so perfectly in touch

with the ripened spirit of the Renaissance that they met with the

success which those things only find that at the same moment wake us to

the full sense of a need and satisfy it.

Giorgione's life was short, and very few of his works--not a score in

all--have escaped destruction. But these suffice to give us a glimpse

into that brief moment when the Renaissance found its most genuine

expression in painting. Its over-boisterous passions had quieted down

into a sincere appreciation of beauty and of human relations. It would

be really hard to say more about Giorgione than this, that his pictures

are the perfect reflex of the Renaissance at its height. His works, as

well as those of his contemporaries and followers, still continue to be

appreciated most by people whose attitude of mind and spirit has most in

common with the Renaissance, or by those who look upon Italian art not

merely as art, but as the product of this period. For that is its

greatest interest. Other schools have accomplished much more in mere

painting than the Italian. A serious student of art will scarcely think

of putting many of even the highest achievements of the Italians,

considered purely as technique, beside the works of the great Dutchmen,

the great Spaniard, or even the masters of to-day. Our real interest in

Italian painting is at bottom an interest in that art which we almost

instinctively feel to have been the fittest expression found by a period

in the history of modern Europe which has much in common with youth.

The Renaissance has the fascination of those years when we seemed so

full of promise both to ourselves and to everybody else.

=VIII. The Giorgionesque Spirit.=--Giorgione created a demand which other

painters were forced to supply at the risk of finding no favour. The

older painters accommodated themselves as best they could. One of them

indeed, turning toward the new in a way that is full of singular charm,

gave his later works all the beauty and softness of the first spring

days in Italy. Upon hearing the title of one of Catena's works in the

National Gallery, "A Warrior Adoring the Infant Christ," who could

imagine what a treat the picture itself had in store for him? It is a

fragrant summer landscape enjoyed by a few quiet people, one of whom, in

armour, with the glamour of the Orient about him, kneels at the Virgin's

feet, while a romantic young page holds his horse's bridle. I mention

this picture in particular because it is so accessible, and so good an

instance of the Giorgionesque way of treating a subject; not for the

story, nor for the display of skill, nor for the obvious feeling, but

for the lovely landscape, for the effects of light and colour, and for

the sweetness of human relations. Giorgione's altar-piece at

Castelfranco is treated in precisely the same spirit, but with far more

genius.

The young painters had no chance at all unless they undertook at once to

furnish pictures in Giorgione's style. But before we can appreciate all

that the younger men were called upon to do, we must turn to the

consideration of that most wonderful product of the Renaissance and of

the painter's craft--the Portrait.

=IX. The Portrait.=--The longing for the perpetuation of one's fame, which

has already been mentioned several times as one of the chief passions of

the Renaissance, brought with it the more universal desire to hand down

the memory of one's face and figure. The surest way to accomplish this

end seemed to be the one which had proved successful in the case of the

great Romans, whose effigies were growing more and more familiar as new

busts and medals were dug up. The earlier generations of the

Renaissance relied therefore on the sculptor and the medallist to hand

down their features to an interested posterity. These artists were ready

for their task. The mere materials gave them solidity, an effect so hard

to get in painting. At the same time, nothing was expected from them

except that they should mould the material into the desired shape. No

setting was required and no colour. Their art on this account alone

would naturally have been the earliest to reach fruition. But over and

above this, sculptors and medallists had the direct inspiration of

antique models, and through the study of these they were at an early

date brought in contact with the tendencies of the Renaissance. The

passion then prevailing for pronounced types, and the spirit of analysis

this produced, forced them to such patient study of the face as would

enable them to give the features that look of belonging to one

consistent whole which we call character. Thus, at a time when painters

had not yet learned to distinguish between one face and another,

Donatello was carving busts which remain unrivalled as studies of

character, and Pisanello was casting bronze and silver medals which are

among the greatest claims to renown of those whose effigies they bear.

Donatello's bust of Niccolò d'Uzzano shows clearly, nevertheless, that

the Renaissance could not long remain satisfied with the sculptured

portrait. It is coloured like nature, and succeeds so well in producing

for an instant the effect of actual life as to seem uncanny the next

moment. Donatello's contemporaries must have had the same impression,

for busts of this kind are but few. Yet these few prove that the element

of colour had to be included before the satisfactory portrait was found:

in other words, that painting and not sculpture was to be the

portrait-art of the Renaissance.

The most creative sculptor of the earlier Renaissance was not the only

artist who felt the need of colour in portraiture. Vittore Pisano, the

greatest medallist of this or any age, felt it quite as keenly, and

being a painter as well, he was among the first to turn this art to

portraiture. In his day, however, painting was still too undeveloped an

art for the portrait not to lose in character what it gained in a more

lifelike colouring, and the two of Pisanello's portraits which still

exist are profiles much inferior to his best medals, seeming indeed to

be enlargements of them rather than original studies from life.

It was only in the next generation, when the attention of painters

themselves was powerfully concentrated upon the reproduction of strongly

pronounced types of humanity, that they began to make portraits as full

of life and energy as Donatello's busts of the previous period. Even

then, however, the full face was rarely attempted, and it was only in

the beginning of the sixteenth century that full-face portraits began to

be common. The earliest striking achievement of this sort, Mantegna's

head of Cardinal Scarampo (now in Berlin), was not the kind to find

favour in Venice. The full-face likeness of this wolf in sheep's

clothing brought out the workings of the self-seeking, cynical spirit

within too clearly not to have revolted the Venetians, who looked upon

all such qualities as impious in the individual because they were the

strict monopoly of the State. In the portraits of Doges which decorated

the frieze of its great Council Hall, Venice wanted the effigies of

functionaries entirely devoted to the State, and not of great

personalities, and the profile lent itself more readily to the omission

of purely individual traits.

