His death came when the noble altarpiece to St. Ambrogio in the Frari was still unfinished, and it was completed by his assistant, Marco Basaiti. The execution is heavy and probably of Basaiti, but the venerable doctor is a grand figure, and the two young soldier saints on his right and left hand are striking examples of the beauty we claim for him. The architectural plan is very elaborate, but altogether successful. The group is set beneath an arched vault supported by columns and cornices. Overhead, behind a balustrade, is placed a coronation of the Virgin. The many figures are grouped so as not to interfere with each other, and the sword of St. George, the crozier of St. Gregory, and the crook of St. Ambrose break up the composition and give length and line. The faces of the saints are extremely beautiful, and the two angels making music below compare well with those of the Bellinesque School.

The portraits Alvise has left add to his reputation, and remind us of those of Antonello da Messina, particularly in the vital expression of the eyes, though they are without Antonello's intense force. The "Bernardo di Salla" and the "Man feeding a Hawk," though some critics still ascribe them to Savoldo, have features which make their attribution to Alvise almost certainly correct. Indeed, the resemblance of Bernardo to the Madonna in the 1480 altarpiece cannot escape the most unscientific observer. There is the same inflated nostril, the peculiarly curved mouth, and vivacious eyes.

Among the followers of Alvise, Marco Basaiti, Bartolommeo Montagna, and Lorenzo Lotto are the most distinguished. Others less direct are Giovanni Buonconsiglio and Francesco Bonsignori, while Cima da Conegliano was for a short time his greatest pupil. We shall return to these later.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Berlin. Madonna enthroned, with six Saints. London. Portrait of Youth. Milan. Bonomi-Cereda Collection: Portrait of a Man. Naples. Madonna with SS. Francis and Bernardino. Paris. Portrait of Bernardo di Salla. Venice. Academy: Seven panels of single Saints; Madonna and six Saints, 1480. Frari: S. Ambrose enthroned. S. Giovanni in Bragora: Madonna adoring Child; Resurrection and Predelle. Redentore: Sacristy: Madonna and Child, with Angels. Vienna. Madonna. Windsor. Man feeding a Hawk.



CHAPTER X

CARPACCIO

Vittore Carpaccio was Gentile Bellini's most faithful pupil. He and his master stand apart in having, before the arrival of the Venetian School proper, captured an aspect and a charm inspired by the natural beauty of the City of the Sea. Gentile, as we have seen, paints her historic appearance, and Carpaccio gives us something of the delight we feel to-day in her translucent waters and her ample, sea-washed spaces flooded with limpid light. While others were absorbed in assimilating extraneous influences, he goes on his own way, painting, indeed, the scenes that were asked for, but painting them in his own manner and with his own enjoyment.

Pageant-pictures had been the demand of the Venetian State from very early days. The first use of painting had been that made by the Church to glorify religion, and very soon the State had followed, using it to enhance the love which Venetians bore to their city, and to bring home to them the consciousness of its greatness and glory. Pageants and processions were an integral part of Venetian life. The people looked on at them, often as they occurred, with more pride and sense of proprietorship than a Londoner does at a coronation procession or at the King going in state to open Parliament. The Venetian loved splendour and beauty and the story of the city's great achievements, and nothing provided so welcome a subject for the decoration of the great public halls as portrayals of the events which had made Venice famous. Artists had been employed to produce these as early as the end of the fourteenth century, and those of the Bellini and Alvise Vivarini (which perished in the great fire) were a rendering on modern lines of the same subjects, satisfying the more advanced feeling for truth and beauty.

Besides the Church and the public Government, we have already seen the "Schools," as they were called, becoming important employers. These schools were the great organised confraternities in the cause of charity and mutual help, which sprang up in Venice in the fifteenth century. That of St. Mark was naturally the foremost, but others were banded each under their patron saint. Each attracted numbers of rich patrons, for it was the fashion to belong to the confraternities. Riches and endowments rolled in, and halls for meeting and for transacting business were built, and were adorned with pictures setting forth the legends of their patron saints. We have already seen Gentile Bellini employed in the schools of San Marco and San Giovanni, and now the schools of St. Ursula and St. George gave commissions to Carpaccio, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that Gentile, having become pre-eminent in this art, provided employment for his pupil and assistant, and that by degrees Carpaccio became a maestro on his own account.

A host of second-rate painters were plying side by side, disciples first of one master, then drawn off to become followers of a second; assimilating the influence first of one workshop and then of another. Carpaccio has been lately identified as a pupil of Lazzaro Bastiani, who had a school in Venice, and the recent attribution to this painter of the "Doge before the Madonna," in the National Gallery, gives some countenance to the contention that he was held to be of great excellence in his time.

Though some historians advance the suggestion that Carpaccio was a native of Capo d'Istria, there is little proof that he was not, like his father Pietro, born a Venetian. He seems to have worked in Venice all his life, his first work being dated 1490 and his last 1520. In 1527 his wife, Laura, declared herself a widow.

The narrative art needed by the confraternities was supplied in perfection by Carpaccio, and one of his earliest independent commissions was the important one of decorating the School of St. Ursula. Devotion to St. Ursula was a monopoly of the school. No one else had a right to collect offerings in her name or to put up an image to her. The legend afforded an opportunity for painting varied and dramatic scenes, of which Carpaccio takes full advantage, and the cycle is one of the freshest and most characteristic things that has come down to us from the quattrocento. Problems are not conspicuous. The mediocre masters who have educated the painter have made little impression on him. He is entirely occupied in delight in his subject and in telling his story. The story of St. Ursula, told briefly, is that she was the daughter of the King of Brittany. The King of England sends his ambassadors to beg her hand for his son, Hereo. Ursula discusses the proposal with her father, and makes the conditions that Hereo, who is a heathen, shall be baptized, and that the betrothed couple must before marriage visit the Pope and the sacred shrines. After taking leave of their parents, the Prince and Princess depart on their expedition, but Ursula has had a vision in her sleep in which an angel has announced her martyrdom. She is accompanied on her journey by 11,000 virgins, and they are received by Pope Cyriacus in Rome. The Pope then makes the return journey with them as far as Cologne, where, however, they are assaulted and massacred by the Huns, after which Ursula is accorded a splendid funeral, and is canonised. The thirteen scenes in which the story is told are arranged on nine canvases, and the painter has not executed them in the chronological order, some of the latest events being the least complete in artistic skill. Professor Leonello Venturi assigns the following dates to the list:

1. The ambassadors of the King of England meet those of the King of Brittany to ask for the hand of Ursula. Probably painted from 1496-98.

2. (On same canvas) Ursula discusses the proposal with her father. 1496-98.

3. The King of Brittany dismisses the ambassadors. 1496-98.

4. The ambassadors return to the King of England. 1496-98.

5. An angel appears to Ursula in her sleep. 1492.

6, 7, 8. The betrothed couple take leave of their respective parents, and the Prince meets Ursula. 1495.

9. The betrothed couple and the 11,000 virgins meet the Pope. 1492.

10. They arrive at Cologne. 1490.

11, 12. The massacre by the Huns. The Funeral. 1495.

13. The saint appears in glory, with the palm of martyrdom, venerated by the 11,000 virgins and received in heaven by the Eternal Father. 1491.

No. 10 is a small canvas, such as might naturally have been chosen for a first experiment. The heads are large with coarse features, and the proportions of the figures are poor. The face of the saint in glory (No. 13), plump and without much expression, is of the type of Bastiani's saints. It may be assumed that such a great scheme of decoration would not have been entrusted to any one who was not already well known as an independent master, but perhaps Carpaccio, who would have been about thirty when the work was begun, was still principally engrossed with the conventional, ecclesiastical subject. The heads of the virgins pressing round the saint appear to be portraits, and were very possibly those of the wives and daughters of members of the confraternity.

