PRINCIPAL WORKS

Augsburg. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. Berlin. Portraits; Madonna and Saints; Luna and the Hours; Procurator before S. Mark. Dresden. Lady in Black; The Rescue; Portraits. Florence. Pitti: Portraits of Men; Luigi Cornaro; Vincenzo Zeno. Uffizi: Portrait of Himself; Admiral Venier; Portrait of Old Man; Jacopo Sansovino; Portrait. Hampton Court. Esther before Ahasuerus; Nine Muses; Portrait of Dominican; Knight of Malta. London. S. George and the Dragon; Christ washing Feet of Disciples; Origin of Milky Way. Bridgewater House: Entombment; Portrait. Madrid. Battle on Land and Sea; Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; Susanna and the Elders; Finding of Moses; Esther before Ahasuerus; Judith and Holofernes. Milan. Brera: S. Helena, Saints and Donors; Finding of the Body of S. Mark (E.). Paris. Susanna and the Elders; Sketch for Paradise; Portrait of Himself. Rome. Capitol: Baptism; Ecce Homo; The Flagellation. Colonna: Adoration of the Holy Spirit; Old Man playing Spinet; Portraits. Turin. The Trinity. Venice. Academy: S. Giustina and Three Senators; Madonna with Saints and Treasurers, 1566; Portraits of Senators; Deposition; Jacopo Soranzo, 1564 (still attributed to Titian); Andrea Capello (E.); Death of Abel; Miracle of S. Mark, 1548; Adam and Eve; Resurrected Christ blessing Three Senators; Madonna and Portraits; Crucifixion; Resurrection; Presentation in Temple. Palazzo Ducale: Doge Mocenigo commended to Christ by S. Mark; Doge da Ponte before the Virgin; Marriage of S. Catherine; Doge Gritti before the Virgin. Ante-Collegio: Mercury and Three Graces; Vulcan's Forge; Bacchus and Ariadne; Pallas resisting Mars, abt. 1578. Ante-room of Chapel: SS. George, Margaret, and Louis; SS. Andrew and Jerome. Senato: S. Mark presenting Doge Loredano to the Virgin. Sala Quattro Porte: Ceiling. Ante-room: Portraits; Ceiling, Doge Priuli with Justice. Passage to Council of Ten: Portraits; Nobles illumined by Holy Spirit. Sala del Gran Consiglio: Paradise, 1590. Sala dello Scrutino: Battle of Zara. Palazzo Reale: Transportation of Body of S. Mark; S. Mark rescues a Shipwrecked Saracen; Philosophers. Giovanelli Palace: Battlepiece; Portraits. S. Cassiano: Crucifixion; Christ in Limbo; Resurrection. S. Giorgio Maggiore: Last Supper; Gathering of Manna; Entombment (in Mortuary Chapel). S. Maria Mater Domini: Finding of True Cross. S. Maria dell' Orto: Last Judgment (E.); Golden Calf (E.); Presentation of Virgin (E.); Martyrdom of S. Agnes. S. Polo: Last Supper; Assumption of Virgin. S. Rocco: Annunciation; Pool of Bethesda; S. Roch and the Beasts; S. Roch healing the Sick; S. Roch in Campo d' Armata; S. Roch consoled by an Angel. Scuola di S. Rocco: Lower Hall, all the paintings on wall. Staircase: Visitation. Upper Hall: all the paintings on walls and ceiling. Refectory: Crucifixion, 1565; Christ before Pilate; Ecce Homo; Way to Golgotha; Ceiling, 1560. Salute: Marriage of Cana, 1561; Martyrdom of S. Stephen. S. Silvestro: Baptism. S. Stefano: Last Supper; Washing of Feet; Agony in Garden. S. Trovaso: Temptation of S. Anthony. Vienna. Susanna and the Elders; Sebastian Venier; Portraits of Procurators, Senators, and Men (fifteen in all); Old Man and Boy; Portrait of Lady.



CHAPTER XXVII

BASSANO

We wonder how many of those sightseers who pass through the Ante-Collegio in the Ducal Palace, and stare for a few moments at Tintoretto's famous quartet and at Veronese's "Rape of Europa," turn to give even such fleeting attention to the long, dark canvas which hangs beside them, "Jacob's Journey into Canaan," by Jacopo da Ponte, called Bassano.

Yet from the position in which it is placed the visitor might guess that it is considered to be a gem, and it gains something in interest when we learn from Zanetti that it was ordered by Jacopo Contarini at the same time as the "Rape of Europa," as if the great connoisseur enjoyed contrasting Veronese's light, gay style with the vigorous brush of da Ponte.

If attention is arrested by the beauty of the painting, and the visitor should be inspired to seek the painter in his native city, he will be well repaid. Bassano once held an important position on the main road between Italy and Germany, but since the railroad was made across the Brenner Pass, few people ever see the little town which lies cradled on the spurs of the Italian Alps, where the gorge of Valsugana opens. It is surrounded by chestnut woods, which sweep up to the blue mountains, the wide Brenta flows through the town, and the houses cluster high on either side, and have gardens and balconies overhanging the water. The facades of many of the houses are covered with fading frescoes, relics of da Ponte's school of fresco-painters, which, though they are fast perishing, still give a wonderful effect of warmth and colour.

Jacopo da Ponte was the son and pupil of his father, Francesco, who in his day had been a pupil of the Vicentine, Bartolommeo Montagna. Francesco da Ponte's best work is to be found at Bassano, in the cathedral and the church of San Giovanni, and has many of the characteristics, such as the raised pedestal and vaulted cupola, which we have noticed that Montagna owed to the Vivarini. Francesco's son went when very young to Venice, and was there thrown at once among the artists of the lagoons, and attached himself in particular to Bonifazio. In Jacopo's earliest work, now in the Museum at Bassano, a "Flight into Egypt," Bonifazio's tuition is markedly discernible in the build of the figures and, above all, in the form of the heads. A comparison of the very peculiarly shaped head of the Virgin in this picture with that of the Venetian lady in Bonifazio's "Rich Man's Feast," in the Venetian Academy, leaves us in no doubt on this score. Jacopo's "Adulteress before Christ" and the "Three in the Fiery Furnace" have Bonifazio's manner in the architecture and the staging of the figures. Only five examples are known of this early work of da Ponte, and it is all in Bonifazio's lighter style, not unlike his "Holy Family" in the National Gallery.

The house in which the painter lived when he returned to his native town, still stands in the little Piazza Monte Vecchio, and its whole facade retains the frescoes, mouldy and decaying, with which he decorated it. The design is in four horizontal bands. First comes a frieze of children in every attitude of fun and frolic. Then follows a long range of animals—horses, oxen, and deer. Musical instruments and flowers make a border, with allegorical representations of the arts and crafts filling the spaces between the windows. The principal band is decorated with Scriptural subjects, most of which are now hardly discernible, but which represent "Samson slaying the Philistines," "The Drunkenness of Noah," "Cain and Abel," "Lot and his Daughters," and "Judith with the Head of Holofernes." Between the two last there formerly appeared a drawing of a dead child, with the motto, "Mors omnia aequat," which was removed to the Museum in 1883, in comparatively good preservation.

Jacopo da Ponte lived a busy life at Bassano, where, with the help of his four sons, who were all painters, he poured out an inexhaustible stream of works, which, it is said, were put up to auction at the neighbouring fairs, if no other market was forthcoming. From time to time he and his sons went down to Venice, and with the help of the eldest, Francesco, Bassano (as he is generally known) painted the "Siege of Padua" and five other works in the Ducal Palace. His mature style was founded mainly upon that of Titian, and it is to this second manner that he owes his fame. He makes use of fewer colours, and enhances his lights by deepening and consolidating his shadows, so that they come into strong contrast, and his technique gains a richer impasto. He has a marvellous faculty for keeping his colour pure, and his greens shine like a beetle's wing. A nature-lover in the highest degree, his painting of animals and plants evinces a mind which is steeped in the magic of outdoor life. A subject of which he was particularly fond, and which he seems to have undertaken for half the collectors of Europe, was the "Four Seasons." Here was found united everything that Bassano most loved to paint: beasts of the farmyard and countryside, agriculturists with their implements, scenes of harvest-time and vintage, rough peasants leading the plough, cutting the grass, harvesting the grain, young girls making hay, driving home the cattle, taking dinner to the reapers. When he was obliged to paint for churches he chose such subjects as the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Sacrifice of Noah, the Expulsion from the Temple, into which he could introduce animals, painting them with such vigour and such forcible colour that Titian himself is said to have had a copy hanging in his studio. He loved to paint his daughters engaged in household tasks, and perhaps placed his figures with rather too obvious a reference to light and shade, and to the sun striking full on sunburnt cheeks and buxom shoulders. A friend, not a rival, of Veronese and Tintoretto, Gianbattista Volpado, records that when he was one day discussing contemporary painters with the latter, Tintoretto exclaimed, "Ah, Jacopo, if you had my drawing and I had your colour I would defy the devil himself to enable Titian, Raphael, and the rest to make any show beside us."

Bassano was invited to take up his residence at the Court of the Emperor Rudolph, but he refused to leave his mountain city, where he died in 1592. His funeral was attended by a crowd of the poorest inhabitants, for whom his charity had been boundless.

The "Journey of Jacob," to which we have already alluded, is among his most beautiful works. The brilliant array of figures is subordinated to the charm of the landscape. The evening dusk draws all objects into its embrace. The long, low, deep-blue distance stands out against a gleam of sunset sky. The tree-trunks and light play of leafy branches, which break up the composition, are from da Ponte's own country round Bassano. The pony upon which the boy scrambles, the cows, the dog among the quiet sheep, are given with all the loving truth of the born animal-painter. It is no wonder that Teniers borrowed ideas from him, and has more than once imitated his whole design.

The "Baptism of St. Lucilla" (in the Museum at Bassano) is one of his most Titianesque creations. The personages in it are grouped upon a flight of steps, in front of a long Renaissance palace with cypresses against a sky of evening-red barred with purple clouds. The drawing and modelling of the figures are almost faultless, and the colour is dazzling. The bending figure of S. Lucilla, with the light falling on her silvery satin dress, as she kneels before the young bishop, St. Valentine, is one of the most graceful things in art, and Titian himself need not have disowned the little angels, bearing palm branches and frolicking in the stream of radiance overhead.

Bassano has a "Concert," which is interesting as a family piece. It was painted in the year in which his son Leandro's marriage took place, and is probably a bridal painting to celebrate the event. The "Magistrates in Adoration" (Vicenza) again gives a brilliant effect of light, and its stately ceremonial is founded on Tintoretto's numerous pictures of kneeling doges and procurators in fur-trimmed velvet robes.



Madonnas and saints are usually built into close-packed pyramids, but in the "Repose in Egypt," now in the Ambrosiana, Milan, his arrangement comes very close to Palma and Lotto. The beautiful Mother and Child, the attendants, above all the St. Joseph, resting, head on hand, at the Virgin's feet and gazing in rapt adoration on the Child, are examples of the true Venetian manner, while the exquisite landscape behind them, and the vigorously drawn tree under which they recline, show Bassano true to his passion for nature.