It is significant that Venice was the first state which made a business

of preserving the portraits of its chief rulers. Those which Gentile and

Giovanni Bellini executed for this end must have had no less influence

on portraiture than their mural paintings in the same Hall had on other

branches of the art. But the State was not satisfied with leaving

records of its glory in the Ducal Palace alone. The Church and the

saints were impressed for the same purpose--happily for us, for while

the portraits in the Great Hall have perished, several altar-pieces

still preserve to us the likenesses of some of the Doges.

Early in the sixteenth century, when people began to want pictures in

their own homes as well as in their public halls, personal and

religious motives combined to dictate the choice of subjects. In the

minds of many, painting, although a very familiar art, was too much

connected with solemn religious rites and with state ceremonies to be

used at once for ends of personal pleasure. So landscape had to slide in

under the patronage of St. Jerome; while romantic biblical episodes,

like the "Finding of Moses," or the "Judgment of Solomon," gave an

excuse for _genre_, and the portrait crept in half hidden under the

mantle of a patron saint. Its position once secure, however, the

portrait took no time to cast off all tutelage, and to declare itself

one of the most attractive subjects possible. Over and above the obvious

satisfaction afforded by a likeness, the portrait had to give pleasure

to the eye, and to produce those agreeable moods which were expected

from all other paintings in Giorgione's time. Portraits like that of

Scarampo are scarcely less hard to live with than such a person himself

must have been. They tyrannize rather than soothe and please. But

Giorgione and his immediate followers painted men and women whose very

look leads one to think of sympathetic friends, people whose features

are pleasantly rounded, whose raiment seems soft to touch, whose

surroundings call up the memory of sweet landscapes and refreshing

breezes. In fact, in these portraits the least apparent object was the

likeness, the real purpose being to please the eye and to turn the mind

toward pleasant themes. This no doubt helps to account for the great

popularity of portraits in Venice during the sixteenth century. Their

number, as we shall see, only grows larger as the century advances.

=X. The Young Titian.=--Giorgione's followers had only to exploit the vein

their master hit upon to find ample remuneration. Each, to be sure,

brought a distinct personality into play, but the demand for the

Giorgionesque article, if I may be allowed the phrase, was too strong to

permit of much deviation. It no longer mattered what the picture was to

represent or where it was going to be placed; the treatment had to be

always bright, romantic, and joyous. Many artists still confined

themselves to painting ecclesiastical subjects chiefly, but even among

these, such painters as Lotto and Palma, for example, are fully as

Giorgionesque as Titian, Bonifazio, or Paris Bordone.

Titian, in spite of a sturdier, less refined nature, did nothing for a

generation after Giorgione's death but work on his lines. A difference

in quality between the two masters shows itself from the first, but the

spirit that animated each is identical. The pictures Titian was painting

ten years after his companion's death have not only many of the

qualities of Giorgione's, but something more, as if done by an older

Giorgione, with better possession of himself, and with a larger and

firmer hold on the world. At the same time, they show no diminution of

spontaneous joy in life, and even an increased sense of its value and

dignity. What an array of masterpieces might be brought to witness! In

the "Assumption," for example, the Virgin soars heavenward, not helpless

in the arms of angels, but borne up by the fulness of life within her,

and by the feeling that the universe is naturally her own, and that

nothing can check her course. The angels seem to be there only to sing

the victory of a human being over his environment. They are embodied

joys, acting on our nerves like the rapturous outburst of the orchestra

at the end of "Parsifal." Or look at the "Bacchanals" in Madrid, or at

the "Bacchus and Ariadne" in the National Gallery. How brimful they are

of exuberant joy! you see no sign of a struggle of inner and outer

conditions, but life so free, so strong, so glowing, that it almost

intoxicates. They are truly Dionysiac, Bacchanalian triumphs--the

triumph of life over the ghosts that love the gloom and chill and hate

the sun.

The portraits Titian painted in these years show no less feeling of

freedom from sordid cares, and no less mastery over life. Think of "The

Man with the Glove" in the Louvre, of the "Concert," and "Young

Englishman" in Florence, and of the Pesaro family in their altar-piece

in the Frari at Venice--call up these portraits, and you will see that

they are true children of the Renaissance whom life has taught no

meannesses and no fears.

=XI. Apparent Failure of the Renaissance.=--But even while such pictures

were being painted, the spirit of the Italian Renaissance was proving

inadequate to life. This was not the fault of the spirit, which was the

spirit of youth. But youth cannot last more than a certain length of

time. No matter how it is spent, manhood and middle age will come. Life

began to show a sterner and more sober face than for a brief moment it

had seemed to wear. Men became conscious that the passions for

knowledge, for glory, and for personal advancement were not at the

bottom of all the problems that life presented. Florence and Rome

discovered this suddenly, and with a shock. In the presence of

Michelangelo's sculptures in San Lorenzo, or of his "Last Judgment," we

still hear the cry of anguish that went up as the inexorable truth

dawned upon them. But Venice, although humiliated by the League of

Cambrai, impoverished by the Turk, and by the change in the routes of

commerce, was not crushed, as was the rest of Italy, under the heels of

Spanish infantry, nor so drained of resource as not to have some wealth

still flowing into her coffers. Life grew soberer and sterner, but it

was still amply worth the living, although the relish of a little

stoicism and of earnest thought no longer seemed out of place. The

spirit of the Renaissance had found its way to Venice slowly; it was

even more slow to depart.