The improvement that takes place is so rapid that we can guess how congenial the painter found the task and how quickly he adapted his already trained talent. In No. 5 he takes delight in the opportunity for painting a little domestic scene,—the bedroom of a young Venetian girl, perhaps a sister of his own. The comfortable bed, the dainty furniture, are carefully drawn. The clear morning light streams into the room. The saint lies peacefully asleep, her hand under her head, her long eyelashes resting upon her cheek: the whole is an idyll, full of insight into girlish life. The tiny slippers made, no doubt, one of the details that caught his eye. The crown lying on the ledge of the bed is an arbitrary introduction, as naif as the angel. In the funeral scene the luminous light is diffused over all, the young saint lies upon her bier and is followed by priest and deacon, the crowd is composed with truth to nature, the draperies and garments are brought into harmony with the sky and background, and in all those that follow we find this quality of light. The landscape behind the massacre has gained in natural character, the city is at some distance, houses and churches are half buried in woods; the setting is much more natural than are the quaint and elegant pages who occupy it, and who are drawing their crossbows and attacking the martyrs with leisurely nonchalance. The panel in which the betrothed couple meet shows a great advance, and this and the succeeding ones of the ambassadors, which were painted between 1495 and 1498, must have crowned Carpaccio's reputation. He paints Venice in its most fascinating aspect; the enamelled beauty of its marbles, its sky and sea, its palaces and ships, the rich and picturesque dresses men wore in the streets, the barge glowing with rich velvets. He evinces a fairy-tale spirit which we may compare with the work of Pintoricchio. His Prince, kneeling in a white and gold dress, with long fair curls, is a real fairy prince; Ursula, in her red dress and puffed sleeves, her rippling, flaxen hair and strings of pearls, is a princess of story. Carpaccio's art is simple and garrulous in feeling, his conception is as unpassionate as the fancies of a child, but he has a true love for these gay crowds; Venice going upon her gallant way—her solid, worthy citizens, men of substance, shrewd and valuable, taking their pleasure seriously with a sense of responsibility. They throng the streets and cross over the bridges, every figure is full of freedom and vitality. The arrival and dismissal of the ambassadors are the best of all the scenes. In the middle of the great stage King Maurus of Brittany sits upon a Venetian terrace. In the colonnade to the left is gathered a group of Venetian personages, members of the Loredano family, which was a special patron of St. Ursula's Guild, and gave this panel. The types are all vividly realised and differentiated: the courtier looking critically at the arrivals; the frankly curious bourgeoisie; the man of fashion passing with his nose in the air, disdaining to stare too closely; the fop with his dogs and their dwarf keeper. Far beyond stretch the lagoons; the sea and air of Venice clear and fresh. What is noticeable even now in an Italian crowd, the absence of women, was then most true to life, for except on special occasions they were not seen in the streets, but were kept in almost Oriental seclusion. The dismissal of the ambassadors affords the opportunity for drawing an interior with the street visible through a doorway. A group at the side, of a man dictating a letter and the scribe taking down his words, writing laboriously, with his shoulders hunched and his head on one side, is excellent in its quiet reality. The same life-like vivacity is displayed in Ursula's consultation with her father. The old nurse crouched upon the steps is introduced to break the line and to throw back the main group. Carpaccio has already used such a figure in the funeral scene, and Titian himself adopts his suggestion.



Carpaccio is not a very great painter, but a charming one. His treatment of light and water, of distant hills and trees, shows a sense of peace and poetry, and though he is influenced by Gentile's splendid realistic heads, the type which appeals to him is gentler and more idealised. His fancy is caught by Oriental details, to which Gentile would naturally have directed his attention, and of which there was no lack in Venice at this time. All his episodes are very clearly illustrated, and his popular brush was kept busily employed. He took a share with other assistants in the series which Gentile was painting in S. Giovanni Evangelista. In 1502 the Dalmatians inhabiting Venice resolved to decorate their school, which had been founded fifty years earlier, for the relief of destitute Dalmatian seamen in Venice. The subjects were to be selected from the lives of the Saviour and the patron saints of Dalmatia and Albania, St. Jerome, St. George of the Sclavonians, and St. Tryphonius. The nine panels and an altarpiece which Carpaccio delivered between 1502 and 1508 still adorn the small but dignified Hall of the school. His "Jerome in his Study" has nothing ascetic, but shows a prosperous Venetian ecclesiastic seated in his well-furnished library among his books and writings. He is less successful in his scenes from the life of Christ; the Gethsemane is an obvious imitation of Mantegna; but when he leaves his own style he is weak and poor, and imaginary scenes are quite beyond him. In the death and interment of St. Jerome he gives a delightful impression of the peace of the old convent garden, and in the scene where the lion introduced by the saint scatters the terrified monks he lets a sense of humour have free play. The monks in their long garments, escaping in all directions, are really comical, and in conjunction with the ingratiating smile of the lion, the scene passes into the region of broad farce. We divine the same sense of the comic in the scene in St. Ursula's history, where the 11,000 virgins are hurrying in single file along a winding road which disappears out of the picture. In the principal scene in the life of St. George, Carpaccio again achieves a masterpiece. The force and vivacity of the saint in armour charging the dragon, lingers long in the memory. The long, decorative lines of lance and war-horse and dragon throw back the whole landscape. The details show an almost childish delight in the realisation of ghoulish horrors. He rather injures his "Triumph of St. George" by his anxiety to bring in the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem; the flying flags distract the eye, and the whole scene is one of confusion, broken up into different parts, while the dragon is reduced to very unterrifying insignificance. His series for the school of the Albanians dealt with the life of the Virgin, who was their special patron. Its remains are at Bergamo, Milan, and in the Academy. The single figures in the "Presentation," the priest and maiden, are excellent. A child at the side of the steps, leading a unicorn, emblem of chastity, shows once more what a hold this use of a figure had taken of him. In the "Visitation" the figures are too much scattered, and the fantastic buildings attract more attention than the women. He still produced altarpieces, and the Presentation of the Infant Christ in the Temple, which he was called upon to paint for San Giobbe, where one of Bellini's most famous altarpieces stood, challenged him to put forth all his strength. He never produced anything more simple and noble or more worthy of the cinque-cento than this altarpiece (now in the Academy). It surpasses Bellini's arrangement in the way in which the personages are raised upon a step, while the dome overhead and the angel musicians below give them height and dignity. The contrast between the infant and the youthful woman and the old men is purposely marked. Such a contrast between youth and age is a very favourite one. Bellini, in the same church, draws it between SS. Sebastian and Job, and Alvise Vivarini, in his last painting, balances a very youthful Sebastian with St. Jerome. This is the most grandiose, the least of a genre picture of all Carpaccio's creations, although he does make Simeon into a pontiff with attendant cardinals bearing his train. One of his last works is the S. Vitale over the high altar of the church of that name, where we forgive the wooden appearance of the horse which the saint rides for the sake of the simple dignity of the rider and the airy effect given by the balcony overhead. Nor must we forget that study of the "Two Courtesans" in the Museo Civico, full of the sarcasm of a deep realism. It conveys to us the matter-of-fact monotony of the long, hot days, and the women and the animals with which they are beguiling their idle hours are painted with the greatest intelligence. It carries us back to another phase of life in Carpaccio's Venice, seen through his observant, humorous eyes, and if there is nothing in his colour distinctive of the impending Venetian richness, it is still arresting in its brilliant limpidity; it seems drawn straight from the transparent canals and radiant lagoons.

We apprehend the difference at once in Bastiani and in Mansueti, who essay the same sort of compositions. They studied grouping carefully, and it must have seemed easy enough to paint their careful architecture and to place citizens in costume with appropriate action in a "Miracle of the Cross," or the "Preaching of St. Mark"; but these pictures are dry and crowded, they give no illusion of truth, there is none of the careless realism of Carpaccio's crowds,—of incidents taking place which are not essential to the story, and, as in life, are only half seen, but which have their share in producing a full and varied illusion. The scenes want the air and depth in which Carpaccio's pictures are enveloped. We are not stimulated and charmed, taken into the outer air and refreshed by these heavy personages, standing in rows, painted in hot, dry colour, and carrying no conviction in their glance and action.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Berlin. Madonna and Saints; Consecration of Stephen. Ferrara. Death of Virgin. Milan. Presentation of Virgin; Marriage of Virgin; St. Stephen disputing. Paris. St. Stephen preaching. Stuttgart. Martyrdom of St. Stephen. Venice. Academy: The History of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins; Presentation in the Temple. Museo Correr: Visitation; Two Courtesans. S. Giorgio degli Schiavone: History of SS. George and Tryphonius; Agony in the Garden; Christ in the House of the Pharisee; History of St. Jerome. S. Vitale: Altarpiece to S. Vitale. Lady Layard. Death of the Virgin; St. Ursula taking leave of her Father. Vienna. Christ adored by Angels.



CHAPTER XI

GIOVANNI BELLINI

The difference between Gian. Bellini and his accomplished brother, that which makes us so conscious that the first was the greater of the two and which sets him in a later artistic generation than Gentile, is a difference of mind. Such pageant-pictures as we hear that Giovanni was engaged upon have all been destroyed. We may suspect that their composition was not particularly congenial to him, and that the strictly religious pictures and the small allegorical studies, by which we must judge him, were more after his heart. It is his poetic and ideal feeling which adds so strongly to his claim to be a great artist; it was this which drew all men to him and enabled him so powerfully to influence the art of his day in Venice.

