cifixion " 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



5^ THE t'ENETIAN PAINTERS

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 per-
sonal 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 Tin-
toretto'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 multi-
tude 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 life-
less and desolate, in spite of the crowd and ani-
mation, as if it were the bottom of a dried up sea.



TINTORETTO'S PORTRAITS 50

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 commis-
sions 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 Vene-
tian portrait, it will be remembered, was ex-
pected 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 expecta-
tions. 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



6o THE VENETIAN PAINTERS

kind represented in most of Tintoretto's por-
traits.

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 w^as 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



VENETIAN ART AND THE PROVINCES 6 1

long a growth and with as independent an evo-
lution 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 Mon-
tagna 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 paint-
ers 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 provincial-
ism. 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



62 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS

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 indepen-
dent 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



PAUL VERONESE ^l

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 ruHng, and cer-
tainly 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



64 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS

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



BASS A NO, GENRE, AND LANDSCAPE 65

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 civilisa-
tion. 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 in-
clination and with an already common prac-
tice. 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

5



66 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS

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, Boni-
fazio, continued the same line, gradually, how-
ever, 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 how-
ever confine himself to representing city people
in their parks. His pictures were for the in-
habitants 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 farm-
ing and grazing. Inspired, although unawares,
by the new idea of giving perfectly modern



BASSANO, GENRE, AND LANDSCAPE 6/

versions of biblical stories, Bassano intro-
duced 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,
v/ho 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 sug-
gested 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 suc-
cess of the Bassani was so great because they



68 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS

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 paint-
ing, 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-



BASSANO, GENRE, AND LANDSCAPE 69

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 con-
nection 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 w^ithout
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,



70 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS

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 ele-
ments 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 coun-
try itself naturally seemed the best background
and the best accompaniment possible, — indeed,
the only kind desirable. Without knovv^ing 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



DECLINE OF VENETIAN ART 7 1

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 at-
tractions 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.— Bas-
sano appealed to collectors by mere acci-
dent. 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 pre-
ceded them, and, feeling no longer the strength



72 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS

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 pic-
tures which, in the distant markets for which
they were intended, passed for works of Titian,
Veronese, and Giorgione. Nor are these pic-
tures altogether unenjoyable. There are airs
by the great composers we so love that we
enjoy them even when woven into the com-
positions of some third-rate master.

XXIV. Longhi.— But Venetian painting
was not destined to die unnoticed. In the
eighteenth century, before the Republic en-
tirely disappeared, Venice produced three
or four painters who deserve at the least
a place with the best painters of that cen-
tury. 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



LONGHI 73

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 surround-
ings. 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 aris-
ing that human intelligence untrammelled by
superstition could not instantly solve. Every-
body was therefore in holiday mood, and the
gaiety and frivolity of the century were of
almost as much account as its politics and cul-
ture. There was no room for great distinctions.
Hair-dressers and tailors found as much con-
sideration as philosophers and statesmen at a
lady's levee. People were delighted with their
own occupations, their whole lives ; and what-
ever 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



74 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS

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 occu-
pies 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 pe-
culiar to the city, that makonis views of the



TIE POLO 75

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 paint-
ers 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, al-
though 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 inferi-
ority of workmanship, as in a lack of that sim-



"j^y THE VEMETIAN' PAINTERS

plicity 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
onlv 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 move-
ment, 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 re-
vival of painting in that country under Goya ;



INFLUENCE OF VENETIAN ART J J

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 Vene-
tian painters gave an impulse to Spaniards,
who in turn have had an extraordinary influ-
ence 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 Rey-
nolds, 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



78 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS

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 pos-
sessed 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.



INDEX TO THE WORKS OF THE PRIN-
CIPAL VENETIAN PAINTERS.



NOTE.

Public galleries are mentioned first, then private collections,
and churches last. The principal public gallery is always
understood after the simple mention of a city or town. Thus,
Paris means Paris, Louvre, London means London, National
Gallery, etc.

An interrogation point after the number or title of a picture
indicates that its attribution to the given painter is doubtful.

Distinctly early or late works are marked E, or L.

It need scarcely be said that the attributions here given are
not based on official catalogues, and are often at variance
with them.

ANTONELLO DA MESSINA.

B. Circa 1444 : d. circa 1493. Began under unknown
Flemish painter ; influenced by the Vivarini and
Bellini.

Antwerp. 4. Crucifixion, 1475.
Bergamo. Lochis, 222, St. Sebastian.
Berlin. 18. Portrait of Young Man, 1478.

18^. Portrait of Young Man, 1474.

25. Portrait of Young Man in Red Coat.
Dresden. 52. St. Sebastian.

79



8o WORKS OF

London. 673. The Saviour, 1465. 1141. Portrait of

Man. 1 166. Crucifixion, 1477. St. Jerome in