We therefore find that toward the middle of the sixteenth century, when

elsewhere in Italy painting was trying to adapt itself to the hypocrisy

of a Church whose chief reason for surviving as an institution was that

it helped Spain to subject the world to tyranny, and when portraits were

already exhibiting the fascinating youths of an earlier generation

turned into obsequious and elegant courtiers,--in Venice painting kept

true to the ripened and more reflective spirit which succeeded to the

most glowing decades of the Renaissance. This led men to take themselves

more seriously, to act with more consideration of consequences, and to

think of life with less hope and exultation. Quieter joys were sought,

the pleasures of friendship and of the affections. Life not having

proved the endless holiday it had promised to be, earnest people began

to question whether under the gross masque of the official religion

there was not something to console them for departed youth and for the

failure of hopes. Thus religion began to revive in Italy, this time not

ethnic nor political, but personal,--an answer to the real needs of the

human soul.

=XII. Lotto.=--It is scarcely to be wondered at that the Venetian artist

in whom we first find the expression of the new feelings, should have

been one who by wide travel had been brought in contact with the

miseries of Italy in a way not possible for those who remained sheltered

in Venice. Lorenzo Lotto, when he is most himself, does not paint the

triumph of man over his environment, but in his altar-pieces, and even

more in his portraits, he shows us people in want of the consolations of

religion, of sober thought, of friendship and affection. They look out

from his canvases as if begging for sympathy.

But real expression for the new order of things was not to be found by

one like Lotto, sensitive of feeling and born in the heyday of the

Renaissance, to whom the new must have come as a disappointment. It had

to come from one who had not been brought in personal contact with the

woes of the rest of Italy, from one less conscious of his environment,

one like Titian who was readier to receive the patronage of the new

master than to feel an oppression which did not touch him personally; or

it had to come from one like Tintoretto, born to the new order of things

and not having to outlive a disappointment before adapting himself to

it.

=XIII. The Late Renaissance and Titian.=--It is as impossible to keep

untouched by what happens to your neighbours as to have a bright sky

over your own house when it is stormy everywhere else. Spain did not

directly dominate Venice, but the new fashions of life and thought

inaugurated by her nearly universal triumph could not be kept out. Her

victims, among whom the Italian scholars must be reckoned, flocked to

Venice for shelter, persecuted by a rule that cherished the Inquisition.

Now for the first time Venetian painters were brought in contact with

men of letters. As they were already, fortunately for themselves, too

well acquainted with the business of their own art to be taken in tow by

learning or even by poetry, the relation of the man of letters to the

painter became on the whole a stimulating and at any rate a profitable

one, as in the instance of two of the greatest, where it took the form

of a partnership for mutual advantage. It is not to our purpose to speak

of Aretino's gain, but Titian would scarcely have acquired such fame in

his lifetime if that founder of modern journalism, Pietro Aretino, had

not been at his side, eager to trumpet his praises and to advise him

whom to court.

The overwhelming triumph of Spain entailed still another consequence. It

brought home to all Italians, even to the Venetians, the sense of the

individual's helplessness before organized power--a sense which, as we

have seen, the early Renaissance, with its belief in the omnipotence of

the individual, totally lacked. This was not without a decided influence

on art. In the last three decades of his long career, Titian did not

paint man as if he were as free from care and as fitted to his

environment as a lark on an April morning. Rather did he represent man

as acting on his environment and suffering from its reactions. He made

the faces and figures show clearly what life had done to them. The great

"Ecce Homo" and the "Crowning with Thorns" are imbued with this feeling

no less than the equestrian portrait of Charles the Fifth. In the "Ecce

Homo" we see a man with a godlike personality, humbled by the imperial

majesty, broken by the imperial power, and utterly unable to hold out

against them. In the "Crowning with Thorns" we have the same godlike

being almost brutalised by pain and suffering. In the portrait of the

Emperor we behold a man whom life has enfeebled, and who has to meet a

foe who may crush him.

Yet Titian became neither soured nor a pessimist. Many of his late

portraits are even more energetic than those of his early maturity. He

shows himself a wise man of the world. "Do not be a grovelling

sycophant," some of them seem to say, "but remember that courtly manners

and tempered elegance can do you no harm." Titian, then, was ever ready

to change with the times, and on the whole the change was toward a

firmer grasp of reality, necessitating yet another advance in the

painter's mastery of his craft. Titian's real greatness consists in the

fact that he was as able to produce an effect of greater reality as he

was ready to appreciate the need of a firmer hold on life. In painting,

as I have said, a greater effect of reality is chiefly a matter of light

and shadow, to be obtained only by considering the canvas as an enclosed

space, filled with light and air, through which the objects are seen.