Jacopo's wife, Anna, in a will of 1429, leaves everything to her two sons, Gentile and Niccolo. Giovanni was evidently not her son, but Vasari speaks of him as the elder of the two, so that it is very possible that he was an illegitimate child, brought up, after the fashion that so often obtained, in the full privileges of his father's house. Documents show that Jacopo Bellini was living in Venice in 1437, first near the Piazza, and afterwards in the parish of San Lio. He was a member of S. Giovanni Evangelista, and probably one of the leading artists of the city. His two sons helped him in his great decorative works, and also went with him to Padua, where he painted the Gattamalata Chapel. Their relative position is suggested by a document of 1457, which records that the father received twenty-one ducats for "three figures, done on cloth, put in the Great Hall of the Patriarch," only two of which were to go to the son. In 1459 Gian. Bellini's signature first appears on a document, and at about this time we may suppose that he and his brother began to execute small commissions on their own account. On these visits to Padua the intimacy must have sprung up, which led to Mantegna's marriage in 1453 with Jacopo's daughter. At Padua, too, Bellini, in company with Mantegna, drank in the inspiration left there by Donatello, the greatest master that either of them encountered. It was the humanistic and naturalistic side of Donatello which touched Giovanni Bellini, more than all his classic lore. It chimed in, too, with his father's graceful and fanciful quality, and there is no doubt that the Venetian painters soon exercised a marked influence on Mantegna. They "fought for him with Squarcione," and even in the Eremitani frescoes he begins to lose his purely statuesque type and to become frankly Renaissance. In the later scenes of the series a pergola with grapes, a Venetian campanile and doorway replace his classic towers and arches of triumph. In the "Martyrdom of St. James" the couple walking by and paying no attention whatever to the tragic event, are very like the people whom Gentile introduces in his backgrounds.

There are few documents more interesting in the history of art than the two pictures of the "Agony in the Garden," executed by the brothers-in-law, about 1455, from a design by Jacopo in the British Museum sketch-book. Jacopo draws the mound-like hill, Christ kneeling before the vision of the Chalice, the figures wrapt in slumber, and the distant town. In few pictures up to this time is the landscape conceived in such sympathy with the figures. As we look at this sketch and examine the two finished compositions, which it is so fortunate to find in juxtaposition in the National Gallery, we surmise that the two artists agreed to carry out the same idea and each to give his version of Jacopo's suggestion, and very curious it is to see the rendering each has produced.

Mantegna has made use of the most formal and Squarcionesque contours in his surroundings. The rocks are of an unnatural, geological structure. The towers of Jerusalem are defined in elaborate perspective, and a band of classic figures fills the middle distance. The sleeping forms of the disciples are laid about like so many draped statues taken from their pedestals. The choir of child angels is solid and leaves nothing to the imagination, and if it were not for the beautifully conceived Christ, the whole composition would leave us quite unmoved. On the other hand, we can never look at Bellini's version without a fresh thrill. He, like Mantegna, has followed Jacopo's scheme of winding roads and the city "set on a hill," and has drawn the advancing band of soldiers; but, independent of all details, he gives us the vision of a poet. The still dawn is breaking over the broadly painted landscape, the rosy shafts of light are colouring the sky and casting their magic over every common object, and, lonely and absorbed, the Sacred Figure kneels, wrapt into the Heavenly Vision, which is hardly more definite than a stronger beam of light upon the radiance. One of the disciples, at least, is a successful and natural study of a tired-out man, whose head has fallen back and whose every limb has relaxed in sleep. Bellini is less assured, less accomplished than Mantegna, but he is able to touch us with the pathos of both natural and spiritual feeling.

Even earlier than this picture, critics place the "Crucifixion" and "Transfiguration" of the Museo Correr and our own "Salvator Mundi." In 1443, when Giovanni was a young man of four or five and twenty, San Bernardino had held a great revival at Padua, and the whole of Venice had thronged to hear him. It is very possible, as Mr. Roger Fry suggests in his Life of Bellini, that Giovanni's emotional temperament had been worked upon by the preacher's eloquence, and the very poignant feelings of love and pity which his early art expresses were the deliberate consequence of his sympathy with the deep religious mysteries expounded.

In the two pictures in the Correr, Bellini is still going with the Paduan current. In both we have the winding roads so characteristic of his father, but the rocks in the "Transfiguration" have the jointed, arbitrary character of Mantegna's and the draperies are plastered to the forms beneath; yet the figures here have a beauty and a dignity which no reproduction seems able to convey. The feeling is already more imposing than the execution. Christ and the two prophets tower up against the belt of clouds, the central figure conveying a sense of pathetic isolation; while below, St. John's attitude betrays a state of tension, the feet being drawn up and contorted. This picture prepares us for the overwhelming emotion we find in the "Redeemer" and the group of Pietas. The treatment of the Christ was a development of the early motif of angels flying forward on either side of the Cross, but here the sacred blood pouring into the chalice is also sacramental and connected with the intensified religious fervour which had led to the foundation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, illustrations of which are met with in the miniatures and wood-engravings of fifteenth-century books of devotion. The accessories, the antique reliefs, the low wall, the distant buildings, have an allegorical meaning underlying each one, and common to trecento and, in a less degree, to quattrocento art. Paradise regained is signified by the paved court with the open door, in contradistinction to the Hortus Clausus, or enclosed court; the type of the old covenant. In one of the bas-reliefs Mucius Scaevola thrusts his hand into the fire, the ancient type of heroic readiness to suffer. The other represents a pagan sacrifice, foreshadowing the sacrifice upon the Cross. Figures in the background are leaving a ruined temple and making their way towards the new Christian city, fortified and crowned with a church tower, and in the midst of all this symbolism, Christ and the attendant angel are placed, vibrating with nervous feeling.

During the next few years, Bellini devoted himself to two subjects of the highest devotional order. These are the Madonna and Child, the great exercise in every age for painters, and the Pieta, which he has made peculiarly his own.



Close by, at Padua, Giotto had left a rendering of the last subject, so full of passionate sorrow that it is hardly possible that it should not, if only half consciously, have stimulated the artistic sensibilities of the most sensitive of painters; but Bellini's pathos shrinks from all exaggeration. He conceives grief with the tenderest insight. His interest in the subject was so intense that he never left the execution to others, and though not a single one bears his signature, yet each is entirely by his own hand. Besides the Pieta at Milan, which is perhaps the best known, there is one in the Correr Museum, another in the Doge's Palace, and yet others at Rimini and at Berlin. The version he adopts, which places the Body of Christ within the sarcophagus, was a favourite in North Italy. Donatello uses it in a bas-relief (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), but whether he brought or found the suggestion in Padua nothing exists to show. Jacopo has left sketches in which the whole group is within the tomb, and this rendering is followed by Carpaccio, Crivelli, Marco Zoppo, and others. It is never found in trecento art, and is probably traceable to the Paduan impulse to make use of classic remains.

Giovanni Bellini's Pietas fall into two groups. In one, the Christ is placed between the Virgin and St. John, who are embodiments of the agony of bereavement. In the other, the dead Redeemer is supported by angels, who express the amazement and grief of immortal beings who see their Lord suffering an indignity from which they are immune.

Mary and St. John inside the sarcophagus shows that they are conceived mystically; Mary as the Church, and St. John as the personification of Christian Philosophy—a significance frequently attached to these figures. Such a picture was designed to hang over the altar, at which the mystical sacrifice of the Mass was perpetually offered.

In his treatment of the Brera example Bellini has shaken off the Paduan tradition, and is forming his own style and giving free play to his own feeling. The winding roads and evening sky, barred with clouds, are the accessories he used in the "Agony in the Garden," but the figures are treated much more boldly; the drapery falls in broad masses, and scarcely a trace is left of sculpturesque treatment. Careful as is the study of the nude, everything is subordinated to the emotion expressed by the three figures: the helpless, indifferent calm of the dead, the tender solicitude of the Mother, the wandering, dazed look of the despairing friend. Here there is nothing of beautiful or pathetic symbol; the group is intense with the common sorrow of all the world. Mary presses the corpse to her as if to impart her own life, and gazes with anguished yearning on the beloved face. Bellini seems to have passed to a more complex age in his analysis of suffering, yet here is none of the extravagance which the primitive masters share with the Caracci: his restraint is as admirable as his intensity.

In the Rimini version the tender concern and questioning surprise of the attendant angels contrast with the inert weight of the beautiful dead body they support. Their childish limbs and butterfly wings make a sinuous pattern against the lacquered black of the ground-work, and Mr. Roger Fry makes the interesting suggestion that the effect, reminiscent of Greek vase-painting, and the likeness of the Head of Christ to an old bronze, may, in a composition painted for Sigismondo Malatesta, be no mere accident, but a concession to the patron's enthusiasm for classic art.