Hampton Court is rich in his pictures. "The Adoration of the Shepherds," in which the pillars rise behind the sacred group, is an exercise in the manner of Titian's Frari altarpiece. His portraits are fine and sympathetic, but hardly any of them are signed or can be dated. His own is in the Uffizi, and there is a splendid "Old Man" at Buda-Pesth. Ariosto and Tasso, Sebastian Venier, and many other distinguished men were among his sitters; most of them are in half-length with three-quarter heads. The National Gallery possesses a singularly attractive one of a young man with a sensitive, acute countenance, robed in dignified, picturesque black, relieved by an embroidered linen collar. He stands by the sort of square window, opening on a distant landscape, of which Tintoretto and Lotto so often made use, in front of which a golden vase, holding a branch of olive, catches the rays of light.

Bassano has no great power of design, and his knowledge of the nude seems to have been small, but his brushwork is facile, and his colour leaps out with a vivid beauty which obliterates other shortcomings.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Augsburg. Madonna and Saints. Bassano. Susanna and Elders (E.); Christ and Adulteress (E.); The Three Holy Children (E.); Madonna, Saints, and Donor (E.); Flight into Egypt (E.); Paradise; Baptism of S. Lucilla; Adoration of Shepherds; St. Martin and the Beggar; St. Roch recommending Donor to Virgin; St. John the Evangelist adored by a Warrior; Descent of Holy Spirit; Madonna in Glory, with Saints (L.). Duomo: S. Lucia in Glory; Martyrdom of S. Stephen (L.); Nativity. S. Giovanni: Madonna and Saints. Bergamo. Carrara: Portrait. Lochis: Portraits. Cittadella. Duomo: Christ at Emmaus. Dresden. Israelites in Desert; Moses striking Rock; Conversion of S. Paul. Hampton Court. Portraits; Jacob's Journey; Boaz and Ruth; Shepherds (E.); Christ in House of Pharisee; Assumption of Virgin; Men fighting Bears; Tribute Money. London. Portrait of Man; Christ and the Money-Changers; Good Samaritan. Milan. Ambrosiana: Adoration of Shepherds (E.); Annunciation to Shepherds (L.). Munich. Portraits; S. Jerome; Deposition. Padua. S. Maria in Vanzo: Entombment. Paris. Christ bearing Cross; Vintage (L.). Rome. Villa Borghese: Last Supper; The Trinity. Venice. Academy: Christ in Garden; A Venetian Noble; S. Elenterino blessing the Faithful. Ducal Palace, Ante-Collegio: Jacob's Journey. S. Giacomo dell' Orio: Madonna and Saints. Vicenza. Madonna and Saints; Madonna; St. Mark and Senators. Vienna. The Good Samaritan; Thomas led to the Stake; Adoration of Magi; Rich Man and Lazarus; The Lord shows Abraham the Promised Land; The Sower; A Hunt; Way to Golgotha; Noah entering the Ark; Christ and the Money-Changers; After the Flood; Saints; Adoration of Magi; Portraits; Christ bearing Cross. Academy: Deposition; Portrait.



PART III



CHAPTER XXVIII

THE INTERIM

Many of the churches and palaces of Venice and the adjoining mainland, and almost every public and private gallery throughout Europe, contain pictures purporting to be painted by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and others of that famous company. Hardly a great English house but boasts of a round dozen at least of such specimens, acquired in the days when rich Englishmen made the "grand tour" and substantiated a reputation for taste and culture by collecting works of art. These pictures resemble the genuine article in a specious yet half-hearted way. Their owners themselves are not very tenacious as to their authenticity, and the visit of an expert, or the ordeal of a public exhibition tears their pretensions to tatters. In the Academia itself the Bonifazio and Tintoretto rooms are crowded with imitations. The Ducal Palace has ceilings and panels on which are reproduced the kind of compositions initiated by the great artists, which make an effort to capture their gamut of colour and to master their scheme of chiaroscuro, copying them, in short, in everything except in their inimitable touch and fire and spirit. It would have been impossible for any men, however industrious and prolific, to have carried out all the work which passes under their names, to say nothing of that which has perished; but our surprise and curiosity diminish when we come to inquire systematically into the methods of that host of copyists which, even before the masters' death, had begun to ply its lucrative trade.

We must bear in mind that every great man was surrounded by busy and attentive satellites, helping him to finish and, indeed, often painting a large part of important commissions, witnesses of the high prices received, and alive to all the gossip as to the relative popularity of the painters and the requests and orders which reached them from all quarters. The painters' own sons were in many instances those who first traded upon their fathers' fame. From Ridolfi, Zanetti, or Boschini we learn of the many paintings executed by Carlotto Caliari and the vast numbers painted by Domenico Robusti in the style of their respective fathers. Domenico seems to have particularly affected the subject of "St. George and the Dragon," and the picture at Dresden, which passes under Tintoretto's name, is perhaps by his hand. Of Bassano's four sons, Francesco "imitated his father perfectly," conserving his warmth of tint, his relief and breadth. Zanetti enumerates a surprising number of Francesco's works, seven of them being painted for the Ducal Palace. Leandro followed more particularly his father's first manner, was a good portrait-painter, and possessed lightness and fancy. Girolamo copied and recopied the old Bassano till he even deceived connoisseurs, "how much more," says Zanetti, writing in 1771, "those of the present day, who behold them harmonised and accredited by time." No school in Venice was so beloved, or lent itself so well to the efforts of the imitators, as that of Paolo Veronese. Even at an early date it was impossible not to confound the master with the disciples; the weaker of the originals were held to be of imitators, the best imitations were assigned to the master himself. "Oh how easy it is," exclaims Zanetti again, "to make mistakes about Veronese's pictures, but I can point out sundry infallible characteristics to those who wish for light upon this doubtful path; the fineness and lightness of the brushwork, the sublime intelligence and grace, shown particularly in the form of the heads, which is never found in any of his imitators."

Few Venetians, however, followed the style of only one man; the output was probably determined and varied by the demand. Too many attractive manners existed to dazzle them, and when once they began to imitate, they were tempted on all hands. It must also be remembered that every master left behind him stacks of cartoons, sketches and suggestions, and half-finished pictures, which were eagerly seized upon, bought or stolen, and utilised to produce masterpieces masquerading under his name.

As the seventeenth century advanced the character of art and manners underwent a change. Men sought the beautiful in the novel and bizarre, and the complex was preferred to the simple. Venetian art, in all its branches, had passed from the stately and restrained to the pompous and artificial. Yet the barocco style was used by Venice in a way of its own; whimsical, contorted, and overloaded with ornament as it is, it yet compels admiration by its vigorous life and movement. The art of the sei-cento in Venice was extravagant, but it was alive. It escaped the most deadly of all faults, a cold and academic mannerism—and this at a time when the rest of Italy was given over to the inflated followers of Michelangelo and the calculated elaborations of the eclectics.

Many of the things we most love in Venice, such as the Salute, the Clock-Tower, the Dogana, the Bridge of Sighs, the Rezzonico and Pesaro Palaces, are additions of the seventeenth century. The barocco intemperance in sculpture was carried on by disciples of Bernini; and as the immediate influence of the great masters declined, painting acquired the same sort of character. The carelessness and rapidity of Tintoretto, which, in his case, proceeded from the lightning speed of his imagination and the unerring sureness of his brush, became a mechanical trick in the hands of superficial students. True art had migrated elsewhere—to the homes of Velasquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt. As art grew more pompous it became less emotional. Painters like Palma Giovine spoilt their ready, lively fancy by the vice of hurry. The nickname of "Fa Presto" was deserved by others besides Luca Giordano, and Venice was overrun by a swarm of painters whose prime standard of excellence was the ability to make haste. Grandeur of conception was forgotten; a grave, ample manner was no longer understood; superficial sentiment and bombastic size carried the day. Yet a few painters, though their forms had become redundant and exaggerated, retained something of what had been the Venetian glory—the deep and moist colour of old. It still glowed with traces of its old lustre on the canvases of Giovanni Contarini, or Tiberio Tinelli, or Pietro Liberi; and though there was a perfect fury of production, without order and without law, there can still be perceived the survival of that sense of the decorative which kept the thread of art. We discover it in the ceiling of the Church of San Pantaleone, where Gianbattista Fumiani paints the glorification of the martyred patron, and which, fantastic and extravagant as it is, with its stupendous, architectural setting, and its acutely, almost absurdly foreshortened throng, is not without a certain grandiose geniality, ample and picturesque, like the buildings of that date. In Alessandro Varotari (il Padovanino), whose "Nozze di Cana" in the Academia is a finely spaced scene, in which a charming use is made of cypresses, we seem to recognise the last ray of the Titianesque. The painting of the seventeenth century passed on towards the eighteenth, and, from ceilings and panels, rosy nymphs and Venuses smile at us, attitudinising and contorted upon their cloudy backgrounds. Lackadaisical Magdalens drop sentimental tears, and the Angel of the Annunciation capers above the head of an affected Virgin, while violent colours, intensified chiaroscuro, and black greasy impasto betray the neighbourhood of the tenebrosi. When, towards the end of the seventeenth century, Gregorio Lazzarini set himself to shake off these influences, he went to the opposite extreme. Although a beautiful designer, he becomes cold and flat in colour, with a coldness and insipidity, indeed, that take us by surprise, appearing in a country where the taste for luminous and brilliant tints was so strongly rooted. The student of Venetian painting, who wishes to fill up the hiatus which lies between the Golden Age and the revival of the eighteenth century, cannot do better than compare Fumiani's vault in San Pantaleone with Lazzarini's sober and earnest fresco, "The Charity of San Lorenzo Giustiniani," in San Pietro in Castello, and with Pietro Liberi's "Battle of the Dardanelles" in the Ducal Palace. In all three we have examples of the varied and accomplished yet soulless art of this period. Not many of the scenes painted for the palaces of patricians in the seventeenth century have survived. They are to be found here and there by the curious who wander into old churches and palaces with a second-hand copy of Boschini in their hands; but in the reaction from the florid which took place in the Empire period, many of them gave place to whitewash and stucco. In the Ducal Palace, side by side with the masterpieces of the Renaissance, are to be found the overcrowded canvases of Vicentino, Giovanni Contarini, Pietro Liberi, Celesti, and others like them. Some of the poor and meretricious mosaics in St. Mark's are from designs by Palma Giovine and Fumiani. Carlo Ridolfi, who was a painter himself, as well as the painter's chronicler, has an "Adoration of the Magi" in S. Giovanni Elemosinario, poor enough in invention and execution. Two pictures by obscure artists disfigure a corner of the Scuola di San Rocco. The Museo Civico has a large canvas by Vicentino, a "Coronation of a Dogaressa," which once adorned Palazzo Grimani. We hear of a school opened by Antonio Balestra, who was the master of Rosalba Carriera and Pietro Longhi, and the names of others have come down to us in numbers too numerous to be quoted. Towards the end of the seventeenth century more light and novelty sparkles in the painting of the Bellunese, Battista Ricci, and assures us that he was no mere copyist; and, as the eighteenth century opens, we become aware of the strong and daring brush of Gianbattista Piazetta. Piazetta studied the works of the Carracci for some time in Bologna, and especially those of Guercino, whose style, with its bold contrasts of light and shade, has served above all as his model. He paints very darkly, and his figures often blend with and disappear into the profound tones of his backgrounds. Charles Blanc calls him "a Venetian Caravaggio"; and he has something of the strength and even the brutality of the Bolognese. A fine decorative and imaginative example of his work is the "Madonna appearing to S. Philip Neri" in the Church of S. Fava. The erect form of the Madonna is relieved in striking chiaroscuro against the mantle, upheld by putti. Radiant clouds light up the background and illumine the form of the old saint, a refined and spirited figure, gazing at the vision in an ecstasy of devotion. Piazetta is a bold realist, and many of his small pictures are strong and forcible. Sebastiano Ricci, Battista's son, is described as "a fine intelligence," and attracts our notice as having forged special links with England. Hampton Court possesses a long array of his paintings. In the chapel of Chelsea Hospital the plaster semi-dome is painted by him, in oils, with very good effect. He is said to have worked in Thornhill's studio, and his influence may be suspected in the Blenheim frescoes, and even in touches in Hogarth's work.