There is more than one way of getting this effect, but Titian attains it

by the almost total suppression of outlines, by the harmonising of his

colours, and by the largeness and vigour of his brushwork. In fact, the

old Titian was, in his way of painting, remarkably like some of the best

French masters of to-day. This makes him only the more attractive,

particularly when with handling of this kind he combined the power of

creating forms of beauty such as he has given us in the "Wisdom" of the

Venetian Royal Palace, or in the "Shepherd and Nymph" of Vienna. The

difference between the old Titian, author of these works, and the young

Titian, painter of the "Assumption," and of the "Bacchus and Ariadne,"

is the difference between the Shakspeare of the "Midsummer-Night's

Dream" and the Shakspeare of the "Tempest." Titian and Shakspeare begin

and end so much in the same way by no mere accident. They were both

products of the Renaissance, they underwent similar changes, and each

was the highest and completest expression of his own age. This is not

the place to elaborate the comparison, but I have dwelt so long on

Titian, because, historically considered, he is the only painter who

expressed nearly all of the Renaissance that could find expression in

painting. It is this which makes him even more interesting than

Tintoretto, an artist who in many ways was deeper, finer, and even more

brilliant.

=XIV. Humanity and the Renaissance.=--Tintoretto grew to manhood when the

fruit of the Renaissance was ripe on every bough. The Renaissance had

resulted in the emancipation of the individual, in making him feel that

the universe had no other purpose than his happiness. This brought an

entirely new answer to the question, "Why should I do this or that?" It

used to be, "Because self-instituted authority commands you." The answer

now was, "Because it is good for men." In this lies our greatest debt to

the Renaissance, that it instituted the welfare of man as the end of all

action. The Renaissance did not bring this idea to practical issue, but

our debt to it is endless on account of the results the idea has

produced in our own days. This alone would have made the Renaissance a

period of peculiar interest, even if it had had no art whatever. But

when ideas are fresh and strong, they are almost sure to find artistic

embodiment, as indeed this whole epoch found in painting, and this

particular period in the works of Tintoretto.

=XV. Sebastiano del Piombo.=--The emancipation of the individual had a

direct effect on the painter in freeing him from his guild. It now

occurred to him that possibly he might become more proficient and have

greater success if he deserted the influences he was under by the

accident of birth and residence, and placed himself in the school that

seemed best adapted to foster his talents. This led to the unfortunate

experiment of Eclecticism which checked the purely organic development

of the separate schools. It brought about their fusion into an art which

no longer appealed to the Italian people, as did the art which sprang

naturally from the soil, but to the small class of _dilettanti_ who

considered a knowledge of art as one of the birthrights of their social

position. Venice, however, suffered little from Eclecticism, perhaps

because a strong sense of individuality was late in getting there, and

by that time the painters were already well enough educated in their

craft to know that they had little to learn elsewhere. The one Venetian

who became an Eclectic, remained in spite of it a great painter.

Sebastiano del Piombo fell under the influence of Michelangelo, but

while this influence was pernicious in most cases, the hand that had

learned to paint under Bellini, Cima, and Giorgione, never wholly lost

its command of colour and tone.

=XVI. Tintoretto.=--Tintoretto stayed at home, but he felt in his own

person a craving for something that Titian could not teach him. The

Venice he was born in was not the Venice of Titian's early youth, and

his own adolescence fell in the period when Spain was rapidly making

herself mistress of Italy. The haunting sense of powers almost

irresistible gave a terrible fascination to Michelangelo's works, which

are swayed by that sense as by a demonic presence. Tintoretto felt this

fascination because he was in sympathy with the spirit which took form

in colossal torsoes and limbs. To him these were not, as they were to

Michelangelo's enrolled followers, merely new patterns after which to

model the nude.

But beside this sense of overwhelming power and gigantic force,

Tintoretto had to an even greater degree the feeling that whatever

existed was for mankind and with reference to man. In his youth people

were once more turning to religion, and in Venice poetry was making its

way more than it had previously done, not only because Venice had become

the refuge of men of letters, but also because of the diffusion of

printed books. Tintoretto took to the new feeling for religion and

poetry as to his birthright. Yet whether classic fable or biblical

episode were the subject of his art, Tintoretto coloured it with his

feeling for the human life at the heart of the story. His sense of power

did not express itself in colossal nudes so much as in the immense

energy, in the glowing health of the figures he painted, and more still

in his effects of light, which he rendered as if he had it in his hands

to brighten or darken the heavens at will and subdue them to his own

moods.

He could not have accomplished this, we may be sure, if he had not had

even greater skill than Titian in the treatment of light and shadow and

of atmosphere. It was this which enabled him to give such living

versions of biblical stories and saintly legends. For, granting that an

effect of reality were attainable in painting without an adequate

treatment of light and atmosphere, even then, the reality would look

hideous, as it does in many modern painters who attempt to paint people

of to-day in their every-day dress and among their usual surroundings.

It is not "Realism" which makes such pictures hideous, but the want of

that toning down which the atmosphere gives to things in life, and of

that harmonising to which the light subjects all colours.

It was a great mastery of light and shadow which enabled Tintoretto to

put into his pictures all the poetry there was in his soul without once

tempting us to think that he might have found better expression in

words. The poetry which quickens most of his works in the Scuola di San

Rocco is almost entirely a matter of light and colour. What is it but

the light that changes the solitudes in which the Magdalen and St. Mary

of Egypt are sitting, into dreamlands seen by poets in their moments of

happiest inspiration? What but light and colour, the gloom and chill of

evening, with the white-stoled figure standing resignedly before the

judge, that give the "Christ before Pilate" its sublime magic? What,

again, but light, colour, and the star-procession of cherubs that imbue

the realism of the "Annunciation" with music which thrills us through

and through?