In 1470 Bellini received his first commission in the Scuola di San Marco. Gentile had been employed there since 1466 on the history of the Israelites in the desert. Bellini agreed to paint "The Deluge and the Ark of Noah" with all its attendant circumstances, but of these, except from Vasari's descriptions, we can form no idea. These great pageant-pictures had become identified with the Bellini and their following, while the production of altarpieces was peculiarly the province of the Vivarini. Here Bellini effected a change, for sacred subjects best suited the restrained and simple perfection of his style, and afforded the most sympathetic opening for his idealistic spirit. For the next twenty years or more, however, he was unavoidably absorbed in public work, for we hear of his being given the direction of that which Gentile left unfinished in the Ducal Palace when he went to the East in 1479. In 1492, Giovanni being ill, Gentile superintended the work for him, and in that year he was appointed to paint in the Hall of the Grand Council, at an annual salary of sixty ducats. Other commissions were turned out of the bottega he had set up with his brother in 1471, and between that year and 1480 he went to Pesaro to paint the important altarpiece that still holds its place there. It is in some ways the greatest and most powerful thing that Bellini ever accomplished. The central figures and the attendant saints have a large gravity and carefully studied individuality. St. Jerome, absorbed in his theological books, an ascetic recluse, is admirably contrasted with the sympathetic, cultured St. Paul. The landscape, set in a marble frame, is a gem of beauty, and proves what an appeal nature was making to the painter. The predella, illustrating the principal scenes in the lives of the saints around the altar, is full of Oriental costumes. The horses are small Eastern horses, very unlike the ponderous Italian war-horse, and the whole is evidently inspired by the sketches which Gentile brought back on his return from Constantinople in 1481.

Looking from one to another of the cycle of Madonna pictures which Bellini produced, and of which so many hang side by side in the Academy, we are able to note how his conception varied. In one of the earliest the Child lies across its Mother's knee, in the attitude borrowed from his father and the Vivarini, from whom, too, he takes the uplifted hands, placed palm to palm. The earlier pictures are of the gentle and adoring type, but his later Madonnas are stately Venetian ladies. He gives us a queenly woman, with full throat and stately poise, in the Madonna degli Alberi, in which the two little trees are symbols of the Old and New Testament; or, again, he paints a lovely intellectual face with chiselled and refined features, and sad dark eyes, and contrasts it dramatically with the bluff St. George in armour; and there is another Madonna between St. Francis and St. Catherine, a picture which has a curious effect of artificial light.



CHAPTER XII

GIOVANNI BELLINI (continued)

In 1497 the Maggior Consiglio of the Venetian Republic appointed Bellini superintendent of the Great Hall, and conferred on him the honourable title of State Painter. In this capacity he was the overseer of all public works of painting, and was expected to devote a part of his time to the decoration of the Hall. Sansovino enumerates nine of his historical paintings, which had been painted before the State appointment, all having reference to the visit of Pope Alexander; but though he must have been much engrossed, he seems to have suspended the work from time to time, for between 1485 and 1488 he painted the large altarpiece in the Frari, that at San Pietro in Murano, and the one in the Academy, which was painted for San Giobbe. Of these three, the last shows the greatest advance and is fullest of experiment. The Madonna is a grand ecclesiastical figure. It has been said with truth that it is a picture which must have afforded great support and dignity to the Church. The Infant has an expression of omniscience, and the Mother gazes out of the picture, extending invitation and encouragement to the advancing worshippers. The religious feeling is less profound; the artist has been more absorbed in the contrast between the beautiful, youthful body of St. Sebastian and that of St. Giobbe, older but not emaciated, and with the exquisite surface that his now complete mastery of oil-painting enabled him to produce. This technique has evidently been a great delight, and is here carried to perfection; the skin of St. Sebastian gleams with a gloss like the coat of a horse in high condition. Everything that architecture, sculpture, and rich material can supply is borrowed to enhance the grandeur of the group; but the line of sight is still close to the bottom of the picture, and if it were not for the exquisite grace with which the angels are placed, the Madonna would have a broad, clumsy effect. The Madonna of the Frari is the most splendid in colour of all his works. As he paints the rich light of a golden interior and the fused and splendid colours, he seems to pass out of his own time and gives a foretaste of the glory that is to follow. The Murano altarpiece is quite a different conception; instead of the seclusion of the sanctuary, it is a smiling, plein air scene: the Mother benign, the Child soft and playful, the old Doge Barbarigo and the patron saints kneeling among bright birds, and a garden and mediaeval townlet filling up the background, for which, by the way, he uses the same sketch as in the Pesaro picture. It says much for his versatility that he could within a short time produce three such different versions.

Among Bellini's most fascinating achievements in the last years of the fifteenth century are his allegorical paintings, known to us by the "Pelerinage de l'Ame" in the Uffizi and the little series in the Academy. The meaning of the first has been unravelled by Dr. Ludwig from a mediaeval poem by Guillaume de Guilleville, a Cistercian monk who wrote about 1335, and it is interesting to see the hold it has taken on Bellini's mystic spirit. The paved space, set within the marble rail, signifies, as in the "Salvator Mundi," the Paradise where souls await the Resurrection. The new-born souls cluster round the Tree of Life and shake its boughs. The poem says:

There is no pilgrim who is not sometimes sad Who has not those who wound his heart, And to whom it is not often necessary To play and be solaced And be soothed like a child With something comforting. Know that those playing There in order to allay their sorrow Have found beneath that tree An apple that great comfort gives To those that play with it.[2]

[2] This translation is by Miss Cameron Taylor.



This may be an allusion to sacramental comfort. St. Peter and St. Paul guard the door, beside which the Madonna and a saint sit in holy conversation. A very beautiful figure on the left, wrapped in a black shawl, requires explanation, and it has been suggested that it is the donor, a woman who may have lost husband and children, and who, still in life, is introduced, watching the happiness of the souls in Paradise. SS. Giobbe and Sebastian, who might have stepped out of the San Giobbe altarpiece, are obviously the patron saints of the family, and St. Catherine, at the Virgin's side, may be the donor's own saint. This picture, with its delicious landscape bathed in atmospheric light, is a forerunner of those Giorgionesque compositions of "pure and unquestioning delight in the sensuous charm of rare and beautiful things" in which the artistic nature is even more engrossed than with the intellectual conception, and within its small space Bellini seems to have enshrined all his artistic creed. The allegories in the Academy are also full of meaning. They are decorative works, and were probably painted for some small cabinet. They seem too small for a cassone. They are ruined by over-painting, but still full of grace and fancy. The figure in the classic chariot, bearing fruit, in the encounter between Luxury and Industry, is drawn from Jacopo's triumphant Bacchus. Fortune floats in her barque, holding the globe, and the souls who gather round her are some full of triumphant success, others clinging to her for comfort, while several are sinking, overwhelmed in the dark waters. "Prudence," the only example of a female nude in Bellini's works, holds a looking-glass. Hypocrisy or Calumny is torn writhing from his refuge. The Summa Virtus is an ugly representation of all the virtues; a waddling deformity with eyes bound holds the scales of justice; the pitcher in its hand means prudence, and the gold upon its feet symbolises charity. The landscape, both of this and of the "Fortune," resembles that which he was painting in his larger works at the end of the century. Soon after 1501 Bellini entered into relations with Isabela d'Este, Marchioness of Gonzaga. That distinguished collector and connoisseur writes through her agent to get the promise of a picture, "a story or fable of antiquity," to be placed in position with the allegories which Mantegna had contributed to her "Paradiso." Bellini agreed to supply this, and received twenty-five ducats on account. He seems, however, to have felt that he would be at a disadvantage in competing with Mantegna on his own ground, and asks to be allowed to choose his subject. Isabela was unwillingly obliged to content herself with a sacred picture, and a "Nativity" was selected. She is at once full of suggestions, desiring to add a St. John Baptist, whom Bellini demurs at introducing except as a child, but in April 1504 the commission is still unaccomplished, and Isabela angrily demands the return of her money. This brings a letter of humble apology from Bellini, and presently the picture is forwarded. Lorenzo of Pavia writes that it is quite beautiful, and that "though Giovanni has behaved as badly as possible, yet the bad must be taken with the good." The joy of its acquisition appeased Isabela, who at once began to lay plans to get a further work out of Bellini, and in 1505 Bembo wrote to her that he would take a fresh commission always providing he might fix the subject. From the catalogue of her Mantovan pictures we gather that the picture "sul asse" (on panel) represented the "B.V., il Putto, S. Giovanni Battista, S. Giovanni Evangelista, S. Girolamo, and Santa Caterina."