By the eighteenth century Venice had parted with her old nobility of soul, and enjoyment had become the only aim of life. Yet Venice, among the States of Italy, alone retained her freedom. The Doge reigned supreme as in the past. Beneath the ceiling of Veronese the dreaded Three still sat in secret council. Venice was still the city of subtle poisons and dangerous mysteries, but the days were gone when she had held the balance in European affairs, and she had become, in a superlative degree, the city of pleasure. Nowhere was life more varied and entertaining, more full of grace and enchantment.

A long period of peace had rocked the Venetian people into calm security. There was, indeed, a little spasmodic fighting in Corfu, Dalmatia, and Algiers, but no real share was retained in the struggles of Europe. The whole policy of the city's life was one of self-indulgence. Holiday-makers filled her streets; the whole population lived "in piazza," laughing, gossiping, seeing and being seen. The very churches had become a rendezvous for fashionable intrigues; the convents boasted their salons, where nuns in low dresses, with pearls in their hair, received the advances of nobles and gallant abbes. People came to Venice to waste time; trivialities, the last scandal, sensational stories, were the only subjects worth discussing. In an age of parodies and practical jokes, the more absurd any one could be, the more silly or witty stories he could tell, the more assured was his success in the joyous, frivolous circle, full of fun and laughter. The Carnival lasted for six months of the year, and was the occasion for masques and licence of every description. In the hot weather, the gay descendants of the Contarini, the Loredan, the Pisani, and other grand old houses, migrated to villas along the Brenta, where by day and night the same reckless, irresponsible life went gaily on. The power of such courtesans as Titian and Paris Bordone had painted was waning. Their place was adequately supplied by the easy dames of society, no longer secluded, proud and tranquil, but "stirred by the wild blood of youth and stooping to the frolic." "They are but faces and smiles, teasing and trumpery," says one of their critics, yet they are declared to be wideawake, natural and charming, making the most of their smattering of letters. Love was the great game; every woman had lovers, every married woman openly flaunted her cicisbeo or cavaliere servente.

The older portion of the middle class was still moderate and temperate, contented to live in the old fashion, eschewing all interest in politics, with which it was dangerous for the ordinary individual to meddle; but the new leaven was creeping through every level of society. The sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie tried to rise in the social scale by aping the pleasant vices of the aristocracy. They deserted the shop and the counting-house to play cards and strut upon the piazza. They mimicked the fine gentleman and the gentildonna, and made fashionable love and carried on intrigues. The spirit of the whole people had lost its elevation; there were no more proud patricians, full of noble ambitions and devoted zeal of public service; it was hardly possible to get a sufficient number of persons to carry on public business. It is a contemptible indictment enough; yet among all this degenerate life, we come upon something more real as we turn to the artists. They were very much alive. In music, in literature, and in painting, new and graceful forms of art were emerging. Painting was not the grand art of other days; it might be small and trivial, but there grew up a real little Renaissance of the eighteenth century, full of originality and fire, and showing a reaction from the pompous and banale style of the imitators.

The influence of the "lady" was becoming increasingly felt by society. Confidential little boudoirs, small and cosy apartments were the mode, and needed decorating as well as vast salas. The dainty luxury of gilt furniture, designed by Andrea Brustolon and upholstered in delicate silks, was matched by small, attractive works of art. Venice had lost her Eastern trade, and as the East faded out of her scheme of life, the West, to which she now turned, was bringing her a different form of art. The great reception rooms were still suited by the grandiose compositions of Ricci, Piazetta, and Pittoni, but another genre of charming creations smiled from the brocaded alcoves and more intimate suites of rooms.

It is impossible to name more than a fraction of these artists of the eighteenth century. There is Amigoni, admirable as a portrait-painter; Pittoni, one of the ablest figure-painters of the day; Luca Carlevaris, the forerunner of Canale; Pellegrini, whose decorations in this country are mentioned by Horace Walpole and of which the most important are preserved in the cupola and spandrils of the Grand Hall at Castle Howard. Their work is still to be found in many a Venetian church or North Italian gallery. Some of it is almost fine, though too often vitiated by the affected, exaggerated spirit of their day. When originality asserts itself more decidedly, Rosalba Carriera stands out as an artist who acquired great popularity. In 1700, when she was a young woman of twenty-four, she was already a great favourite with the public. She began life as a lace-maker, but when trade was bad, Jean Steve, a Frenchman, taught her to paint miniatures. She imparted a wonderfully delicate feeling to her art, and, passing on to pastel, she brought to this branch of portraiture a brilliancy and freshness which it had not known before. Rosalba has perhaps preserved for us better than any one else, those women of Venice who floated so lightly on the dancing waves of that sparkling stream. There they are: La Cornaro; La Maria Labia, who was surrounded by French lovers, "very courteous and very beautiful"; La Zenobio and La Pisani; La Foscari, with her black plumes; La Mocenigo, "the lady with the pearls." She has pinned them all to the canvas; lovely, frail, light-hearted butterflies, with velvet neck-ribbons round their snowy throats and coquettish patches on their delicate skin and bouquets of flowers in their high-dressed hair and sheeny bodices. They look at us with arch eyes and smile with melting mouths, more frivolous than depraved; sweet, ephemeral, irresponsible in every relation of life. Older men and women there are, too, when those artificial years have produced a succession of rather dull, sodden personages, kindly, inoffensive, but stupid, and still trifling heavily with the world.

Of Rosalba we have another picture to compare with those of her sitters. She and the other artists of her circle lived the merry, busy life of the worker, and found in their art the antidote to the evil living and the dissipation of the gay world which provided sitters and patrons. Rosalba's milieu is a type of others of its class. She lives with her mother and sisters, an honest, cheerful, industrious existence. They are fond of old friends and old books, and indulge in music and simple pleasures. Her sisters help Rosalba by preparing the groundwork of her paintings. She pays visits, and writes rhymes, and plays on the harpsichord. She receives great men without much ceremony, and the Elector Palatine, the Duke of Mecklenburg, Frederick, King of Norway, and Maximilian, King of Bavaria, come to her to order miniatures of their reigning beauties. Then she goes off to Paris where she has plenty of commissions, and the frequently occurring names of English patrons in her fragmentary diaries, tell how much her work was admired by English travellers. She did more than anybody else to promote the fashion for pastels, and her delightful art may be seen at its best in the pastel room of the Dresden Gallery.

Henrietta, Countess of Pomfret, has left us a charming description of a party of English travellers, which included Horace Walpole, arriving in Venice in 1741, strolling about in mask and bauta, and visiting the famous pastellist in her studio. It is in such guise that Rosalba has painted Walpole, and has left one of the most interesting examples of her art.

SOME EXAMPLES

Francesco da Ponte.

Venice. Ducal Palace: Sala del Maggior Consiglio. Four pictures on ceiling (second from the four corners of the sala). On left as you face the Paradiso: 1. Pope Alexander III. giving the Stocco, or Sword, to the Doge as he enters a Galley to command the Army against Ferrara; 2. Victory against the Milanese; 3. Victory against Imperial Troops at Cadore; 4. Victory under Carmagnola, over Visconti. These four are all very rich in colour. Chiesetta: Circumcision; Way to Calvary. Sala dell' Scrutino: Padua taken by Night from the Carraresi.

Leandro da Ponte.

Venice. Sala del Maggior Consiglio: The Patriarch giving a Blessed Candle to the Doge. Sala of Council of Ten: Meeting of Alexander III. and Doge Ziani. A fine decorative picture, running the whole of one side of the sala. Sala of Archeological Museum: Virgin in Glory, with the Avogadori Family.

Palma Giovine.

Dresden. Presentation of the Virgin. Florence. Uffizi: S. Margaret. Munich. Deposition; Nativity; Ecce Homo; Flagellation. Venice. Academy: Scenes from the Apocalypse; S. Francis. Ducal Palace: The Last Judgment. Vienna. Cain and Abel; Daughter of Herodias; Pieta; Immaculate Conception.

Il Padovanino.

Florence. Uffizi: Lucretia. London. Cornelia and her Children. Paris. Venus and Cupid. Rome. Villa Borghese: Toilet of Minerva. Venice. Academy: The Marriage of Cana; Madonna in Glory; Vanity, Orpheus, and Eurydice; Rape of Proserpine; Virgin in Glory. Verona. Man and Woman playing Chess; Triumph of Bacchus. Vienna. Woman taken in Adultery; Holy Family.

Pietro Liberi.

Venice. Ducal Palace: Battle of the Dardanelles.

Andrea Vicentino.

Venice. Museo Civico: The Marriage of a Dogaressa.

G. A. Fumiani.

Venice. San Pantaleone: Ceiling. Church of the Carita: Christ disputing with the Doctors.

A. Balestra.

Verona. S. Tomaso: Annunciation.

G. Lazzarini.

Venice. S. Pietro in Castello. The Charity of S. Lorenzo Giustiniani.

Sebastiano Ricci.

Venice. S. Rocco: The Glorification of the Cross. Gesuati: Pope Pius V. and Saints. London. Royal Hospital, Chelsea: Half-dome.

G. B. Pittoni.

Vicenza. The Bath of Diana.

G. B. Piazetta.

Venice. Chiesa della Fava: Madonna and S. Philip Neri. Academy: Crucifixion; The Fortune-Teller.

Rosalba Carriera.

Venice. Academy: pastels. Dresden. Pastels.



CHAPTER XXIX

TIEPOLO

We have already noted that to establish the significance of any period in art, it is necessary that the tendencies should unite and combine in some culminating spirits who rise triumphant over their contemporaries and soar above the age in which they live. Such a genius stands out above the eighteenth century crowd, and is not only of his century, but of every time. For two hundred years Tiepolo has been stigmatised as extravagant, mannered, as just equal to painting cupids, nymphs, and parroquets. In the last century he experienced the effect of the profound discredit into which the whole of eighteenth-century art had fallen. In France, David had obliterated Watteau; and the reputation of Pompeo Battoni, a sort of Italian David, effaced Tiepolo and his contemporaries. When the delegates of the French Republic inspected Italian churches and palaces, and decided what works of art should be sent to the Louvre, they singled out the Bolognese, the Guercinos and Guidos, the Carracci, even Pompeo Battoni and other such forgotten masters, a Gatti, a Nevelone, a Badalocchio; but to the lasting regret of their descendants, they disdained to annex a single one of the great paintings of the Venetian, Gianbattista Tiepolo.

Eastlake only vouchsafes him one line as "an artist of fantastic imagination." Most of the nineteenth-century critics do not even mention him. Burckhardt dismisses him with a grudging line of praise, Blanc is equally disparaging, and for Taine he is a mere mannerist, yet his influence has been felt far beyond his lifetime; only now is he coming into his own, and it is recognised that the plein-air artist, the luminarist, the impressionist, owe no small share of their knowledge to his inspiration.