Religion and poetry did not exist for Tintoretto because the love and

cultivation of the Muses was a duty prescribed by the Greeks and Romans,

and because the love of God and the saints was prescribed by the Church;

but rather, as was the case with the best people of his time, because

both poetry and religion were useful to man. They helped him to forget

what was mean and sordid in life, they braced him to his task, and

consoled him for his disappointments. Religion answered to an

ever-living need of the human heart. The Bible was no longer a mere

document wherewith to justify Christian dogma. It was rather a series of

parables and symbols pointing at all times to the path that led to a

finer and nobler life. Why then continue to picture Christ and the

Apostles, the Patriarchs and Prophets, as persons living under Roman

rule, wearing the Roman toga, and walking about in the landscape of a

Roman bas-relief? Christ and the Apostles, the Patriarchs and Prophets,

were the embodiment of living principles and of living ideals.

Tintoretto felt this so vividly that he could not think of them

otherwise than as people of his own kind, living under conditions easily

intelligible to himself and to his fellow-men. Indeed, the more

intelligible and the more familiar the look and garb and surroundings of

biblical and saintly personages, the more would they drive home the

principles and ideas they incarnated. So Tintoretto did not hesitate to

turn every biblical episode into a picture of what the scene would look

like had it taken place under his own eyes, nor to tinge it with his own

mood.

His conception of the human form was, it is true, colossal, although the

slender elegance that was then coming into fashion, as if in protest

against physical force and organisation, influenced him considerably in

his construction of the female figure; but the effect which he must

always have produced upon his contemporaries, and which most of his

works still produce, is one of astounding reality as well as of wide

sweep and power. Thus, in the "Discovery of the Body of St. Mark," in

the Brera, and in the "Storm Rising while the Corpse is being Carried

through the Streets of Alexandria," in the Royal Palace at Venice, the

figures, although colossal, are so energetic and so easy in movement,

and the effects of perspective and of light and atmosphere are so on a

level with the gigantic figures, that the eye at once adapts itself to

the scale, and you feel as if you too partook of the strength and health

of heroes.

=XVII. Value of Minor Episodes in Art.=--That feeling for reality which

made the great painters look upon a picture as the representation of a

cubic content of atmosphere enveloping all the objects depicted, made

them also consider the fact that the given quantity of atmosphere is

sure to contain other objects than those the artist wants for his

purpose. He is free to leave them out, of course, but in so far as he

does, so far is he from producing an effect of reality. The eye does not

see everything, but all the eye would naturally see along with the

principal objects, must be painted, or the picture will not look true

to life. This incorporation of small episodes running parallel with the

subject rather than forming part of it, is one of the chief

characteristics of modern as distinguished from ancient art. It is this

which makes the Elizabethan drama so different from the Greek. It is

this again which already separates the works of Duccio and Giotto from

the plastic arts of Antiquity. Painting lends itself willingly to the

consideration of minor episodes, and for that reason is almost as well

fitted to be in touch with modern life as the novel itself. Such a

treatment saves a picture from looking prepared and cold, just as light

and atmosphere save it from rigidity and crudeness.

No better illustration of this can be found among Italian masters than

Tintoretto's "Crucifixion" in the Scuola di San Rocco. The scene is a

vast one, and although Christ is on the Cross, life does not stop. To

most of the people gathered there, what takes place is no more than a

common execution. Many of them are attending to it as to a tedious duty.

Others work away at some menial task more or less connected with the

Crucifixion, as unconcerned as cobblers humming over their last. Most of

the people in the huge canvas are represented, as no doubt they were in

life, without much personal feeling about Christ. His own friends are

painted with all their grief and despair, but the others are allowed to

feel as they please. The painter does not try to give them the proper

emotions. If one of the great novelists of to-day, if Tolstoi, for

instance, were to describe the Crucifixion, his account would read as if

it were a description of Tintoretto's picture. But Tintoretto's fairness

went even further than letting all the spectators feel as they pleased

about what he himself believed to be the greatest event that ever took

place. Among this multitude he allowed the light of heaven to shine upon

the wicked as well as upon the good, and the air to refresh them all

equally. In other words, this enormous canvas is a great sea of air and

light at the bottom of which the scene takes place. Without the

atmosphere and the just distribution of light, it would look as lifeless

and desolate, in spite of the crowd and animation, as if it were the

bottom of a dried up sea.

=XVIII. Tintoretto's Portraits.=--While all these advances were being

made, the art of portraiture had not stood still. Its popularity had

only increased as the years went on. Titian was too busy with

commissions for foreign princes to supply the great demand there was in

Venice alone. Tintoretto painted portraits not only with much of the air

of good breeding of Titian's likenesses, but with even greater

splendour, and with an astonishing rapidity of execution. The Venetian

portrait, it will be remembered, was expected to be more than a

likeness. It was expected to give pleasure to the eye, and to stimulate

the emotions. Tintoretto was ready to give ample satisfaction to all

such expectations. His portraits, although they are not so

individualised as Lotto's, nor such close studies of character as

Titian's, always render the man at his best, in glowing health, full of

life and determination. They give us the sensuous pleasure we get from

jewels, and at the same time they make us look back with amazement to a

State where the human plant was in such vigour as to produce old men of

the kind represented in most of Tintoretto's portraits.