The great altarpieces which remain strike us less by their research, their preoccupation with new problems of paint or grouping, than by their intense delight in beauty. Bellini was now nearly eighty years old, and in 1504 the young Giorgione had proclaimed a revolution in art with his Castelfranco Madonna. In composition and detail the Madonna of San Zaccaria is in some degree a protest against the Arcadian, innovating fashion of approaching a religious scene, of which the Church had long since decided on the treatment, yet Bellini cannot escape the indirect suggestion of the new manner. The same leaven was at work in him which was transforming the men of a younger generation. In this altarpiece, in the Baptism at Vicenza, in others, perhaps, which have perished, and above all in the hermit saint in S. Giovanni Crisostomo he is linked in feeling and in treatment with the later Venetian School.

The new device, which he adopts quite naturally, of raising the line of sight, sets the figures in increased depth. For the first time he gives height and majesty to the young Mother by carrying the draperies down over the steps. He realises to the full the contrast between the young, fragile heads of his girl-saints and the dark, venerable countenances of the old men. The head of S. Lucy, detaching itself like a flower upon its stem, reminds us of the type which we saw in his Watcher in the sacred allegory of the Uffizi. The arched, dome-like niche opens on a distance bathed in golden light. Bellini keeps the traditions of the old hieratic art, but he has grasped a new perfection of feeling and atmosphere. Who the saints are matters little; it is the collective enjoyment of a company of congenial people that pleases us so much. The "Baptism" in S. Corona, at Vicenza, painted sixteen years later than Cima's in S. Giovanni in Bragora, is in frank imitation of the younger man. Christ and the Baptist, traditional figures, are drawn without much zest, in a weak, conventional way, but the artist's true interest comes out in the beauty of face and gesture of the group of women holding the garments, and above all in the sombre gloom of the distance, which replaces Cima's charming landscape, and which keys the whole picture to the significance of a portent. In the enthronement of the old hermit, S. Chrysostom himself, painted in 1513, Bellini keeps his love for the golden dome, but he lets us look through its arch, at rolling mountain solitudes, with mists rising between their folds. The geranium robe of the saint, an exquisite, vivid bit of colouring, is caught by the golden sunset rays, the fine ascetic head stands out against the evening sky, and in the faces of the two saints who stand on either side of the aged visionary Bellini has gone back to all his old intensity of religious feeling, a feeling which he seemed for a time to have exchanged for a more pagan tone.

In 1507, at Gentile's death, Giovanni undertook, at his brother's dying request, to finish the "Preaching of St. Mark," receiving as a recompense that coveted sketch-book of his father's, from which he had adopted so many suggestions, and which, though he was the eldest, had been inherited by the legitimate son.

In the preceding year Albert Duerer had visited Venice for the second time, and Bellini had received him with great cordiality. Duerer writes, "Bellini is very old, but is still the best painter in Venice"; and adds, "The things I admired on my last visit, I now do not value at all." Implying that he was able now to see how superior Bellini was to the hitherto more highly esteemed Vivarini.

At the very end of Bellini's life, in 1514, the Duke of Ferrara paid him eighty-five ducats for a painting of "Bacchanals," now at Alnwick Castle; which may be looked upon as an open confession by one who had always considered himself as a painter of distinctively religious works, that such a gay scene of feasting afforded opportunities which he could not resist, for beauty of attitude and colour; but the gods, sitting at their banquet in a sunny glade, are almost fully draped, and there is little of the abandon which was affected by later painters. The picture was left unfinished, and was later given to Titian to complete. In his capacity as State Painter to the Republic, it was Bellini's duty to execute the official portraits of the Doges. During his long life he saw eleven reigns, and during four he held the State appointment. Besides the official, he painted private portraits of the Doges, and that of Doge Loredano, in the National Gallery, is one of the most perfect presentments of the quattrocento. This portrait, painted by one old man of another, shows no weakening in touch or characterisation. It is as brilliant and vigorous as it is direct and simple. The face is quiet and unexaggerated; there is no unnatural fire and feeling, but an air of accustomed dignity and thought, while the technique has all the perfection of the painter's prime.

In 1516 Giovanni was buried in the Church of SS. Giovanni and Paolo, by the side of his brother Gentile. To the last he was popular and famous, overwhelmed with attentions from the most distinguished personages of the city. Though he had begun life when art showed such a different aspect, he was by nature so imbued with that temperament, which at the time of his death was beginning to assert itself in the younger school, that he was able to assimilate a really astonishing share of the new manner. He is guided by feeling more than by intellect. All the time he is working out problems, he is dominated by the emotion of his subject, but his emotion, his pathos, are invariably tempered and restrained by the calm moderation of the quattrocento. The golden mean still has command of Bellini, and never allows his feelings, however poignant, to degenerate into sentimentality or violence.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Bergamo. Lochis: Madonna (E.). Morelli: Two Madonnas. Berlin. Pieta (L.); Dead Christ. Florence. Uffizi: Allegory; The Souls in Paradise (L.). London. Portrait of Doge (L.); Madonna (L.); Agony in Garden (E.); Salvator Mundi (E.). Milan. Brera: Pieta (E.); Madonna; Madonna, 1510. Mond Collection. Dead Christ; Madonna (E.). Murano. S. Pietro: Madonna with Saints and Doge Barbarigo, 1488. Naples. Sala Grande: Transfiguration. Pesaro. S. Francesco: Altarpiece. Rimini. Dead Christ (E.). Venice. Academy: Three Madonnas; Five small allegorical paintings (L.); Madonna with SS. Catherine and Magdalene; Madonna with SS. Paul and George; Madonna with five Saints. Museo Correr: Crucifixion (E.); Transfiguration (E.); Dead Christ; Dead Christ with Angels. Palazzo Ducale, Sala di Tre: Pieta (E.). Frari: Triptych; Madonna and Saints, 1488. S. Giovanni Crisostomo: S. Chrysostom with SS. Jerome and Augustine, 1513. S. Maria dell' Orto: Madonna (E.). S. Zaccaria: Madonna and Saints, 1505. Vicenza. S. Corona: Baptism, 1510.



CHAPTER XIII

CIMA DA CONEGLIANO AND OTHER FOLLOWERS OF BELLINI

The rising tide of feeling, the growing sense of the joy of life and the apprehension of pure beauty, which was strengthening in the people and leading up to the great period of Venetian art, flooded round Bellini and recognised its expression in him. He was more popular and had a larger following among the artists of his day than either Gentile or Carpaccio with their frankly mundane talent. Whatever Giovanni's State works may have been, his religious paintings are the ones which are copied and adapted and studied by the younger band of artists, and this because of their beauty and notwithstanding their conventional subjects. Gentile's pageant-pictures have still something cold and colourless, with a touch of the archaic, while Giovanni's religious altarpieces evince a new freedom of handling, a modern conception of beautiful women, a use of that colour which was soon to reign triumphant. As far as it went indeed, its triumph was already assured; as Giovanni advanced towards old age, it was no longer of any use for the young masters of the day to paint in any way save the one he had made popular, and one artist after another who had begun in the school of Alvise Vivarini ended as the disciple of Giovanni Bellini.

It was the habit of Bellini to trust much to his assistants, and as everything that went out of his workshop was signed by his name, even if it only represented the use of one of his designs, or a few words of advice, and was "passed" by the master, it is no wonder that European collections were flooded with works, among which only lately the names of Catena, Previtali, Pennacchi, Marco Belli, Bissolo, Basaiti, Rondinelli, and others begin to be disentangled.