The name of Tiepolo brings before us a whole string of illustrious personages—doges and senators, magnificent procurators and great captains—but we have nothing to prove that the artist belonged to a decayed branch of the famous patrician house. Born in Castello, the people's quarter of Venice, he studied in early youth with that good draughtsman, Lazzarini. At twenty-three he married the sister of Francesco Guardi; Guardi, who comes between Longhi and Canale and who is a better painter than either. Tiepolo appeared at a fortunate moment. The demand for a facile, joyous genius was at its height. The life of the aristocracy on the lagoons was every year growing more gay, more abandoned to capricious inclination, to light loves and absurd amusements. And the art which reflected this life was called upon to give gaiety rather than thought, costume rather than character. Yet if the Venetian art had lost all connection with the grave magnificence of the past, it had kept aloof from the academic coldness which was in fashion beyond the lagoons, so that though theatrical, it was with a certain natural absurdity. The age had become romantic; the Arcadian convention was in full force, Nature herself was pressed into the service of idle, sentimental men and women. The country was pictured as a place of delight, where the sun always shone and the peasants passed their time singing madrigals and indulging in rural pleasures. The public, however, had begun to look for beauty; the traditions which had formed round the decorative schools were giving way to the appreciation of original work. Tiepolo, sincere and spontaneous even when he is sacrificing truth to caprice, struck the taste of the Venetians, and without emancipating himself from the tendencies of the time, contrives to introduce a fresh accent. All round him was a weak and self-indulgent world, but within himself he possessed a fund of buoyant and inexhaustible energy. He evokes a throng of personages on the ceilings of the churches and palaces confided to his fancy. His creations range from mythology to religion, from the sublime to the grotesque. All Olympia appears upon his ample and luminous spaces. It is not to the cold, austere Lazzarini, or to the clashing chiaroscuro of Piazetta, or the imaginative spirit of Battista Ricci, though he was touched by each of them, that we must turn for Tiepolo's derivation. Long before his time, the kind of decoration of ceilings which we are apt to call Tiepolesque; the foreshortened architecture, the columns and cornices, the figures peopling the edifices, or reclining upon clouds, had been used by an increasing throng of painters. The style arose, indeed, in the quattrocento; Mantegna, the Umbrians, and even Michelangelo had used it, though in a far more sober way than later generations. Correggio and the Venetians had perfected the idea, which the artists of the seventeenth century seized upon and carried to the most intemperate excess. But Tiepolo rose above them all; he abandoned the heavy, exaggerated, contorted designs, which by this time defied all laws of equilibrium, and we must go back further than his immediate predecessors for his origins. His claim to stand with Tintoretto or Veronese may be contested, but he is nearest to these, and no doubt Veronese is the artist he studied with the greatest fervour. Without copying, he seems to have a natural affinity of spirit with Veronese and assimilates the ample arrangement of his groups, the grace of his architecture, and his decorative feeling for colour. Zanetti, who was one of Tiepolo's dearest friends, writes: "No painter of our time could so well recall the bright and happy creations of Veronese." The difference between them is more one of period than of temperament. Paolo Veronese represented the opulence of a rich, strong society, full of noble life, while Tiepolo's lot was cast among effeminate men and frivolous women, and full of the modern spirit himself, he adapts his genius to his time and devotes himself to satisfy the theatrical, sentimental vein of the Venice of the decadence. Full of enthusiasm for his work, he was ready to respond to any call. He went to and fro between Venice and the villas along the mainland and to the neighbouring towns. Then coveting wider fields, he travelled to Milan and Genoa, where his frescoes still gleam in the palaces of the Dugnani, the Archinto, and the Clerici. At Wuerzburg in Bavaria he achieved a magnificent series of decorations for the palace of the Prince-Archbishop. Then coming back to Italy, he painted altarpieces, portraits, pictures for his friends, and a fresh multitude of allegorical and mythological frescoes in palaces and villas. His charming villa at Zianigo is frescoed from top to bottom by himself and his sons, and has amusing examples of contemporary dress and manners.

When the Academy was instituted in 1755, Tiepolo was appointed its first director, but the sort of employment it provided was not suited to his impetuous spirit, and in 1762 he threw up the post and went off to Spain with his two sons. There he received a splendid welcome and was loaded with commissions, the only dissentient voice being that of Raphael Mengs, who, obsessed by the taste for the classic and the antique, was fiercely opposed to the Venetian's art. Tiepolo died suddenly in Madrid in 1770, pencil in hand. Though he was past seventy, the frescoes he has left there show that his hand was as firm and his eye as sure as ever.

His frescoes have, as we have said, that frankly theatrical flavour which corresponds exactly to the taste of the time. Such works as the "Transportation of the Holy House of Loretto" in the Church of the Scalzi in Venice, or the "Triumph of Faith" in that of the Pieta, the "Triumph of Hercules" in Palazzo Canossa in Verona, or the decorations in the magnificent villa of the Pisani at Stra, are extravagant and fantastic, yet have the impressive quality of genius. These last, which have for subject the glorification of the Pisani, are full of portraits. The patrician sons and daughters appear, surrounded by Abundance, War, and Wisdom. A woman holding a sceptre symbolises Europe. All round are grouped flags and dragons, "nations grappling in the airy blue," bands of Red Indians in their war-paint and happy couples making love. The idea of the history, the wealth, the supreme dignity of the House is paramount, and over all appears Fame, bearing the noble name into immortality. In Palazzo Clerici at Milan a rich and prodigal committee gave the painter a free hand, and on the ceiling of a vast hall the Sun in a chariot, with four horses harnessed abreast, rises to the meridian, flooding the world with light. Venus and Saturn attend him, and his advent is heralded by Mercury. A symbolical figure of the earth joys at his coming, and a concourse of naiads, nymphs, and dolphins wait upon his footsteps. In the school of the Carmine in Venice Tiepolo has left one of his grandest displays. The haughty Queen of Heaven, who is his ideal of the Virgin, bears the Child lightly on her arm, and, standing enthroned upon the rolling clouds, hardly deigns to acknowledge the homage of the prostrate saint, on whom an attendant angel is bestowing her scapulary. The most charming amoretti are disporting in all directions, flinging themselves from on high in delicious abandon, alternating with lovely groups of the cardinal virtues. At Villa Valmarana near Vicenza, after revelling among the gods, he comes to earth and delights in painting lovely ladies with almond eyes and carnation cheeks, attended by their cavaliers, seated in balconies, looking on at a play, or dancing minuets, and carnival scenes with masques and dominoes and fetes champetres, which give us a picture of the fashions and manners of the day. He brings in groups of Chinese in oriental dress, and then he condescends to paint country girls and their rustic swains, in the style of Phyllis and Corydon.

Sometimes he becomes graver and more solid. He abandons the airy fancies scattered in cloud-land. The story of Esther in Palazzo Dugnano affords an opportunity for introducing magnificent architecture, warriors in armour, and stately dames in satin and brocades. He touches his highest in the decorations of Palazzo Labia, where Antony and Cleopatra, seated at their banquet, surrounded by pomp and revelry, regard one another silently, with looks of sombre passion. Four exquisite panels have lately been acquired by the Brera Gallery, representing the loves of Rinaldo and Armida, and are a feast of gay, delicate colour, with fascinating backgrounds of Italian gardens. The throne-room of the palace at Madrid has the same order of compositions—Aeneas conducted by Venus from Time to Immortality, and other deifications of Spanish royalty.



Now and then Tiepolo is possessed by a tragic mood. In the Church of San Alvise he has left a "Way to Calvary," a "Flagellation," and a "Crowning of Thorns," which are intensely dramatic, and which show strong feeling. Particularly striking is the contrast between the refined and sensitive type of his Christ and the realistic and even brutal study of the two despairing malefactors—one a common ruffian, the other an aged offender of a higher class. His altarpiece at Este, representing S. Tecla staying the plague, is painted with a real insight into disaster and agony, and S. Tecla is a pathetic and beautiful figure. Sometimes in his easel-pictures he paints a Head of Christ, a S. Anthony, or a Crucifixion, but he always returns before long to the ample spaces and fantastic subjects which his soul loved.

Tiepolo is a singular contradiction. His art suggests a strong being, held captive by butterflies. Sometimes he is joyous and limpid, sometimes turbulent and strong, but he has always sincerity, force, and life. A great space serves to exhilarate him, and he asks nothing better than to cover it with angels and goddesses, white limbs among the clouds, sea-horses ridden by Tritons, patrician warriors in Roman armour, balustrades and columns and amoretti. He does not even need to pounce his design, but puts in all sorts of improvised modifications with a sure hand. The vastness of his frescoes, the daring poses of his countless figures, and the freedom of his line speak eloquently of the mastery to which his hand had attained. He revels, above all, in effects of light—"all the light of the sky, and all the light of the sea; all the light of Venice ... in which he swims as in a bath. He paints not ideas, scarcely even forms, but light. His ceilings are radiant, like the sky of birds; his poems seem to be written in the clouds. Light is fairer than all things, and Tiepolo knows all the tricks and triumphs of light."[6]

[6] Philippe Monnier, Venice in the Eighteenth Century.

Nearly all his compositions have a serene and limpid horizon, with the figures approaching it painted in clear, silvery hues, airy and diaphanous, while the forms below are more muscular, the flesh tints are deeper, and the whole of the foreground is often enveloped in shadow. Veronese had lit up the shadows, which, under his contemporaries, were growing gloomy. Tiepolo carries his art further on the same lines. He makes his figures more graceful, his draperies more vaporous, and illumines his clouds with radiance. His faded blue and rose, his golden-greys, and pearly whites and pastel tints are not so much solid colours as caprices of light. We have remarked already that with Veronese the accessories of gleaming satins and rich brocades serve to obscure the persons. In many of Tiepolo's scenes the figures are lost in a flutter of drapery, subject and action melt away, and we are only conscious of soft harmonies of delicious colour, as ethereal as the hues of spring flowers in woodland ways and joyous meadows. With these delicious, audacious fancies, put on with a nervous hand, we forget the age of profound and ardent passion, we escape from that of pompous solemnity and studied grace, and we breathe an atmosphere of irresponsible and capricious pleasure. In this last word of her great masters Venice keeps what her temperament loved—sensuous colour and emotional chiaroscuro, used to accentuate an art adapted to a city of pleasure.

The excellence of the old masters' drawings is a perpetual revelation. Even second-class men are almost invariably fine draughtsmen, proving that drawing was looked upon as something over which it was necessary for even the meanest to have entire mastery. Tiepolo's drawings, preserved in Venice and in various museums, are as beautiful as can be wished; perfect in execution and vivid in feeling. In Venice are twenty or thirty sheets in red carbon, of flights of angels, and of draperies studied in every variety of fold.

