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 efifigies 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 por-
traiture 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 w4iile the
portraits in the Great Hall have perished, sev-
eral altar-pieces still preserve to us the like-
nesses of some of the Doges.
Early in the sixteenth century, when people
began to want pictures in their own homes as
THE PORTRAIT X'J
well as in their>ublic halls, personal and reli-
gious motives combmbd. to dictate the choice
of subjects. In the minds' of m.any, 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 ior 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 sub-
jects possible. Over and above the obvious
satisfaction afforded by a likeness, the portrait
had to give pleasure to the eye, and to pro-
duce those agreeable moods which were ex-
pected 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 tyran-
nize rather than soothe and please. But Gior-
gione and his immediate followers painted men
38 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
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 pur-
pose 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 cen-
tury. Their number, as we shall see, only
grows larger as the century advances.
X. The Young Titian.— Giorgione's fol-
lowers had only to exploit the vein their
master hit upon to find ample remunera-
tion. 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
THE YOUNG TITIAN 39
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 feel-
ing that the universe is naturally her own, and
40 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
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, Bac-
chanalian 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.
APPARENT FAILURE 4I
XI. Apparent Failure of the Renaissance.
— But even while such pictures were being
painted, the spirit of the ItaHan Renaissance
was proving inadequate to Hfe. 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 ad-
vancement 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 sculp-
tures in San Lorenzo, or of his ** Last Judg-
ment," 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 flow-
42 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
ing 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 hy-
pocrisy 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 fas-
cinating 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 exulta-
tion. Quieter joys were sought, the pleasures
of friendship and of the affections. Life not
having proved the endless holiday it had prom-
LOTTO 43
ised 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 him-
self, 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,
44 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
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 di-
rectly 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, per-
secuted by a rule that cherished the Inquisi-
tion. Now for the first time Venetian painters
THE LATE RENAISSANCE AND TITIAN 45
were brought in contact with men of letters.
As they were already, fortunately for them-
selves, 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 let-
ters to the painter became on the whole a stim-
ulating 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 ad-
vantage. 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 organ-
ized 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
H-
6 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
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 eques-
trian 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 un-
able to hold out against them. In the '' Crown-
ing 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 pes-
simist. Many of his late portraits are even
more energetic than those of his early matu-
rity. 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
THE LATE RENAISSANCE AND TITIAN 47
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, uitian'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 mat-
ter 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 mas-
ters 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
48 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
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
Shakspcare of the '' Midsummer - Night's
Dream " and the Shakspeare of the *' Tem-
pest." 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 ever}^ bough.
SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO 49
The Renaissance had resulted in the emancipa-
tion of the individual, in making him feel that
the universe had no other purpose than his
happiness. This brought an entirely new an-
swer to the question, *' Why should I do this
or that?" It used to be, "Because self-insti-
tuted 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 eman-
cipation of the individual had a direct effect
on the painter in freeing him from his guild.
4
50 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
It now occurred to him that possibly }>e
might become more proficient and have
greater success if he deserted the influences he
was under by the accident of birth and resi-
dence, and placed himself in the school that
seemed best adapted to foster his talents. This
led to the unfortunate experiment of Eclecti-
cism which checked the purely organic develop-
ment 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 knowl-
edge of art as one of the birthrights of their
social position. Venice, however, suffered lit-
tle 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 Michelan-
gelo, but while this influence was pernicious in
most cases, the hand that had learned to paint
TINTORETTO 5 1
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. Tinto-
retto 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 tc
52 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
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 birth-
right. 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 attain-
able in painting without an adequate treatment
TINTORETTO 53
of light and atmosphere, even then, the reahty
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 pic-
tures all the poetry there was in his soul with-
out 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 alm.ost entirely a matter
of light and colour. What is it but the light
that changes the solitudes in which the Mag-
dalen 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 be-
fore the judge, that give the '' Christ before
Pilate" its sublime magic? What, again, but
54 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
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 Tinto-
retto 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 dis-
appointments. 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 per-
sons living under Roman rule, wearing the
Roman toga, and w^alking about in the land-
scape of a Roman bas-relief? Christ and the
TINTORETTO 55
Apostles, the Patriarchs and Prophets, were
the embodiment of hving 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 condi-
tions easily intelligible to himself and to his
fellow-men. Indeed, the more intelligible and
the more familiar the look and garb and sur-
roundings 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, influ-
enced him considerably in his construction of
the female figure ; but the effect which he
must always have produced upon his contem-
poraries, and which most of his works still pro-
duce, is one of astounding reality as well as of
wide sweep and power. Thus, in the '' Discov-
56 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
cry of the Body of St. Mark," in the Brera,
and in the '' Storm Rising while the Corpse is
being Carried through the Streets of Alexan-
dria," in the Royal Palace at Venice, the fig-
ures, although colossal, are so energetic and so
easy in movement, and the effects of perspec-
tive 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 repre-
sentation 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
Value of minor episodes in art 57
painted, or the picture will not look true to
life. This incorporation of small episodes run-
ning parallel with the subject rather than form-
ing 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 considera-
tion of minor episodes, and for that reason is
almost as well fitted to be in touch with mod-
ern life as the novel itself. Such a treatment
saves a picture from looking prepared and cold,
just as light and atmosphere save it from rigid-
ity and crudeness.
No better illustration of this can be found
among Italian masters than Tintoretto's *' Cru-