Chapter IV

, Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco.

[269] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 183.

[270] I must refer my readers to Crowe and Cavalcaselle for an estimate of the influence exercised at Venice by Gentile de Fabriano, John Alamannus, and the school of Squarcione. Antonello da Messina brought his method of oil-painting into the city in 1470, and Gian Bellini learned something at Padua from Andrea Mantegna. The true point about Venice, however, is that the Venetian character absorbed, assimilated, and converted to its own originality whatever touched it.

[271] The conditions of art in Flanders--wealthy, bourgeois, proud, free--were not dissimilar to those of art in Venice. The misty flats of Belgium have some of the atmospheric qualities of Venice. As Van Eyck is to the Vivarini, so is Rubens to Paolo Veronese. This expresses the amount of likeness and of difference.

[272] Jacopo and his sons Gentile and Giovanni.

[273] Notice particularly the Contadina type of S. Catherine in a picture ascribed to Cordegliaghi in the Venetian Academy.

[274] These Scuole were the halls of meeting for companies called by the names of patron saints.

[275] Notice in particular, from the series of pictures illustrating the legend of S. Ursula, the very beautiful faces and figures of the saint herself, and her young bridegroom, the Prince of Britain. Attendant squires and pages in these paintings have all the charm of similar subordinate personages in Pinturicchio, with none of his affectation.

[276] The most beautiful of these _angiolini_, with long flakes of flaxen hair falling from their foreheads, are in a Sacra Conversazione of Carpaccio's in the Academy. Gian Bellini's, in many similar pictures, are of the same delicacy.

[277] What follows above about Giorgione is advanced with diffidence, since the name of no other great painter has been so freely used to cover the works of his inferiors.

[278] Lord Lansdowne's Giorgionesque picture of a young man crowned with vine, playing and singing to two girls in a garden, for example. The celebrated Concert of the Louvre Gallery, so charming for its landscape and so voluptuous in its dreamy sense of Arcadian luxury, is given by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo. See _History of Painting in North Italy_, vol. ii. p. 147.

[279] Under the fire of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's destructive criticism, it would require more real courage than I possess to speak of the "Entombment" in the Monte di Pietà at Treviso as genuine. Coarse and unselect as are the types of the boy angels, as well as of the young athletic giant, who plays the part in it of the dead Christ, this is a truly grandiose and striking picture. Nothing proves the average greatness of the Venetian masters more than the possibility of attributing such compositions to obscure and subordinate craftsmen of the school.

[280] Crowe and Cavalcaselle assign this picture with some confidence and with fair show of reason, to Cariani, on whom again they father the frescoes at Colleoni's Castle of Malpaga. I have ventured to notice it above in connection with Giorgione, since it exhibits some of the most striking Giorgionesque qualities, and shows the ascendency of his imagination over the Venetian School.

[281] Giorgione, b. 1478; d. 1511. Titian, b. 1477, d. 1576. Tintoretto, b. 1512; d. 1594. Veronese, b. 1530; d. 1588.

[282] I cannot, for example, imagine Veronese painting anything like Rubens' two pictures of the "Last Judgment" at Munich.

[283] For his sacred types see the "Marriage at Cana" in the Louvre, the little "Crucifixion" and the "Baptism" of the Pitti, and the "Martyrdom of S. Agata" in the Uffizzi.

[284] These examples are mostly chosen from the Scuola di S. Rocco and the church of S. Maria dell' Orto at Venice; also from "Pietàs," in the Brera and the Pitti, the "Paradise" of the Ducal Palace, and a sketch for "Paradise" in the Louvre.

[285] S. Maria dell' Orto.

[286] What is here said about Tintoretto is also true of Michael Angelo. His sculpture in S. Lorenzo, compared with Greek sculpture, the norm and canon of the perfect in that art, may be called an invasion of the realm of poetry or music.

[287] There are probably not few of my readers who, after seeing this painting in the Ducal Palace, will agree with me that it is, if not the greatest, at any rate the most beautiful, oil picture in existence. In no other picture has a poem of feeling and of fancy, a romance of varied lights and shades, a symphony of delicately blended hues, a play of attitude and movement transitory but in no sense forced or violent, been more successfully expressed by means more simple or with effect more satisfying. Something of the mythopoeic faculty must have survived in Tintoretto, and enabled him to inspire the Greek tale with this intense vitality of beauty.

[288] The first of these pictures is in the Ducal Palace, the other two in the Academy at Venice.

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