With Tintoretto ends the universal interest the Venetian school arouses;

for although painting does not deteriorate in a day any more than it

grows to maturity in the same brief moment, the story of the decay has

none of the fascination of the growth. But several artists remain to be

considered who were not of the Venetian school in the strict sense of

the term, but who have always been included within it.

=XIX. Venetian Art and the Provinces.=--The Venetian provinces were held

together not merely by force of rule. In language and feeling no less

than in government, they formed a distinct unit within the Italian

peninsula. Painting being so truly a product of the soil as it was in

Italy during the Renaissance, the art of the provinces could not help

holding the same close relation to the art of Venice that their language

and modes of feeling held. But a difference must be made at once between

towns like Verona, with a school of at least as long a growth and with

as independent an evolution as the school of Venice itself, and towns

like Vicenza and Brescia whose chief painters never developed quite

independently of Venice or Verona. What makes Romanino and Moretto of

Brescia, or even the powerful Montagna of Vicenza, except when they are

at their very best, so much less enjoyable as a rule than the

Venetians--that is to say the painters wholly educated in Venice,--is

something they have in common with the Eclectics of a later day. They

are ill at ease about their art, which is no longer the utterly

unpremeditated outcome of a natural impulse. They saw greater painting

than their own in Venice and Verona, and not unfrequently their own

works show an uncouth attempt to adopt that greatness, which comes out

in exaggeration of colour even more than of form, and speaks for that

want of taste which is the indelible stamp of provincialism. But there

were Venetian towns without the traditions even of the schools of

Vicenza and Brescia, where, if you wanted to learn painting, you had to

apprentice yourself to somebody who had been taught by somebody who had

been a pupil of one of Giovanni Bellini's pupils. This was particularly

true of the towns in that long stretch of plain between the Julian Alps

and the sea, known as Friuli. Friuli produced one painter of remarkable

talents and great force, Giovanni Antonio Pordenone, but neither his

talents nor his force, nor even later study in Venice, could erase from

his works that stamp of provincialism which he inherited from his first

provincial master.

Such artists as these, however, never gained great favour in the

capital. Those whom Venice drew to herself when her own strength was

waning and when, like Rome in her decline, she began to absorb into

herself the talent of the provinces, were rather painters such as Paolo

Veronese whose art, although of independent growth, was sufficiently

like her own to be readily understood, or painters with an entirely new

vein, such as the Bassani.

=XX. Paul Veronese.=--Paolo was the product of four or five generations of

Veronese painters, the first two or three of which had spoken the

language of the whole mass of the people in a way that few other artists

had ever done. Consequently, in the early Renaissance, there were no

painters in the North of Italy, and few even in Florence, who were not

touched by the influence of the Veronese. But Paolo's own immediate

predecessors were no longer able to speak the language of the whole mass

of the people. There was one class they left out entirely, the class to

whom Titian and Tintoretto appealed so strongly, the class that ruled,

and that thought in the new way. Verona, being a dependency of Venice,

did no ruling, and certainly not at all so much thinking as Venice, and

life there continued healthful, simple, unconscious, untroubled by the

approaching storm in the world's feelings. But although thought and

feeling may be slow in invading a town, fashion comes there quickly.

Spanish fashions in dress, and Spanish ceremonial in manners reached

Verona soon enough, and in Paolo Caliari we find all these fashions

reflected, but health, simplicity, and unconsciousness as well. This

combination of seemingly opposite qualities forms his great charm for

us to-day, and it must have proved as great an attraction to many of the

Venetians of his own time, for they were already far enough removed from

simplicity to appreciate to the full his singularly happy combination of

ceremony and splendour with an almost childlike naturalness of feeling.

Perhaps among his strongest admirers were the very men who most

appreciated Titian's distinction and Tintoretto's poetry. But it is

curious to note that Paolo's chief employers were the monasteries. His

cheerfulness, and his frank and joyous worldliness, the qualities, in

short, which we find in his huge pictures of feasts, seem to have been

particularly welcome to those who were expected to make their meat and

drink of the very opposite qualities. This is no small comment on the

times, and shows how thorough had been the permeation of the spirit of

the Renaissance when even the religious orders gave up their pretence to

asceticism and piety.

=XXI. Bassano, Genre, and Landscape.=--Venetian painting would not have

been the complete expression of the riper Renaissance if it had

entirely neglected the country. City people have a natural love of the

country, but when it was a matter of doubt whether a man would ever

return if he ventured out of the town-gates, as was the case in the

Middle Ages, this love had no chance of showing itself. It had to wait

until the country itself was safe for wayfarers, a state of things which

came about in Italy with the gradual submission of the country to the

rule of the neighbouring cities and with the general advance of

civilisation. During the Renaissance the love of the country and its

pleasures received an immense impulse from Latin authors. What the great

Romans without exception recommended, an Italian was not slow to adopt,

particularly when, as in this case, it harmonised with natural

inclination and with an already common practice. It was the usual thing

with those who could afford to do so to retire to the villa for a large

part of the year. Classic poets helped such Italians to appreciate the

simplicity of the country and to feel a little of its beauty. Many took

such delight in country life that they wished to have reminders of it

in town. It may have been in response to some such half formulated wish

that Palma began to paint his "Sante Conversazioni,"--groups of saintly

personages gathered under pleasant trees in pretty landscapes. His

pupil, Bonifazio, continued the same line, gradually, however,

discarding the traditional group of Madonna and saints, and, under such

titles as "The Rich Man's Feast" or "The Finding of Moses," painting all

the scenes of fashionable country life, music on the terrace of a villa,

hunting parties, and picnics in the forest.