Poor work of his school is often ascribed to his sons, but the superb "Stations of the Cross," in the Frari, which were etched by Domenico, and published as his own in his lifetime, are almost equal to the father's work. Tiepolo had many immediate followers and imitators. The colossal roof-painting of Fabio Canal in the Church of SS. Apostoli, Venice, may be pointed out as an example of one of these. But he is full of the tendencies of modern art. Mr. Berenson, writing of him, says he sometimes seems more the first than the last of a line, and notices how he influenced many French artists of recent times, though none seem quite to have caught the secret of his light intensity and his exquisite caprice.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Aranjuez. Royal Palace: Frescoes; Altarpiece. Orangery: Frescoes. Bergamo. Cappella Colleoni: Scenes from the Life of the Baptist. Berlin. Martyrdom of S. Agatha; S. Dominia and the Rosary. London. Sketches; Deposition. Madrid. Escurial; Ceilings. Milan. Palazzi Clerici, Archinto, and Dugnano: Frescoes. Brera: Loves of Rinaldo and Armida. Paris. Christ at Emmaus. Stra. Villa Pisani: Ceiling. Venice. Academy: S. Joseph, the Child, and Saints; S. Helena finding the Cross. Palazzo Ducale: Sala di Quattro Porte: Neptune and Venice. Palazzo Labia: Frescoes; Antony and Cleopatra. Palazzo Rezzonico: Two Ceilings. S. Alvise: Flagellation; Way to Golgotha. SS. Apostoli: Communion of S. Lucy. S. Fava: The Virgin and her Parents. Gesuati: Ceiling; Altarpiece. S. Maria della Pieta: Triumph of Faith. S. Paolo: Stations of the Cross. Scalzi: Transportation of the Holy House of Loretto. Scuola del Carmine: Ceiling. Verona. Palazzo Canossa: Triumph of Hercules. Vicenza. Museo Entrance Hall: Immaculate Conception. Villa Valmarana: Frescoes; Subjects from Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso; Masks and Oriental Scenes. Wuerzburg. Palace of the Archbishop: Ceilings; Fetes Galantes; Assumption; Fall of Rebel Angels.



CHAPTER XXX

PIETRO LONGHI

We have here a master who is peculiarly the Venetian of the eighteenth century, a genre-painter whose charm it is not easy to surpass, yet one who did not at the outset find his true vocation. Longhi's first undertakings, specimens of which exist in certain palaces in Venice, were elaborate frescoes, showing the baneful influence of the Bolognese School, in which he studied for a time under Giuseppe Crispi. He attempts to place the deities of Olympus on his ceilings in emulation of Tiepolo, but his Juno is heavy and common, and the Titans at her feet appear as a swarm of sprawling, ill-drawn nudities. He shows no faculty for this kind of work, but he was thirty-two before he began to paint those small easel-pictures which in his own dainty style illustrate the "Vanity Fair" of his period, and in which the eighteenth century lives for us again.

His earliest training was in the goldsmith's art, and he has left many drawings of plate, exquisite in their sense of graceful curve and their unerring precision of line. It was a moment when such things acquired a flawless purity of outline, and Longhi recognised their beauty with all the sensitive perception of the artist and the practised workman. His studies of draperies, gestures, and hands are also extraordinarily careful, and he seems besides to have an intimate acquaintance with all the elegant dissipation and languid excesses of a dying order. We feel that he has himself been at home in the masquerade, has accompanied the lady to the fortune-teller, and, leaning over her graceful shoulder, has listened to the soothsayer's murmurs. He has attended balls and routs, danced minuets, and gossiped over tiny cups of China tea. He is the last chronicler of the Venetian feasts, and with him ends that long series that began with Giorgione's concert and which developed and passed through suppers at Cana and banquets at the houses of Levi and the Pharisee. We are no longer confronted with the sumptuosity of Bonifazio and Veronese; the immense tables covered with gold and silver plate, the long lines of guests robed in splendid brocades, the stream of servants bearing huge salvers, or the bands of musicians, nor are there any more alfresco concerts, with nymphs and bacchantes. Instead there are masques, the life of the Ridotto or gaming-house, routs and intrigues in dainty boudoirs, and surreptitious love-making in that city of eternal carnival where the bauta was almost a national costume. Longhi holds that post which in French art is filled by Watteau, Fragonard, and Lancret, the painters of fetes galantes, and though he cannot be placed on an equal footing with those masters, he is representative and significant enough. On his canvases are preserved for us the mysteries of the toilet, over which ladies and young men of fashion dawdled through the morning, the drinking of chocolate in neglige, the momentous instants spent in choosing headgear and fixing patches, the towers of hair built by the modish coiffeur—children trooping in, in hoops and uniforms, to kiss their mother's hand, the fine gentleman choosing a waistcoat and ogling the pretty embroideress, the pert young maidservant slipping a billet-doux into a beauty's hand under her husband's nose, the old beau toying with a fan, or the discreet abbe taking snuff over the morning gazette. The grand ladies of Longhi's day pay visits in hoop and farthingale, the beaux make "a leg," and the lacqueys hand chocolate. The beautiful Venetians and their gallants swim through the gavotte or gamble in the Ridotto, or they hasten to assignations, disguised in wide bauti and carrying preposterous muffs. The Correr Museum contains a number of his paintings and also his book of original sketches. One of the most entertaining of his canvases represents a visit of patricians to a nuns' parlour. The nuns and their pupils lend an attentive ear to the whispers of the world. Their dresses are trimmed with point de Venise, and a little theatre is visible in the background. This and the "Sala del Ridotto" which hangs near, are marked by a free, bold handling, a richness of colouring, and more animation than is usual in his genre-pictures. He has not preserved the lovely, indeterminate colour or the impressionist touch which was the natural inheritance of Watteau or Tiepolo. His backgrounds are dark and heavy, and he makes too free a use of body colour; but his attitude is one of close observation—he enjoys depicting the life around him, and we suspect that he sees in it the most perfect form of social intercourse imaginable. Longhi is sometimes called the Goldoni of painting, and he certainly more nearly resembles the genial, humorous playwright than he does Hogarth, to whom he has also been compared. Yet his execution and technique are a little like Hogarth's, and it is possible that he was influenced by the elder and stronger master, who entered on his triumphant career as a satirical painter of society about 1734. This was just the time when Longhi abandoned his unlucky decorative style, and it is quite possible that he may have met with engravings of the "Marriage a la mode," and was stimulated by them to the study of eighteenth-century manners, though his own temperament is far removed from Hogarth's moral force and grim satire. His serene, painstaking observation is never distracted by grossness and violence. The Venetians of his day may have been—undoubtedly were—effeminate, licentious, and decadent, but they were kind and gracious, of refined manners, well-bred, genial and intelligent, and so Longhi has transcribed them. In the time which followed, ceilings were covered by Boucher, pastels by Latour were in demand, the scholars of David painted classical scenes, and Pietro Longhi was forgotten. Antonio Francesco Correr bought five hundred of his drawings from his son, Alessandro, but his works were ignored and dispersed. The classic and romantic fashions passed, but it was only in 1850 that the brothers de Goncourt, writing on art, revived consideration for the painter of a bygone generation. Many of his works are in private collections, especially in England, but few are in public galleries. The National Gallery is fortunate in possessing several excellent examples.



PRINCIPAL WORKS

Bergamo. Lochis: At the Gaming Table; Taking Coffee. Baglioni: The Festival of the Padrona. Dresden. Portrait of a Lady. Hampton Court. Three genre-pictures. London. Visit to a Circus; Visit to a Fortune-Teller; Portrait. Mond Collection: Card party; Portrait. Venice. Academy: Six genre-paintings. Correr Museum: Eleven paintings of Venetian life; Portrait of Goldoni. Palazzo Grassi: Frescoes; Scenes of fashionable life. Quirini-Stampalia: Eight paintings; Portraits.



CHAPTER XXXI

CANALE

While Piazetta and Tiepolo were proving themselves the inheritors of the great school of decorators, Venice herself was finding her chroniclers, and a school of landscape arose, of which Canale was the foremost member. Giovanni Antonio Canale was born in Venice in 1697, the same year as Tiepolo. His father earned his living at the profession, lucrative enough just then, of scene-painting, and Antonio learned to handle his brush, working at his side. In 1719 he went off to seek his fortune in Rome, and though he was obliged to help out his resources by his early trade, he was most concerned in the study of architecture, ancient and modern. Rome spoke to him through the eye, by the picturesque masses of stonework, the warm harmonious tones of classic remains and the effects of light upon them. He painted almost entirely out-of-doors, and has left many examples drawn from the ruins. His success in Rome was not remarkable, and he was still a very young man when he retraced his steps. On regaining his native town, he realised for the first time the beauty of its canals and palaces, and he never again wavered in his allegiance.

Two rivals were already in the field, Luca Carlevaris, whose works were freely bought by the rich Venetians, and Marco Ricci, the figures in whose views of Venice were often touched in by his uncle, Sebastiano; but Canale's growing fame soon dethroned them, "i cacciati del nido," as he said, using Dante's expression. In a generation full of caprice, delighting in sensational developments, Canale was methodical to a fault, and worked steadily, calmly producing every detail of Venetian landscape with untiring application and almost monotonous tranquillity. He lived in the midst of a band of painters who adored travel. Sebastiano Ricci was always on the move; Tiepolo spent much of his time in other cities and countries, and passed the last years of his life in Spain; Pietro Rotari was attached to the Court of St. Petersburg; Belotto, Canale's nephew, settled in Bohemia; but Canale remained at home, and, except for two short visits paid to England, contented himself with trips to Padua and Verona.

Early in life Canale entered into relations with Joseph Smith, the British Consul in Venice, a connoisseur who had not only formed a fine collection of pictures, but had a gallery from which he was very ready to sell to travellers. He bought of the young Venetian at a very low price, and contrived, unfairly enough, to acquire the right to all his work for a certain period of time, with the object of sending it, at a good profit, to London. For a time Canale's luminous views were bought by the English under these auspices, but the artist, presently discovering that he was making a bad bargain, came over to England, where he met with an encouraging reception, especially at Windsor Castle and from the Duke of Richmond. Canale spent two years in England and painted on the Thames and at Cambridge, but he could not stand the English climate and fled from the damp and fogs to his own lagoons.

To describe his paintings is to describe Venice at every hour of the day and night—Venice with its long array of noble palaces, with its Grand Canal and its narrow, picturesque waterways. He reproduces the Venice we know, and we see how little it has changed. The gondolas cluster round the landing-stages of the Piazzetta, the crowds hurry in and out of the arcades of the Ducal Palace, or he paints the festivals that still retained their splendour: the Great Bucentaur leaving the Riva dei Schiavoni on the Feast of the Ascension, or San Geremia and the entrance to the Cannaregio decked in flags for a feast-day. From one end to another of the Grand Canal, that "most beautiful street in the world," as des Commines called it in 1495, we can trace every aspect of Canale's time, when the city had as yet lost nothing of its splendour or its animation. At the entrance stands S. Maria della Salute, that sanctuary dear to Venetian hearts, built as a votive offering after the visitation of the plague in 1631. Its flamboyant dome, with its volutes, its population of stone saints, its green bronze door catching the light, pleased Canale, as it pleased Sargent in our own day, and he painted it over and over again. The annual fete of the Confraternity of the Carita takes place at the Scuola di San Rocco, and Canale paints the old Renaissance building which shelters so much of Tintoretto's finest work, decorated with ropes of greenery and gay with flags,[7] while Tiepolo has put in the red-robed, periwigged councillors and the gazing populace. Near it in the National Gallery hangs a "Regatta" with its array of boats, its shouting gondoliers, and its shadows lying across the range of palaces, and telling the exact hour of the day that it was sketched in; or, again, the painter has taken peculiar pleasure in expressing quiet days, with calm green waters and wide empty piazzas, divided by sun and shadow, with a few citizens plodding about their business in the hot midday, or a quiet little abbe crossing the piazza on his way to Mass. Canale has made a special study of the light on wall and facade, and of the transparent waters of the canals and the azure skies in which float great snowy fleeces.