Only one of his followers stands out as a strong and original master, not quite of the first class, but developing his own individuality while he draws in much of what both Alvise and Bellini had to give. Cima da Conegliano, whose real name was Giovanni Battista, always signs himself Coneglianensis: the title of Cima, "the Rock," by which he is now so widely known, having first been mentioned in the seventeenth century by Boschini, and perhaps given him by that writer himself. He was a son of the mountains, who, though he came early to Venice, and lived there most of his life, never loses something of their wild freshness, and to the end delights in bringing them into his backgrounds. He lived with his mother at Conegliano, the beautiful town of the Trevisan marches, until 1484, when he was twenty-five, and then came down to Vicenza, where he fell under the tuition of Bartolommeo Montagna, a Vicentine painter, who had been studying both with Alvise and Bellini. Cima's "Madonna with Saints," painted for the Church of St. Bartolommeo, Vicenza, in 1489, shows him still using the old method of tempera, in a careful, cold, painstaking style, yet already showing his own taste. The composition has something of Alvise, yet that something has been learned through the agency of Montagna, for the figures have the latter's severity and austere character and the colour is clearer and more crude than Alvise's. It is no light resemblance, and he must have been long with Montagna. In the type of the Christ in Montagna's Pieta at Monte Berico, in the fondness for airy porticoes, in the architecture and main features of his "Madonna enthroned" in the Museo Civico at Vicenza, we see characteristics which Cima followed, though he interpreted them in his own way. He turns the heavy arches and domes that Alvise loved, into airy pergolas, decked with vines. He gives increasing importance to high skies and to atmospheric distances. When he got to Venice in 1492, he began to paint in oils, and undertook the panel of S. John Baptist with attendant saints, still in the Church of S. Madonna dell' Orto. The work of this is rather angular and tentative, but true and fresh, and he comes to his best soon after, in the "Baptism" in S. Giovanni in Bragora, which Bellini, sixteen years later, paid him the compliment of copying. It was quite unusual to choose such a subject for the High Altar, and could only be justified by devotion to the Baptist, who was Cima's own name-saint as well as that of the Church. Cima is here at his very highest; the composition is not derived from any one else, but is all the conception of an ingenuous soul, full of intuition and insight. The Christ is particularly fine and simple, unexaggerated in pose and type; the arm of the Baptist is too long, but the very fault serves to give him a refined, tentative look, which makes a sympathetic appeal. The attendant angels look on with an air of sweet interest. The distant mountains, the undulating country, the little town of Conegliano, identified by the castle on its great rock, or Cima, are Arcadian in their sunny beauty. The clouds, as a critic has pointed out, are full of sun, not of rain. The landscape has not the sombre mystery of Titian's, but is bright with the joyous delight of a lover of outdoor life. As Cima masters the new medium he becomes larger and simpler, and his forms lose much of their early angularity. A confraternity of his native town ordered the grand altarpiece which is still in the Cathedral there, and in this he shows his connection with Venice; the architecture is partly taken from St. Mark's, the lovely Madonna head recalls Bellini, and a group of Bellinesque angels play instruments at the foot of the throne. Cima is, however, never merged in Bellini. He keeps his own clearly defined, angular type; his peculiar, twisted curls are not the curls of Bellini's saints, his treatment of surface is refined, enamel-like, perfectly finished, but it has nothing of the rich, broken treatment which Bellini's natural feeling for colour was beginning to dictate. Cima's pale golden figures have an almost metallic sharpness and precision, and though they are full of charm and refinement, they may be thought lacking in spontaneity and passion. To 1501 belongs the "Incredulity of St. Thomas," now in the Academy, but painted for the Guild of Masons. It is a picture full of expression and dignity, broad in treatment if a little cold in its self-restraint. Cima seems to have not quite enough intellect, and not quite enough strong feeling. However, the little altarpiece of the Nativity, in the Church of the Carmine in Venice, has a richer, fuller touch, and this foreshadows the work he did when he went to Parma, where his transparent shadows grow broader and stronger, and his figures gain in ease and freedom. He never loses the delicate radiance of his lights, and his types and his architecture alike convey something of a peculiarly refined, brilliant elegance.

Like all these men of great energy and prolific genius, Cima produced an astonishing number of panels and altarpieces, and no doubt had pupils on his own account, for a goodly list could be made of pictures in his style, but not by his own hand, which have been carried by collectors into widely-scattered places. His exquisite surface and finish and his marked originality make him a difficult master to imitate with any success. His latest work is dated 1508, but Ridolfi says he lived till 1517, and it seems probable that he returned to his beloved Conegliano and there passed his last years.

If Cima possessed originality, Vincenzo of Treviso, called Catena, gained an immense reputation by his industry and his power of imitating and adopting the manner of Bellini's School. In those days men did not trouble themselves much as to whether they were original or not. They worked away on traditional compositions, frankly introducing figures from their master's cartoons, modifying a type here, making some little experiment or arrangement there, and, as a French critic puts it, leaving their own personality to "hatch out" in due time, if it existed, and when it was sufficiently ripened by real mastery of their art. It is here that Catena fails; beginning as a journeyman in the Sala del Gran Consiglio, at a salary of three ducats a month, he for long failed to acquire the absolute mastery of drawing which was possessed by the better disciples of the schools. But he is painstaking, determined to get on, and eager to satisfy the continually increasing demand for work. His draperies are confused and unmeaning, his faces round, with small features, inexpressive button mouths, and weak chins, and his flesh tints have little of the glow which is later the prerogative of every second-rate painter. Yet Catena succeeds, like many another careful mediocre man, in securing patronage, and as the sixteenth century opened he gained the distinction from Doge Loredano of a commission to paint the altarpiece for the Pregadi Chapel of the Sala di Tre, in the Ducal Palace. He adapts his group from that of Bellini in the Cathedral of Murano, bringing in a profile portrait of the kneeling Doge, of which he afterwards made numerous copies, one of which was for long assigned to Gentile and one to Giovanni Bellini.

That Catena is not without charm, we discern in such a composition as his "Martyrdom of St. Cristina," in S. Maria Mater Domini, in which the saint, a solid, Bellinesque figure, kneels upon the water, in which she met her death, and is surrounded by little angels, holding up the millstone tied round her neck, and laden with other instruments of her martyrdom. Catena borrows right and left, and tries to follow every new indication of contemporary taste. For instance, he remarks the growing admiration for colour, and hopes by painting gay, flat tints, in bright contrast, to produce the desired effect.

It is evident that he made many friends among the rich connoisseurs of the time, and that his importance was out of proportion to his real merit. Marcantonio Michele, writing an account of Raphael's last days to a friend in Venice, and touching on Michelangelo's illness, begs him to see that Catena takes care of himself, "as the times are unfavourable to great painters." Catena had acquired and inherited considerable wealth; he came of a family of merchants, and resided in his own house in San Bartolommeo del Rialto. He lived in unmarried relations with Dona Maria Fustana, the daughter of a furrier, to whom he bequeaths in his will 300 ducats and all his personal effects. As a careful portrait-painter, with a talent for catching a likeness, he was in constant demand, and in some of his heads—that of a canon dressed in blue and red, at Vienna, and especially in one of a member of the Fugger family, now at Dresden—he attains real distinction. And in his last phase he does at length prove the power that lies behind long industry and perseverance. Suddenly the Giorgionesque influence strikes him, and turning to imbibe this new element, he produces that masterpiece which throws a glamour over all his mediocre performances; his "Warrior adoring the Infant Christ," in the National Gallery, is a picture full of charm, rich and romantic in tone and spirit. The Virgin and the Child upon her knee are of his dull round-eyed type, the form and colours of her draperies are still unsatisfactory, but the knight in armour with his Eastern turban, the romantic young page, holding his horse, are pure Giorgionesque figures. Beautiful in themselves, set in a beautiful landscape glowing with light and air, the whole picture exemplifies what surprising excellence could be suddenly attained by even very inferior artists, who were constantly associating with greater men, at a moment when the whole air was, as it were, vibrating with genius.

Catena was very much addicted to making his will, and at least five testaments or codicils exist, one of them devising a sum of money for the benefit of the School of Painters in Venice, and another leaving to his executor, Prior Ignatius, the picture of a "St. Jerome in his Cell," which may be the one in our national collection, which remained in Venice till 1862. It is painted in his gay tones, imitating Basaiti and Lotto, and brings in the partridge of which he made a sort of sign manual.

Cardinal Bembo writes in 1525 to Pietro Lippomano, to announce that, at his request, he is continuing his patronage of Catena:

Though I had done all that lay in my power for Vincenzo Catena before I received your Lordship's warm recommendation in his favour, I did not hesitate, on receipt of your letter, to add something to the first piece I had from him, and I did so because of my love and reverence for you, and I trust that he will return appropriate thanks to you for having remembered that you could command me.

Marco Basaiti was alternately a journeyman in different workshops and a master on his own account. For long the assistant and follower of Alvise Vivarini, we may judge that he was also his most trusted confidant, for to him was left the task of completing the splendid altarpiece to S. Ambrogio, in the Frari. His heavy hand is apparent in the execution, and the two saints, Sebastian and Jerome, in the foreground, have probably been added by him, for they have the air of interlopers, and do not come up to the rest of the company in form and conception. The Sebastian, with his hands behind his back and his loin cloth smartly tied, is quite sufficiently reminiscent of Bellini's figure of 1473 to make us believe that Basaiti was at once transferring his allegiance to that reigning master. In his earlier phase he has the round heads and the dry precise manner of the Muranese. In his large picture in the Academy, the "Calling of the Sons of Zebedee," he produces a large, important set piece, cold and lifeless, without one figure which arrests us, or lingers in the memory. "The Christ on the Mount" is more interesting as having been painted for San Giobbe, where Bellini's great altarpiece was already hanging, and coming into competition with Bellini's early rendering of the same scene. Painted some thirty years later, it is interesting to see what it has gained in "modernness." The landscape and trees are well drawn and in good colour, and the saints, standing on either side of a high portico, have dignity. In the "Dead Christ," in the Academy, he is following Bellini very closely in the flesh-tints and the putti. The putti, looking thoughtfully at the dead, is a motif beloved of Bellini, but Basaiti cannot give them Bellini's pathos and significance; they are merely childish and seem to be amused.