Bonifazio's pupil, Jacopo Bassano, no less fond of painting country

scenes, did not however confine himself to representing city people in

their parks. His pictures were for the inhabitants of the small

market-town from which he takes his name, where inside the gates you

still see men and women in rustic garb crouching over their

many-coloured wares; and where, just outside the walls, you may see all

the ordinary occupations connected with farming and grazing. Inspired,

although unawares, by the new idea of giving perfectly modern versions

of biblical stories, Bassano introduced into nearly every picture he

painted episodes from the life in the streets of Bassano, and in the

county just outside the gates. Even Orpheus in his hands becomes a

farmer's lad fiddling to the barnyard fowls.

Bassano's pictures and those of his two sons, who followed him very

closely, found great favour in Venice and elsewhere, because they were

such unconscious renderings of simple country life, a kind of life whose

charm seemed greater and greater the more fashionable and ceremonious

private life in the city became. But this was far from being their only

charm. Just as the Church had educated people to understand painting as

a language, so the love of all the pleasant things that painting

suggested led in time to the love of this art as its own end, serving no

obvious purpose either of decoration or suggestion, but giving pleasure

by the skilful management of light and shadow, and by the intrinsic

beauty of the colours. The third quarter of the sixteenth century thus

saw the rise of the picture-fancier, and the success of the Bassani was

so great because they appealed to this class in a special way. In

Venice there had long been a love of objects for their sensuous beauty.

At an early date the Venetians had perfected an art in which there is

scarcely any intellectual content whatever, and in which colour,

jewel-like or opaline, is almost everything. Venetian glass was at the

same time an outcome of the Venetians' love of sensuous beauty and a

continual stimulant to it. Pope Paul II., for example, who was a

Venetian, took such a delight in the colour and glow of jewels, that he

was always looking at them and always handling them. When painting,

accordingly, had reached the point where it was no longer dependent upon

the Church, nor even expected to be decorative, but when it was used

purely for pleasure, the day could not be far distant when people would

expect painting to give them the same enjoyment they received from

jewels and glass. In Bassano's works this taste found full satisfaction.

Most of his pictures seem at first as dazzling, then as cooling and

soothing, as the best kind of stained glass; while the colouring of

details, particularly of those under high lights, is jewel-like, as

clear and deep and satisfying as rubies and emeralds.

It need scarcely be added after all that has been said about light and

atmosphere in connection with Titian and Tintoretto, and their handling

of real life, that Bassano's treatment of both was even more masterly.

If this were not so, neither picture-fanciers of his own time, nor we

nowadays, should care for his works as we do. They represent life in far

more humble phases than even the pictures of Tintoretto, and, without

recompensing effects of light and atmosphere, they would not be more

enjoyable than the cheap work of the smaller Dutch masters. It must be

added, too, that without his jewel-like colouring, Bassano would often

be no more delightful than Teniers.

Another thing Bassano could not fail to do, working as he did in the

country, and for country people, was to paint landscape. He had to paint

the real country, and his skill in the treatment of light and atmosphere

was great enough to enable him to do it well. Bassano was in fact the

first modern landscape painter. Titian and Tintoretto and Giorgione,

and even Bellini and Cima before them, had painted beautiful landscapes,

but they were seldom direct studies from nature. They were decorative

backgrounds, or fine harmonising accompaniments to the religious or

human elements of the picture. They never failed to get grand and

effective lines--a setting worthy of the subject. Bassano did not need

such setting for his country versions of Bible stories, and he needed

them even less in his studies of rural life. For pictures of this kind

the country itself naturally seemed the best background and the best

accompaniment possible,--indeed, the only kind desirable. Without

knowing it, therefore, and without intending it, Bassano was the first

Italian who tried to paint the country as it really is, and not arranged

to look like scenery.

=XXII. The Venetians and Velasquez.=--Had Bassano's qualities, however,

been of the kind that appealed only to the collectors of his time, he

would scarcely rouse the strong interest we take in him. We care for him

chiefly because he has so many of the more essential qualities of great

art--truth to life, and spontaneity. He has another interest still, in

that he began to beat out the path which ended at last in Velasquez.

Indeed, one of the attractions of the Venetian school of painting is

that, more than all others, it went to form that great Spanish master.

He began as a sort of follower of Bassano, but his style was not fixed

before he had given years of study to Veronese, to Tintoretto, and to

Titian.

=XXIII. Decline of Venetian Art.=--Bassano appealed to collectors by mere

accident. He certainly did not work for them. The painters who came

after him and after Tintoretto no longer worked unconsciously, as

Veronese did, nor for the whole intelligent class, as Titian and

Tintoretto had done, but for people who prided themselves on their

connoisseurship.

Palma the Younger and Domenico Tintoretto began well enough as natural

followers of Tintoretto, but before long they became aware of their

inferiority to the masters who had preceded them, and, feeling no longer

the strength to go beyond them, fell back upon painting variations of

those pictures of Tintoretto and Titian which had proved most popular.