[7] It is thought that it may have been painted from his studio.

His second visit to England was paid in 1751. He was received with open arms by the great world, and invited to the houses of the nobility in town and country. The English were delighted with his taste and with the mastery with which he painted architectural scenes, and in spite of advancing years he produced a number of compositions, which commanded high prices. The Garden of Vauxhall, the Rotunda at Ranelagh, Whitehall, Northumberland House, Eton College, were some of the subjects which attracted him, and the treatment of which was signalised by his calm and perfect balance. He made use of the camera ottica, which is in principal identical with the camera oscura. Lanzi says he amended its defects and taught its proper use, but it must be confessed that in the careful perspective of some of his scenes, its traces seem to haunt us and to convey a certain cold regularity. Canale was a marvellous engraver. Mantegna, Bellini, and Titian had placed engraving on a very high level in the Venetian School, and though at a later date it became too elaborate, Tiepolo and his son brought it back to simplicity. Canale aided them, and his eaux-fortes, of which he has left about thirty, are filled with light and breadth of treatment, and he is particularly happy in his brilliant, transparent water.

The high prices Canale obtained for his pictures in his lifetime led to the usual imitations. He was surrounded by painters whose whole ambition was limited to copying him. Among these were Marieschi, Visentini, Colombini, besides others now forgotten. More than fifty of his finest works were bought by Smith for George III. and fill a room at Windsor. He was made a member of the Academy at Dresden, and Bruhl, the Prime Minister of the Elector, obtained from him twenty-one works which now adorn the gallery there. Canale died in Venice, where he had lived nearly all his life, and where his gondola-studio was a familiar object in the Piazzetta, at the Lido, or anchored in the long canals.

His nephew, Bernardo Belotto, is often also called Canaletto, and it seems that both uncle and nephew were equally known by the diminutive. Belotto, too, went to Rome early in his career, where he attached himself to Panini, a painter of classic ruins, peopled with warriors and shepherds. He was, by all accounts, full of vanity and self-importance, and on a visit to Germany managed to acquire the title of Count, which he adhered to with great complacency. He travelled all over Italy looking for patronage, and was very eager to find the road to success and fortune. About the same time as his uncle, he paid a visit to London and was patronised by Horace Walpole, but in the full tide of success he was summoned to Dresden, where the Elector, disappointed at not having secured the services of the uncle, was fain to console himself with those of the nephew. The extravagant and profligate Augustus II., whose one idea was to extract money by every possible means from his subjects, in order to adorn his palaces, was consistently devoted to Belotto, who was in his element as a Court painter. He paints all his uncle's subjects, and it is not always easy to distinguish between the two; but his paintings are dull and stiff as compared with those of Canale, though he is sometimes fine in colour, and many of his views are admirably drawn.

SOME WORKS OF CANALE

It is impossible to draw up any exhaustive list, so many being in private collections.

Dresden. The Grand Canal; Campo S. Giacomo; Piazza S. Marco; Church and Piazza of SS. Giovanni and Paolo. Florence. The Piazzetta. Hampton Court. The Colosseum. London. Scuola di San Rocco; Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh; S. Pietro in Castello, Venice. Paris. Louvre: Church of S. Maria della Salute. Venice. Heading; Courtyard of a Palace. Vienna. Liechtenstein Gallery: Church and Piazza of S. Mark, Venice; Canal of the Giudecca, Venice; View on Grand Canal; The Piazzetta. Windsor. About fifty paintings. Wallace Collection. The Giudecca; Piazza San Marco; Church of San Simione; S. Maria della Salute; A Fete on the Grand Canal; Ducal Palace; Dogana from the Molo; Palazzo Corner; A Water-fete; The Rialto; S. Maria della Salute; A Canal in Venice.



CHAPTER XXXII

FRANCESCO GUARDI

An entry in Gradenigo's diary of 1764, preserved in the Museo Correr, speaks of "Francesco Guardi, painter of the quarter of SS. Apostoli, along the Fondamenta Nuove, a good pupil of the famous Canaletto, having by the aid of the camera ottica, most successfully painted two canvases (not small) by the order of a stranger (an Englishman), with views of the Piazza San Marco, towards the Church and the Clock Tower, and of the Bridge of the Rialto and buildings towards the Cannaregio, and have to-day examined them under the colonnades of the Procurazie and met with universal applause."

Francesco Guardi was a son of the Austrian Tyrol, and his mountain ancestry may account, as in the case of Titian, for the freshness and vigour of his art. Both his father, who settled in Venice, and his brother were painters. His son became one in due time, and the profession being followed by four members of the family accounts for the indifferent works often attributed to Guardi.

His indebtedness to Canale is universally acknowledged, and perhaps it is true that he never attains to the monumental quality, the traditional dignity which marks Canale out as a great master, but he differs from Canale in temperament, style, and technique. Canale is a much more exact and serious student of architectural detail; Guardi, with greater visible vigour, obliterates detail, and has no hesitation in drawing in buildings which do not really appear. In his oval painting of the Ducal Palace (Wallace Collection) he makes it much loftier and more spacious than it really is. In his "Piazzetta" he puts in a corner of the Loggia where it would not actually be seen. In the "Fair in Piazza S. Marco" the arch from under which the Fair appears is gigantic, and he foreshortens the wing of the royal palace. He curtails the length of the columns in the piazza and so avoids monotony of effect, and he often alters the height of the campaniles he uses, making them tall and slender or short and broad, as his picture requires. At one time he produced some colossal pictures, in several of which Mr. Simonson, who has written an admirable life of the painter, believes that the hand of Canale is perceptible in collaboration; but it was not his natural element, and he often became heavy in colour and handling. In 1782 he undertook a commission from Pietro Edwards, who was a noted connoisseur and inspector of State pictures, and had been appointed superintendent in 1778 of an official studio for the restoration of old masters.

Edwards had important dealings with Guardi, who was directed to paint four leading incidents in the rejoicings in honour of the visit of Pius IV. to Venice. The Venetians themselves had become indifferent patrons of art, but Venice attracted great numbers of foreign visitors, and before the second half of the eighteenth century the export of old masters had already become an established trade. There is no sign, however, that Joseph Smith, who retained his consulship till 1760, extended any patronage to Guardi, though he enriched George III.'s collection with works of the chief contemporary artists of Venice. It is probable that Guardi had been warned against him by Canale and profited by the latter's experience.

We can divide his work into three categories. 1. Views of Venice. 2. Public ceremonies. 3. Landscapes. Gradenigo mentions casually that he used the camera ottica, but though we may consider it probable, we cannot trace the use of it in his works. He is not only a painter of architecture, but pays great attention to light and atmosphere, and aims at subtle effects; a transparent haze floats over the lagoons, or the sun pierces though the morning mists. His four large pendants in the Wallace Collection show his happiest efforts; light glances off the water and is reflected on the shadowed walls. His views round the Salute bring vividly before us those delicious morning hours in Venice when the green tide has just raced up the Grand Canal, when a fresh wind is lifting and curling all the loose sails and fluttering pennons, and when the gondoliers are straining at the oars, as their light craft is caught and blown from side to side upon the rippling water. The sky occupies much of his space, he makes searching studies of it, and his favourite effect is a flash of light shooting across a piled-up mass of clouds. The line of the horizon is low, and he exhibits great mastery in painting the wide lagoons, but he also paints rough seas, and is one of the few masters of his day—perhaps the only one—who succeeds in representing a storm at sea.

Often as he paints the same subjects he never becomes mechanical or photographic. We may sometimes tire of the monotony of Canale's unerring perspective and accurate buildings, but Guardi always finds some new rendering, some fresh point of interest. Sometimes he gives us a summer day, when Venice stands out in light, her white palaces reflected in the sun-illumined water; sometimes he is arrested by old churches bathed in shadow and fusing into the rich, dark tones of twilight. His boats and figures are introduced with great spirit and brio, and are alive with that handling which a French critic has described as his griffe endiablee.



His masterly and spirited painting of crowds enables him to reproduce for us all those public ceremonies which Venice retained as long as the Republic lasted: yearly pilgrimages of the Doge to Venetian churches, to the Salute to commemorate the cessation of the plague, to San Zaccaria on Easter Day, the solemn procession on Corpus Christi Day, receptions of ambassadors, and, most gorgeous of all, the Feast of the Wedding of the Adriatic. He has faithfully preserved the ancient ceremonial which accompanied State festivities. In the "Fete du Jeudi Gras" (Louvre) he illustrates the acrobatic feats which were performed before Doge Mocenigo. A huge Temple of Victory is erected on the Piazzetta, and gondoliers are seen climbing on each other's shoulders and dancing upon ropes. His motley crowds show that the whole population, patricians as well as people, took part in the feasts. He has also left many striking interiors: among others, that of the Sala del Gran Consiglio, where sometimes as many as a thousand persons were assembled, the "Reception of the Doge and Senate by Pius IV." (which formed one of the series ordered by Pietro Edwards), or the fine "Interior of a Theatre," exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts in 1911, belonging to a series of which another is at Munich.

In his landscapes Guardi does not pay very faithful attention to nature. The landscape painters of the eighteenth century, as Mr. Simonson points out, were not animated by any very genuine impulse to study nature minutely. It was the picturesque element which appealed to them, and they were chiefly concerned to reproduce romantic features, grouped according to fancy. Guardi composes half fantastic scenes, introducing classic remains, triumphal arches, airy Palladian monuments. His capricci include compositions in which Roman ruins, overgrown with foliage, occupy the foreground of a painting of Venetian palaces, but in which the combination is carried out with so much sparkle and nervous life and such charm of style, that it is attractive and piquant rather than grotesque.

England is richest in Guardis, of any country, but France in one respect is better off, in possessing no less than eleven fine paintings of public ceremonials. Guardi may be considered the originator of small sketches, and perhaps the precursor of those glib little views which are handed about the Piazza at the present day. His drawings are fairly numerous, and are remarkably delicate and incisive in touch. A large collection which he left to his son is now in the Museo Correr. In his later years he was reduced to poverty and used to exhibit sketches in the Piazza, parting with them for a few ducats, and in this way flooding Venice with small landscapes. The exact spot occupied by his bottega is said to be at the corner of the Palazzo Reale, opposite the Clock Tower. The house in which he died still exists in the Campiello della Madonna, No. 5433, Parrocchia S. Canziano, and has a shrine dedicated to the Madonna attached to it. When quite an old man, Guardi paid a visit to the home of his ancestors, at Mastellano in the Austrian Tyrol, and made a drawing of Castello Corvello on the route. To this day his name is remembered with pride in his Tyrolean valley.

SOME WORKS OF GUARDI

Bergamo. Lochis: Landscapes. Berlin. Grand Canal; Lagoon; Cemetery Island. London. Views in Venice. Milan. Museo Civico: Landscapes. Poldi-Pezzoli: Piazzetta; Dogana; Landscapes. Oxford. Taylorian Museum: Views in Venice. Padua. Views in Venice. Paris. Procession of the Doge to S. Zaccaria; Embarkment in Bucentaur; Festival at Salute; "Jeudi Gras" in Venice; Corpus Christi; Sala di Collegio; Coronation of Doge. Turin. Cottage; Staircase; Bridge over Canal. Venice. Museo Correr: The Ridotto; Parlour of Convent. Verona. Landscapes. Wallace Collection. The Rialto; San Giorgio Maggiore (two); S. Maria della Salute; Archway in Venice; Vaulted Arcades; The Dogana.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

It is an advantage to the student of Italian art to be able to read French, German, and Italian, for though translations appear of the most important works, there are many interesting articles and monographs of minor artists which are otherwise inaccessible.