In 1515 Basaiti has entered upon a new phase. He has felt Giorgione's influence, and is beginning to try what he can do, while still keeping close to Bellini, to develop a fuller touch, more animated figures, and a brilliant effect of landscape. He runs a film of vaporous colour over his hard outlines and makes his figures bright and misty, and though underneath they are still empty and monotonous, it is not surprising that many of his works for a time passed as those of Bellini. Though he is a clever imitator, "his figures are designed with less mastery, his drawing is a little less correct, his drapery less adapted to the under form. Light and shade are not so cleverly balanced, colours have the brightness, but not the true contrast required. In landscape he proceeds from a bleak aridity to extreme gaiety; he does not dwell on detail, but his masses have neither the sober tint nor the mysterious richness conspicuous in his teacher ... he is a clever instrument." Both Previtali and Rondinelli were workers with Basaiti in Bellini's studio. Previtali occasionally signed himself Andrea Cordeliaghi or Cordella, and has left many unsigned pictures. He copies Catena and Lotto, Palma and Montagna; but for a time his work went forth from Bellini's workshop signed with Bellini's name. In 1515, in a great altarpiece in San Spirito at Bergamo, he first takes the title of Previtali, compiling it in the cartello with the monogram already used as Cordeliaghi. There are traces of many other minor artists at this period, all essaying the same manner, copying one or other of the masters, taking hints from each other. The Venetian love of splendour was turning to the collection of works of art, and the work of second-class artists was evidently much in demand and obtained its meed of admiration. Bissolo was a fellow-labourer with Catena in the Hall of the Ducal Palace in 1492; he is soft and nerveless, but he copies Bellini, and has imbibed something of his tenderness of spirit.

It will be seen from this list how difficult it is to unravel the tale of the false Bellinis. The master's own works speak for themselves with no uncertain voice, but away from these it is very difficult to pronounce as to whether he had given a design, or a few touches, or advice, and still more difficult to decide whether these were bestowed on Basaiti in his later manner, or on Previtali or Bissolo, or if the teaching was handed on by them in a still more diluted form to the lesser men who clustered round, much of whose work has survived and has been masquerading for centuries under more distinguished names. It is sometimes affirmed that the loss of originality in the endeavour to paint like greater men has been a symptom of decay in every school in the past. It is interesting to notice, therefore, that in every great age of painting there has always been an undercurrent of imitation, which has helped to form a stream of tradition, and which, as far as we can see, has done no harm to the stronger spirits of the time.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Cima.

Berlin. Madonna with four Saints; Two Madonnas. Conegliano. Duomo: Madonna and Saints, 1493. Dresden. The Saviour; Presentation of Virgin. London. Two Madonnas; Incredulity of S. Thomas; S. Jerome. Milan. Brera: Six pictures of Saints; Madonna. Parma. Madonna with Saints; Another; Endymion; Apollo and Marsyas. Paris. Madonna with Saints. Venice. Academy: Madonna with SS. John and Paul; Pieta; Madonna with six Saints; Incredulity of S. Thomas; Tobias and the Angel. Carmine: Adoration of the Shepherds. S. Giovanni in Bragora: Baptism, 1494; SS. Helen and Constantine; Three Predelle; Finding of True Cross. SS. Giovanni and Paolo: Coronation of the Virgin. S. Maria dell' Orto: S. John Baptist and SS. Paul, Jerome, Mark, and Peter. Lady Layard. Madonna with SS. Francis and Paul; Madonna with SS. Nicholas of Bari and John Baptist. Vicenza. Madonna with SS. Jerome and John, 1489.

Vincenzo Catena.

Bergamo. Carrara: Christ at Emmaus. Berlin. Portrait of Fugger; Madonna, Saints, and Donor (E.). Dresden. Holy Family (L.). London. Warrior adoring Infant Christ (L.); S. Jerome in his Study (L.); Adoration of Magi (L.). Mr. Benson: Holy Family. Lord Brownlow: Nativity. Mond Collection: Madonna, Saints, and Donors (E.). Paris. Venetian Ambassadors at Cairo. Venice. Ducal Palace: Madonna, Saints, and Doge Loredan (E.). Giovanelli Palace: Madonna and Saints. S. Maria Mater Domini: S. Cristina. S. Trovaso: Madonna. Vienna. Portrait of a Canon.

Marco Basaiti.

Bergamo. The Saviour, 1517; Two Portraits. Berlin. Pieta; Altarpiece; S. Sebastian; Madonna (E.). London. S. Jerome; Madonna. Milan. Ambrosiana: Risen Christ. Munich. Madonna, Saints, and Donor (E.). Murano. S. Pietro: Assumption. Padua. Portrait, 1521; Madonna with SS. Liberale and Peter. Venice. Academy: Saints; Dead Christ; Christ in the Garden, 1510; Calling of Children of Zebedee, 1510. Museo Correr: Madonna and Donor; Christ and Angels. Salute: S. Sebastian. Vienna. Calling of Children of Zebedee, 1515.

Andrea Previtali.

Bergamo. Carrara: Pentecost; Marriage of S. Catherine; Altarpiece; Madonna, 1514; Madonna with Saints and Donors. Lochis: Madonna and Saint. Count Moroni: Madonna and Saints; Family Group. S. Alessandro in Croce: Crucifixion, 1524. S. Spirito: S. John Baptist and Saints, 1515; Madonna and four Female Saints, 1525. Berlin. Madonna and Saints; Marriage of S. Catherine. Dresden. Madonna and Saints. London. Madonna and Donor (E.). Milan. Brera: Christ in Garden, 1512. Oxford. Christchurch Library: Madonna. Venice. Ducal Palace: Christ in Limbo; Crossing of the Red Sea. Redentore: Nativity; Crucifixion. Verona. Stoning of Stephen; Immaculate Conception.

N. Rondinelli.

Berlin. Madonna. Florence. Uffizi: Madonna and Saints. Milan. Brera: Madonna with four Saints and three Angels. Paris. Madonna and Saints. Ravenna. Two Madonnas with Saints. S. Domenico: Organ Shutters; Madonna and Saints. Venice. Museo Correr: Madonna; Madonna with Saints and Donors. Giovanelli Palace: Two Madonnas.

Bissolo.

London. Mr. Benson: Madonna and Saints. Mond Collection: Madonna and Saints. Venice. Academy: Dead Christ; Madonna and Saints; Presentation in Temple. S. Giovanni in Bragora: Triptych. Redentore: Madonna and Saints. S. Maria Mater Domini: Transfiguration. Lady Layard: Madonna and Saints.



PART II



CHAPTER XIV

GIORGIONE

When we enter a gallery of Florentine paintings, we find our admiration and criticism expressing themselves naturally in certain terms; we are struck by grace of line, by strenuous study of form, by the evidence of knowledge, by the display of thought and intellectual feeling. The Florentine gestures and attitudes are expressive, nervous, fervent, or, as in Michelangelo and Signorelli, alive with superhuman energy. But when looking at pictures of the Venetian School we unconsciously use quite another sort of language; epithets like "dark" and "rich" come most freely to our lips; a golden glow, a slumberous velvety depth, seem to engulf and absorb all details. We are carried into the land of romance, and are fascinated and soothed, rather than stimulated and aroused. So it is with portraits; before the "Mona Lisa" our intelligence is all awake, but the men and women of Venetian canvases have a grave, indolent serenity, which accords well with the slumber of thought.

Up to the beginning of the sixteenth century the painters of Venice had not differed very materially from those of other schools; they had gradually worked out or learned the technicalities of drawing, perspective and anatomy. They had been painting in oils for twenty-five years, and they betrayed a greater fondness for pageant-pictures than was felt in other States of Italy. Florence appoints Michelangelo and Leonardo to decorate her public palace, but no great store is set by their splendid achievements; their work is not even completed. The students fall upon the cartoons, which are allowed to perish, instead of being treasured by the nation. Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio and the band of State painters are appreciated and well rewarded. These men have reproduced something of the lucent transparency, the natural colour of Venice, but it is as if unconsciously; they are not fully aiming at any special effect. Year after year the Venetian masters assimilate more or less languidly the influences which reach them from the mainland. They welcome Guariento and Gentile da Fabriano, they set themselves to learn from Veronese or Florentine, the Paduans contribute their chiselled drawing, their learned perspective, their archeological curiosity. Yet even early in the day the Venetians escape from that hard and learned art which is so alien to their easy, voluptuous temperament. Jacopo Bellini cannot conform to it, and his greatest son is ready to follow feeling and emotion, and in his old age is quick to discover the first flavour of the new wine. If Venetian art had gone on upon the lines we have been tracing up to now, there would have been nothing very distinctive about it, for, however interesting and charming Alvise and Carpaccio, Cima and the Bellini may be, it is not of them we think when we speak of the Venetian School and when we rank it beside that of Florence, while Giovanni Bellini alone, in his later works, is not strong enough to bear the burden.