So their works recall the great masters, but only to bring out their own

weakness. Padovanino, Liberi, and Pietro della Vecchia went even lower

down and shamelessly manufactured pictures which, in the distant markets

for which they were intended, passed for works of Titian, Veronese, and

Giorgione. Nor are these pictures altogether unenjoyable. There are airs

by the great composers we so love that we enjoy them even when woven

into the compositions of some third-rate master.

=XXIV. Longhi.=--But Venetian painting was not destined to die unnoticed.

In the eighteenth century, before the Republic entirely disappeared,

Venice produced three or four painters who deserve at the least a place

with the best painters of that century. The constitution of the Venetian

State had remained unchanged. Magnificent ceremonies still took place,

Venice was still the most splendid and the most luxurious city in the

world. If the splendour and luxury were hollow, they were not more so

than elsewhere in Europe. The eighteenth century had the strength which

comes from great self-confidence and profound satisfaction with one's

surroundings. It was so self-satisfied that it could not dream of

striving to be much better than it was. Everything was just right; there

seemed to be no great issues, no problems arising that human

intelligence untrammelled by superstition could not instantly solve.

Everybody was therefore in holiday mood, and the gaiety and frivolity of

the century were of almost as much account as its politics and culture.

There was no room for great distinctions. Hair-dressers and tailors

found as much consideration as philosophers and statesmen at a lady's

levee. People were delighted with their own occupations, their whole

lives; and whatever people delight in, that they will have represented

in art. The love for pictures was by no means dead in Venice, and Longhi

painted for the picture-loving Venetians their own lives in all their

ordinary domestic and fashionable phases. In the hair-dressing scenes

we hear the gossip of the periwigged barber; in the dressmaking scenes,

the chatter of the maid; in the dancing-school, the pleasant music of

the violin. There is no tragic note anywhere. Everybody dresses, dances,

makes bows, takes coffee, as if there were nothing else in the world

that wanted doing. A tone of high courtesy, of great refinement, coupled

with an all-pervading cheerfulness, distinguishes Longhi's pictures from

the works of Hogarth, at once so brutal and so full of presage of

change.

=XXV. Canaletto and Guardi.=--Venice herself had not grown less beautiful

in her decline. Indeed, the building which occupies the very centre of

the picture Venice leaves in the mind, the Salute, was not built until

the seventeenth century. This was the picture that the Venetian himself

loved to have painted for him, and that the stranger wanted to carry

away. Canale painted Venice with a feeling for space and atmosphere,

with a mastery over the delicate effects of mist peculiar to the city,

that make his views of the Salute, the Grand Canal, and the Piazzetta

still seem more like Venice than all the pictures of them that have been

painted since. Later in the century Canale was followed by Guardi, who

executed smaller views with more of an eye for the picturesque, and for

what may be called instantaneous effects, thus anticipating both the

Romantic and the Impressionist painters of our own century.

=XXVI. Tiepolo.=--But delightful as Longhi, Canale, and Guardi are, and

imbued as they are with the spirit of their own century, they lack the

quality of force, without which there can be no really impressive style.

This quality their contemporary Tiepolo possessed to the utmost. His

energy, his feeling for splendour, his mastery over his craft, place him

almost on a level with the great Venetians of the sixteenth century,

although he never allows one to forget what he owes to them,

particularly to Veronese. The grand scenes he paints differ from those

of his predecessor not so much in mere inferiority of workmanship, as in

a lack of that simplicity and candour which never failed Paolo, no

matter how proud the event he might be portraying. Tiepolo's people are

haughty, as if they felt that to keep a firm hold on their dignity they

could not for a moment relax their faces and figures from a monumental

look and bearing. They evidently feel themselves so superior that they

are not pleasant to live with, although they carry themselves so well,

and are dressed with such splendour, that once in a while it is a great

pleasure to look at them. It was Tiepolo's vision of the world that was

at fault, and his vision of the world was at fault only because the

world itself was at fault. Paolo saw a world touched only by the

fashions of the Spanish Court, while Tiepolo lived among people whose

very hearts had been vitiated by its measureless haughtiness.

But Tiepolo's feeling for strength, for movement, and for colour was

great enough to give a new impulse to art. At times he seems not so much

the last of the old masters as the first of the new. The works he left

in Spain do more than a little to explain the revival of painting in

that country under Goya; and Goya, in his turn, had a great influence

upon many of the best French artists of our own times.

=XXVII. Influence of Venetian Art.=--Thus, Venetian painting before it

wholly died, flickered up again strong enough to light the torch that is

burning so steadily now. Indeed, not the least attraction of the

Venetian masters is their note of modernity, by which I mean the feeling

they give us that they were on the high road to the art of to-day. We

have seen how on two separate occasions Venetian painters gave an

impulse to Spaniards, who in turn have had an extraordinary influence on

modern painting. It would be easy, too, although it is not my purpose,

to show how much other schools of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, such as the Flemish, led by Rubens, and the English led by

Reynolds, owed to the Venetians. My endeavour has been to explain some

of the attractions of the school, and particularly to show its close

dependence upon the thought and feeling of the Renaissance. This is

perhaps its greatest interest, for being such a complete expression of

the riper spirit of the Renaissance, it helps us to a larger

understanding of a period which has in itself the fascination of youth,

and which is particularly attractive to us, because the spirit that

animates us is singularly like the better spirit of that epoch. We, too,

are possessed of boundless curiosity. We, too, have an almost

intoxicating sense of human capacity. We, too, believe in a great future

for humanity, and nothing has yet happened to check our delight in

discovery or our faith in life.