Vasari, not always trustworthy, either in dates, facts, or opinions, yet delightfully human in his histories, is indispensable, and new editions and translations are constantly issued. Sansoni's edition (Florence), with Milanesi's notes, is the most authoritative; and for translations, those of Mrs. Foster (Messrs. Blashfield and Hopkins), and a new edition in the Temple classics (Dent, 8 vols., 2s. each vol.).

Ridolfi, the principal contemporary authority on Venetian artists, who published his Maraviglie dell' arte nine years after Domenico Tintoretto's death, is only to be read in Italian, though the anecdotes with which his work abounds are made use of by every writer.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle's Painting in North Italy (Murray) is a storehouse of painstaking, minute, and, on the whole, marvellously correct information and sound opinion. It supplies a foundation, fills gaps, and supplements individual biographies as no other book does. For the early painters, down to the time of the Bellini, I Origini dei pittori veneziani, by Professor Leonello Venturi, Venice, 1907, is a large book, written with mastery and insight, and well illustrated; La Storia della pittura veneziana is another careful work, which deals very minutely with the early school of mosaics.

In studying the Bellini, the late Mr. S. A. Strong has The Brothers Bellini (Bell's Great Masters), and the reader should not fail to read Mr. Roger Fry's Bellini (Artist's Library), a scholarly monograph, short but reliable, and full of suggestion and appreciation, though written in a cool, critical spirit. Dr. Hills has dealt ably with Pisanello (Duckworth).

Molmenti and Ludwig in their monumental work Vittore Carpaccio, translated by Mr. R. H. Cust (Murray, 1907), and Paul Kristeller in the equally important Mantegna, translated by Mr. S. A. Strong (Longmans, 1901), seem to have exhausted all that there is to be said for the moment concerning these two painters.

It is almost superfluous to mention Mr. Berenson's two well-known volumes, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, and the North Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Putnam). They are brilliant essays which supplement every other work, overflowing with suggestive and critical matter, supplying original thoughts, and summing up in a few pregnant words the main features and the tendencies of the succeeding stages.

In studying Giorgione, we cannot dispense with Pater's essay, included in The Renaissance. The author is not always well informed as to facts—he wrote in the early days of criticism—but he is rich in idea and feeling. Mr. Herbert Cook's Life of Giorgione (Bell's Great Masters) is full and interesting. Some authorities question his attributions as being too numerous, but whether we regard them as authentic works of the master or as belonging to his school, the illustrations he gives add materially to our knowledge of the Giorgionesque.

When we come to Titian we are well off. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's Life of Titian (Murray, out of print), in two large volumes, is well written and full of good material, from which subsequent writers have borrowed. An excellent Life, full of penetrating criticism, by Mr. C. Ricketts, was lately brought out by Methuen (Classics of Art), complete with illustrations, and including a minute analysis of Titian's technique. Sir Claude Phillips's Monograph on Titian will appeal to every thoughtful lover of the painter's genius, and Dr. Gronau has written a good and scholarly Life (Duckworth).

Mr. Berenson's Lorenzo Lotto must be read for its interest and learning, given with all the author's charm and lucidity. It includes an essay on Alvise Vivarini.

My own Tintoretto (Methuen, Classics of Art) gives a full account of the man and his work, and especially deals exhaustively with the scheme and details of the Scuola di San Rocco. Professor Thode has written a detailed and profusely illustrated Life of Tintoretto in the Knackfuss Series, and the Paradiso has been treated at length and illustrated in great detail in a very scholarly edition de luxe by Mr. F. O. Osmaston. It is the fashion to discard Ruskin, but though we may allow that his judgments are exaggerated, that he reads more into a picture than the artist intended, and that he is too fond of preaching sermons, there are few critics who have so many ideas to give us, or who are so informed with a deep love of art, and both Modern Painters and the Stones of Venice should be read.

M. Charles Yriarte has written a Life of Paolo Veronese, which is full of charm and knowledge. It is interesting to take a copy of Boschini's Della pittura veneziana, 1797, when visiting the galleries, the palaces, and the churches of Venice. His lists of the pictures, as they were known in his day, often open our eyes to doubtful attributions. Second-hand copies of Boschini are not difficult to pick up. When the later-century artists are reached, a good sketch of the Venice of their period is supplied by Philippe Monnier's delightful Venice in the Eighteenth Century (Chatto and Windus), which also has a good chapter on the lesser Venetian masters. The best Life of Tiepolo is in Italian, by Professor Pompeo Molmenti. The smaller masters have to be hunted for in many scattered essays; a knowledge of Goldoni adds point to Longhi's pictures. Canaletto and his nephew, Belotto, have been treated by M. Uzanne, Les Deux Canaletto; and Mr. Simonson has written an important and charming volume on Francesco Guardi (Methuen, 1904), with beautiful reproductions of his works. Among other books which give special information are Morelli's two volumes, Italian Painters in Borghese and Doria Pamphili, and In Dresden and Munich Galleries, translated by Miss Jocelyn ffoulkes (Murray); and Dr. J. P. Richter's magnificent catalogue of the Mond Collection—which, though published at fifteen guineas, can be seen in the great art libraries—has some valuable chapters on the Venetian masters.



INDEX

Academy, Florence, 28 Venice, 13, 16, 19, 32, 36, 38, 40, 43, 47, 52, 57, 67, 80, 102, 116, 117, 171, 183, 196, 202, 205, 206, 210, 211, 217, 219, 226, 227, 242, 262, 267, 271, 277, 281, 286, 295, 296, 308, 313, 320 Adoration of Magi, 28, 31, 116, 131, 197, 205, 287 Adoration of Shepherds, 116, 196, 222, 273, 275 Agnolo Gaddi, 15 Alemagna, Giovanni, 29-32, 36, 37, 58 Altichiero, 24, 25 Alvise Vivarini, 58-63, 65, 66, 69, 79, 104, 105, 112, 187, 190, 223, 330 Amalteo, Pomponio, 219 Amigoni, 292 Anconae, 12, 17, 18, 24, 36, 45, 59, 60, 187 Angelico, Fra, 48 Annunciation, 16, 26, 45, 178, 183, 258, 286 Antonello da Messina, 50, 51, 59, 62, 66 Antonio da Murano, 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, 58 Antonio Negroponte, 37, 44 Antonio Veneziano, 15 Aretino, 163, 166, 167, 172-174, 182, 192, 201, 234, 236, 240 Ascension, 41 Augsburg, 176, 266, 276

Badile, 229 Balestra, 287 Baptism of Christ, 41, 98, 255 Bartolommeo Vivarini, 32, 36, 37, 38, 48, 58, 59, 64, 189, 223, 225 Basaiti, Marco, 104, 111-116 Bassano, 10, 247, 269-276, 282 Bastiani, Lazzaro, 70, 73, 79 Battoni, Pompeo, 297, 298 Bellini, Gentile, 48-57, 68, 70, 81, 83, 89, 90, 99, 101, 103, 146 Bellini, Giovanni, 10, 43, 48, 55, 61, 62, 63, 69, 78, 81, 82, 84-89, 90, 92, 94-101, 103, 104, 107, 109, 112-114, 122, 123, 127, 129, 130, 134, 140, 146, 147, 152, 155, 158, 159, 179, 186, 187, 223, 225, 318, 329, 330 Bellini, Jacopo, 27, 28, 39-43, 58, 81-84, 86 Belotto, 315, 319-331 Bembo, Cardinal, 97, 111, 174, 240 Benson, Mr., 47, 80, 116, 117, 143 Berenson, Mr., 156, 187, 195, 210, 221, 229, 243, 307, 330 Bergamo, 101, 114, 116, 117, 141, 143, 185, 188, 190, 196, 211, 219, 226, 227, 276, 308, 313, 328 Berlin, 19, 32, 35, 47, 57, 66, 80, 101, 115-117, 139, 182, 196, 211, 223, 226, 227, 266, 308, 328 Bissolo, 104, 114, 115, 117 Blanc, M. Charles, 240, 288, 298 Bologna, 36, 38, 60, 167, 288, 309 Bonifazio, 203-206, 210, 243, 245, 250, 270, 281, 310 Bonsignori, 224, 275 Bordone, Paris, 203, 206, 208-211, 219, 231, 290 Borghese, Villa, 154, 188, 194, 197, 331 Boschini, 104, 282, 287, 331 Boston, 139 Botticelli, 127, 159 Brera, 47, 57, 101, 115, 117, 143, 194, 205, 209, 211, 251, 304 Brescia, 182, 196, 219, 220, 222, 226, 227 Bridgewater House, 182, 211 British Museum, 41, 263 Broker's patent, 130, 169, 248 Brusasorci, 229 Buonconsiglio, 223, 224 Burckhardt, 298 Burlington Magazine, 18 Byzantine art, 11, 13, 21

Calderari, 219 Carlevaris, Luca, 292, 315 Caliari, Carlotto, 282 Caliari, Paolo. See Veronese Campagnola, Domenico, 151 Canal, Fabio, 307 Canale, Gian Antonio, 292, 298, 314-320, 322, 331 Canaletto. See Canale Caravaggio, 288 Cariani, 141-143, 204 Carpaccio, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 79, 80, 103, 122, 123, 146, 191 Carracci, 88, 288, 298 Carriera. See Rosalba Carriera Castagno, Andrea del, 27, 48 Castello, Milan, 51 Catena, Vincenzo, 104, 108-111, 114, 202, 206 Cathedrals, Ascoli, 47 Bassano, 270, 276 Conegliano, 115 Cremona, 215, 220, 226 Murano, 109 Spilimbergo, 226 Treviso, 183, 211, 215, 226 Verona, 183, 227 Celesti, 287 Chelsea Hospital, 289 Churches— Bergamo. S. Alessandro, 117, 196 S. Bartolommeo, 188 S. Bernardino, 190 S. Spirito, 114, 117, 196 Brescia. S. Clemente, 227 SS. Nazaro e Celso, 182 Castelfranco. S. Liberale, 132 S. Daniele. S. Antonino, 212, 214, 226 Padua. Eremitani, 48, 83, 224 Il Santo, 25, 227 S. Giustina, 220, 242 S. Maria in Vanzo, 276 S. Zeno, 48 Pesaro. S. Francesco, 102 Piacenza. Madonna di Campagna, 216 Ravenna. S. Domenico, 117 Rome. S. Maria del Popolo, 200 S. Pietro in Montorio, 200, 202 Venice. S. Alvise, 304 SS. Apostoli, 307, 308 S. Barnaba, 242 Carmine, 107, 116, 197 S. Cassiano, 267 SS. Ermagora and Fortunato, 245 S. Fava, 288, 308 S. Francesco della Vigna, 37, 38, 242 Gesuati, 296 S. Giacomo dell' Orio, 197, 277 S. Giobbe, 67, 78, 92, 95, 113 S. Giorgio Maggiore, 259, 263, 267 S. Giovanni in Bragora, 17, 38, 64, 67, 98, 106, 116, 211 S. Giovanni Crisostomo, 98, 102 S. Giovanni Elemosinario, 168, 287 SS. Giovanni and Paolo, 53, 101, 116 S. Maria Formosa, 31, 38, 196 S. Maria dei Frari, 38, 65, 67, 92, 93, 102, 112, 157, 161, 180, 183, 219, 275, 307 S. Maria Mater Domini, 109, 116, 267 S. Maria dei Miracoli, 20 S. Maria dell' Orto, 102, 106, 116, 249, 267 S. Maria della Salute, 173, 262, 267, 317, 324, 325 S. Mark's, 14, 19, 27, 49, 53, 247, 287 S. Pantaleone, 30, 285, 287 Pieta, 221, 227, 308 S. Pietro in Castello, 287, 296 S. Pietro in Murano, 92, 93 S. Polo, 259, 267 Redentore, 63, 64, 67, 117 S. Rocco, 267, 296 S. Salvatore, 178, 183 Scalzi, 308 S. Sebastiano, 230, 236, 241, 242 S. Spirito, 173 S. Stefano, 260, 267 S. Trovaso, 16, 116, 267 S. Vitale, 79, 80 S. Zaccaria, 17, 97, 112, 134, 325 Verona. S. Anastasia, 24, 25, 28, 31, 41 S. Antonio, 24, 28 S. Fermo, 26, 28 S. Tomaso, 296 Vicenza. S. Corona, 98, 102, 227 Monte Berico, 105, 223, 224, 227, 242 Cima da Conegliano, 66, 98, 99, 103-108, 123, 322 Colombini, 319 Confraternity, Carita, 171 S. Mark, 69, 206, 245 Contarini, Giovanni, 287 Cook, Sir F., 183 Cook, Mr. Herbert, 330 Correggio, 189, 300 Correr Museum (Museo Civico), 19, 79, 84, 87, 102, 117, 287, 311, 313, 326 Crivelli, Carlo, 38, 44-47, 189 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, 215, 329, 330 Crucifixion, 25, 41, 84, 255, 256, 262