The change which now comes over painting is not so much a technical one as a change of temper, a new tendency in human thought, and we link it with Giorgione because he was the channel through which the deep impulse first burst into the light. We have tried to trace the growth of the early Venetian School, but it does not develop logically like that of Florence; it is not the result of long endeavour, adding one acquisition and discovery to another. Venetian art was peculiarly the outcome of personalities, and it did not know its own mind till the sixteenth century. Then, like a hidden spring, it bubbles irresistibly to the surface, and the spot where it does so is called by the name of a man.

There are beings in most great creative epochs who, with peculiar facility, seem to embody the purpose of their age and to yield themselves as ready instruments to its design. When time is ripe they appear, and are able, with perfect ease, to carry out and give voice to the desires and tendencies which have been straining for expression. These desires may owe their origin to national life and temperament; it may have taken generations to bring them to fruition, but they become audible through the agency of an individual genius. A genius is inevitably moulded by his age. Rome, in the seventeenth century, drew to her in Bernini a man who could with real power illustrate her determination to be grandiose and ostentatious, and, at the height of the Renaissance, Venice draws into her service a man whose sensuous feeling was instilled, accentuated, and welcomed by every element around him.

More conclusively than ever, at this time, Venice, the world's great sea-power, was in her full glory as the centre of the world's commerce and its art and culture. Vasco da Gama had discovered the sea route to India in 1498, but the stupendous effect which this was to exert on the whole current of power did not become apparent all at once. Venice was still the great emporium of the East, linked to it by a thousand ties, Oriental in her love of Eastern richness.

It would be exaggerating to say that the Venetians of the sixteenth century could not draw. As there were Tuscans who understood beautiful harmonies of colour, so there were Venetians who knew a good deal about form; but the other Italians looked upon colour as a charming adjunct, almost, one might say, as an amiable weakness: they never would have allowed that it might legitimately become the end and aim in painting, and in the same way form, though respected and considered, was never the principal object of the Venetians. Up to this time Venice had fed her emotional instincts by pageants and gold and velvets and brocades, but with Giorgione she discovered that there was a deeper emotional vehicle than these superficial glories,—glowing depths of colour enveloped in the mysterious richness of chiaroscuro which obliterated form, and hid and suggested more than it revealed.

Giorgione no longer described "in drawing's learned tongue"; he carried all before him by giving his direct impression in colour. He conceives in colour. The Florentines cared little if their finely drawn draperies were blue or red, but Giorgione images purple clouds, their dark velvet glowing towards a rose and orange horizon. He hardly knows what attitudes his characters take, but their chestnut hair, their deep-hued draperies, their amber flesh, make a moving harmony in which the importance of exact modelling is lost sight of. His scenes are not composed methodically and according to the old rules, but are the direct impress of the painter's joy in life. It was a new and audacious style in painting, and its keynote, and absolutely inevitable consequence, was to substitute for form and for gay, simple tints laid upon it, the quality of chiaroscuro. We all know how the shades of evening are able to transform the most commonplace scene; the dull road becomes a mysterious avenue, the colourless foliage develops luscious depths, the drab and arid plain glows with mellow light, purple shadows clothe and soften every harsh and ugly object, all detail dies, and our apprehension of it dies also. Our mood changes; instead of observing and criticising, we become soothed, contemplative, dreamy. It is the carrying of this profound feeling into a colour-scheme by means of chiaroscuro, so that it is no longer learned and explanatory, but deeply sensuous and emotional, that is the gift to art which found full voice with Giorgione, and which in one moment was recognised and welcomed to the exclusion of the older manner, because it touched the chord which vibrated through the whole Venetian temperament.

And the immediate result was the picture of no subject. Giorgione creates for us idle figures with radiant flesh, or robed in rich costumes, surrounded by lovely country, and we do not ask or care why they are gathered together. We have all had dreams of Elysian fields, "where falls not any rain, nor ever wind blows loudly," where all is rest and freedom, where music blends with the plash of fountains, and fruits ripen, and lovers dream away the days, and no one asks what went before or what follows after. The Golden Age, the haunt of fauns and nymphs: there never has been such a day, or such a land: it is a mood, a vision: it has danced before the eyes of poets, from David to Keats and Tennyson: it has rocked the tired hearts of men in all ages: the vision of a resting-place which makes no demands and where the dwellers are exempt from the cares and weakness of mortality. Needless to say, it is an ideal born of the East; it is the Eastern dream of Paradise, and it speaks to that strain in the temperament which recognises that life cannot be all thought, but also needs feeling and emotion. And for the first time in all the world the painter of Castelfranco sets that vague dream before men's eyes. The world, with its wistful yearnings and questionings, such as Leonardo or Botticelli embodied, said little to his audience. Here was their natural atmosphere, though they had never known it before. These deep, solemn tones, these fused and golden lights are what Giorgione grasps from the material world, and as he steeps his senses in them the subject counts but little in the deep enjoyment they communicate. We, who have seen his manner repeated and developed through thousands of pictures, find it difficult to realise that there had been nothing like it before, that it was a unique departure, that when Bellini and Titian looked at his first creations they must have experienced a shock of revelation. The old definite style must have seemed suddenly hard and meagre, and every time they looked on the glorious world, the deep glow of sunset, the mysterious shades of falling night, they must have felt they were endowed with a sense to which they had hitherto been strangers, but which, it was at once apparent, was their true heritage. They had found themselves, and in them Venice found her real expression, and with Giorgione and those who felt his impetus began the true Venetian School, set apart from all other forms of art by its way of using and diffusing and intensifying colour.

When Giorgione, the son of a member of the house of Barbarelli and a peasant girl of Vedelago, came down to Venice, we gather that he had nothing of the provincial. Vasari, who must often have heard of him from Titian, describes him as handsome, engaging, of distinguished appearance, beloved by his friends, a favourite with women, fond of dress and amusement, an admirable musician, and a welcome guest in the houses of the great. He was evidently no peasant-bred lad, but probably, though there is no record of the fact, was brought up, like many illegitimate children, in the paternal mansion. His home was not far from the lagoons, in one of the most beautiful places it is possible to imagine, on a lovely and fertile plain running up to the Asolean hills and with the Julian Alps lying behind. We guess that he received his education in the school of Bellini, for when that master sold his allegory of the "Souls in Paradise" to one of the Medici, to adorn the summer villa of Poggio Imperiale, there went with it the two small canvases now in the Uffizi, the "Ordeal of Moses" and the "Judgment of Solomon," delightful little paintings in Giorgione's rich and distinctive style, but less accomplished than Bellini's picture, and with imperfections in the drawing of drapery and figures which suggest that they are the work of a very young man. The love of the Venetians for decorating the exterior of their palaces with fresco led to Giorgione being largely employed on work which was unhappily a grievous waste of time and talent, as far as posterity is concerned. We have a record of facades covered with spirited compositions and heraldic devices, of friezes with Bacchus and Mars, Venus and Mercury. Zanetti, in his seventeenth-century prints, has preserved a noble figure of "Fortitude" grasping an axe, but beyond a few fragments nothing has survived. Before he was thirty Giorgione was entrusted with the important commission of decorating the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. This building, which we hear of so often in connection with the artists of Venice, was the trading-house for German, Hungarian, and Polish merchants. The Venetian Government surrounded these merchants with the most jealous restrictions. Every assistant and servant connected with them was by law a Venetian, and, in fact, a spy of the Republic. All transactions of buying and selling were carried out by Venetian brokers, of whom some thirty were appointed. As time went on, some of these brokerships must have resolved themselves into sinecure offices, for we find Bellini holding one, and certainly without discharging any of the original duties, and they seem to have become some sort of State retainerships. In 1505 the old Fondaco had been burnt to the ground, and the present building was rising when Giorgione and Titian were boys. A decree went forth that no marble, carving, or gilding were to be used, so that painting the outside was the only alternative. The roof was on in 1507, and from that date Giorgione, Titian, and Morto da Feltre were employed in the adornment of the facade. Vasari is very much exercised over Giorgione's share in these decorations. "One does not find one subject carefully arranged," he complains, "or which follows correctly the history or actions of ancients or moderns. As for me, I have never been able to understand the meaning of these compositions, or have met any one able to explain them to me. Here one sees a man with a lion's head, beside a woman. Close by one comes upon an angel or a Love: it is all an inexplicable medley." Yet he is delighted with the brilliancy of the colour and the splendid execution, and adds, "Colour gives more pleasure in Venice than anywhere else."