Dante, 264 David, 297, 313 Doges— Barbarigo, 93 Dandolo, 11 Giustiniani, 49 Gradenigo, 206 Grimani, 170 Loredano, 100, 109 Mocenigo, 325 Donatello, 34, 82, 87 Doria Gallery, 194, 331 Dresden, 139, 182, 196, 210, 211, 242, 266, 276, 294, 296, 320 Duerer, Albert, 59, 99, 150

Edwards, Pietro, 323, 325 Este, 305 Este, Isabela d', 96, 97, 159, 229

Fabriano, Gentile da, 19, 21, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 39, 42, 62 Florence, 4, 9, 21, 22, 28, 101, 117, 122, 123, 139, 182, 197, 202, 211, 242, 266 Florentine, 3, 5, 7, 35, 121, 122, 125, 135, 153, 199, 200, 251 Florigerio, 217 Fondaco dei Tedeschi, 129, 130, 147 Fragonard, 33 Fry, Mr. Roger, 85, 89, 330 Fumiani, Gianbattista, 285, 286

Gaston de Foix, 222 Giambono, Michele, 17, 18, 27 Giordano, Luca, 285 Giorgione, 10, 65, 97, 113, 125, 126-135, 137, 139-142, 147-149, 152-155, 166, 177, 179, 184-187, 193, 206, 210, 213, 214, 216, 219, 222, 310, 330 Giotto, 4, 11, 15, 24, 33, 86 Goldoni, Carlo, 312, 331 Goncourt, de, 313 Guardi, Francesco, 298, 321-324, 326, 328, 331 Guariento, 15, 17, 62, 122 Guercino, 297 Guido, 297 Guilds, 12, 16, 22, 23, 29, 39, 75, 198, 251 Guillaume de Guilleville, 94

Hampton Court, 143, 210, 211, 219, 266, 289, 320 Hazlitt, 6, 8 Hogarth, 289, 312

Jacobello del Fiore, 16, 19, 27, 164 Jacopo Bellini. See Bellini

Kristeller, M. Paul, 330

Lancret, 311 Last Judgment, 238 Last Supper, 237, 208, 259 Layard, Lady, 50, 57, 80, 116 Lazzarini, Gregorio, 286, 287, 296, 300 Leonardo, 122, 127, 136, 140, 159, 162 Liberi, Pietro, 285, 287, 295 Licinio, Bernardino, 218 Licinio, G. A. See Pordenone Lippo, Fra, 48 London (National Gallery), 47, 57, 66, 100, 101, 115-117, 133, 141, 143, 156, 159, 182, 197, 201, 202, 208, 211, 218, 221, 222, 226, 227, 242, 261, 266, 276, 308, 313, 320, 328 Longhi, Pietro, 288, 298, 309-313 Lorenzo di San Severino, 46 Lorenzo Veneziano, 16, 17, 19 Loreto, 193, 197 Lotto, Lorenzo, 172, 186, 187-196, 204, 222, 224, 275, 330 Louvre, 40, 41, 43, 50, 57, 66, 115-117, 143, 161, 165, 177, 178, 182, 196, 202, 211, 233, 235, 242, 266, 277, 297, 308, 320, 328 Luciani. See Sebastian del Piombo Ludwig, Professor, 94, 203, 330

Madrid, 139, 150, 182, 264, 266, 302, 304 Mansueti, Giovanni, 56, 79 Mantegna, 39, 42, 49, 58, 59, 77, 84, 96, 159, 215, 223, 224, 300, 318, 330 Marieschi, 319 Martino da Udine. See Pellegrino Maser, Villa, 231, 242 Masolino, 41 Mengs, Raphael, 302 Michelangelo, 110, 121, 122, 137, 164, 174, 199, 200-202, 244, 249, 300 Milan, Ambrosiana, 66, 116, 275, 276 Brera. See Brera Mocetto, Girolamo, 225 Molmenti, Professor, 330, 331 Mond Collection, 18, 20, 47, 49, 101 Monnier, Philippe, 306, 331 Montagna, Bartolommeo, 105, 114, 222-224, 270 Morelli, 177, 203, 331 Moretto, 221, 222 Morto da Feltre, 130, 214 Munich, 116, 183 Murano, 29, 102, 116, 217, 226 Museo Civico. See Correr

Naples, 50, 57, 66, 102, 183 National Gallery. See London Niccolo di Pietro, 16, 17, 20 Niccolo Semitocolo, 16, 17, 19

Osmaston, Mr. F. O., 331

Padovanino, Il, 286, 196 Padua, 19, 28, 34-37, 49, 59, 82, 86, 87, 116, 151, 155, 183, 223, 226, 227, 242, 272, 276 Palaces— Milan. Archinto, 301, 308 Clerici, 301 Dugnani, 301, 304 Rome. Colonna, 196 Stra. Pisani, 302 Venice. Ducal, 15, 87, 90, 102, 109, 114-117, 170, 183, 211, 235, 236, 242, 260, 265, 267, 269, 272, 277, 281, 295, 308, 316 Giovanelli, 136 Labia, 304, 308 Rezzonico, 308 Verona. Canossa, 302 Wuerzburg, 301, 308 Palma Giovine, 285, 287, 295 Palma Vecchio, 141, 184-188, 196, 203, 204, 214, 219, 231, 244 Paolo da Venezia, 14 Paris. See Louvre Parma, 115 Pellegrino, 213, 214, 219, 226 Pennacchi, 104, 214 Perugino, 133, 134, 202 Pesaro, 90, 94, 102 Pesellino, 48 Piacenza, 216, 226 Piero di Cosimo, 135 Pieta, 86, 87, 179, 199, 223, 224 Pintoricchio, 74, 135 Pisanello (Pisano), 21, 22, 24-28, 31, 33, 34, 37, 39-42, 62, 224, 330 Pordenone, 169, 170, 202, 204, 214-221, 226 Previtali, 104, 114, 115

Quirizio da Murano, 37

Raphael, 140, 161, 174, 200, 213, 221, 234 Ravenna, 117, 132 Rembrandt, 285 Ricci, Battista, 288, 300 Ricci, Marco, 315 Ricci, Sebastiano, 148, 288, 292, 296, 315 Richter, Dr. J. P., 331 Ricketts, Mr. C., 330 Ridolfi, 108, 229, 234, 247, 282, 287, 329 Rimini, 87, 89, 102 Robusti, Domenico, 246, 282 Robusti, Jacopo. See Tintoretto Robusti, Marietta, 246 Romanino, 219-221 Rome, 143, 183, 188, 196, 197, 202, 211, 227, 267, 277, 314, 319 Rondinelli, 104, 114, 117 Rosalba Carriera, 288, 292-294, 296 Rubens, 160, 165, 170, 285 Ruskin, 264, 331

Sansovino, 92, 167, 174, 192 Santa Croce, Girolamo da, 56 Sarto, Andrea del, 137, 140 Savoldo, 66, 222 Sebastian del Piombo, 140, 198, 199-202, 228 Siena, 4, 11, 12 Signorelli, 121 Simonson, Mr., 322, 326, 331 Smith, Joseph, 315, 323 Speranza, 223 Spilimbergo, 216, 226 Strong, Mr. S. A., 329, 330

Taylor, Miss Cameron, 94 Tiepolo, Domenico, 307 Tiepolo, G. B., 10, 297-307, 309, 312, 314, 315, 317, 318, 331 Tintoretto, 10, 15, 25, 173, 179, 181, 210, 231, 234, 243, 245-251, 253-256, 258-267, 269, 273, 276, 281, 282, 285, 300, 317, 330, 331 Titian, 65, 106, 130, 135, 137, 143, 144-160, 162-178, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187, 191-193, 201, 204, 205, 210, 215, 217, 220, 221, 224, 231, 236, 239, 243-245, 250, 256, 265, 273-275, 281, 290, 318, 321, 330 Torbido, Francesco, 225 Treviso, 108, 183, 186, 202, 211, 215, 226, 239

Uccello, Paolo, 26, 42, 48 Urbino, 163, 168, 174 Uzanne, M. O., 331

Valmarana, Villa, 303 Varotari. See Padovanino Vasari, 15, 89, 130, 148, 169, 170, 174, 178, 199, 209, 219, 225, 247, 329 Vecellio. See Titian Vecellio, Marco, 171 Vecellio, Orazio, 164, 174 Vecellio, Pomponio, 166 Velasquez, 285 Venice. See Academy Venturi, Professor Antonio, 40 Venturi, Professor Leonello, vi, 38, 329 Verona, 22, 24, 25, 28, 183, 227, 229, 242, 302, 315, 328 Veronese, Paolo, 221, 228, 230-242, 247, 253, 269, 281, 283, 310, 331 Vicentino, 287 Vicenza, 57, 102, 185, 227, 242-277, 296, 303, 307 Vienna, 67, 80, 110, 116, 117, 131, 143, 149, 183, 196, 197, 211, 242, 268, 277, 320 Visentini, 319 Viterbo, 202 Vivarini. See Alvise Vivarini. See Bartolommeo

Wallace Collection, 183, 320, 328 Walpole, Horace, 292, 294, 319 Watteau, 297, 311, 312 Wickhoff, Dr., 154 Windsor, 47, 320

Yriarte, M. Charles, 229, 331

Zanetti, 129, 148, 246, 269, 282, 283, 301 Zelotti, 230 Zoppo, Marco, 44 Zucchero, Federigo, 236

THE END