On the splendor of Venice—Italo-Byzantine painters of the 14th Century—Paduan, Veronese, and Umbrian Painters at Venice—Jacopo Bellini—Squarcione’s school at Padua, Carlo Crivelli—Andrea Mantegna, mentor for Northern Italy—Antonello da Messina’s Realism—The flowering of the old Narrative School in Gentile Bellino—Giovanni Bellini—The backward Vivarini—Carpaccio and the end of the old Narrative Style—Literary background of Giorgione’s Art—Giorgione of Castelfranco.

When, about the middle of the fifth century, a pitiful throng of refugees sought safety from Attila and his Huns in the fens at the head of the Adriatic, they took with them what was left of the constructive genius of the Roman Empire. They raised amid the lagoons a healthful and convenient city, which in the course of centuries became the most beautiful in Europe. They developed a strong and wise oligarchy, under forms sufficiently democratic to satisfy the people. They attained an extraordinary capacity for diplomacy and overseas trade—a brilliant commercialized civilization. Secure in their isolation and wealth, the Venetians mediated the long strife between the popes and the Teutonic emperors, making favorable terms with both. Venice enjoyed a wholly exceptional political stability. No other commune of Europe could have fittingly assumed the title, Serenissima. Her galleys and sailing craft plied to Candia, Rhodes, Smyrna, Alexandretta, Constantinople. Down the Adriatic to Malta, her trading stations shone white under the yellow cliffs. Her incoming ships brought back the splendid rugs and silks and embroideries from the Levant, the beautiful potteries of Asia Minor, Persia and distant China, the veined marbles and porphyries of Egypt and of Istria to build into her churches and palaces. She was astute and powerful enough to divert a crusade into a plundering expedition against her rival, Constantinople. And thus she got the four antique bronze horses still chafing above the portico of St. Mark’s and many a relic of the later Byzantine splendor. Her doors ever opened to the Orient. Her quays swarmed with turbaned traders. The Greeks had their churches and confraternities at Venice, and so had the Slavonians. For articles of luxury the northern caravans came to Venice over the Brenner to load from the German warehouses on the Grand Canal.

So stable, rich and proud a city was singularly slow in producing its own art. Venice was never primarily a manufacturing community, and from the first she expected to import most articles of luxury and display. Thus when the manydomed Basilica rose over the body of her patron, St. Mark, Venice called masters from Constantinople to enrich the surfaces with mosaics, and when, towards the end of the fourteenth century, she wished to picture the new Palace of the Doges, she called not her own artists to the task, but those of Padua, Verona and distant Fabriano. Her originality and greatness in painting do not clearly assert themselves until about 1475 in the work of the brothers Bellini, and by 1577, the year of Titian’s death, the period of her artistic supremacy has passed. The whole development is comprised within a century; its acceleration is even more remarkable than the tardiness of its appearance. In three generations Venetian painting made the progress that had required six in Tuscany, and the whole preparatory period, which in Florence stretched over a century and three-quarters, is included in the single life of such a master as Giovanni Bellini.

This means that Venetian painting followed simpler and more unperturbed ideals than that of Florence. The composure, complacency, and self-centered quality of the Venetians was a source of strength to their artists and as well a limitation. The city stuck closely to its chief business of gaining greatly in order to live magnificently. And unlike Florence, Venice interprets magnificence in the most material terms, in terms of velvet and veined marbles, fair skins and lustrous hair, in feasting and measured revelry, grave and gentle manners, colorful pageantry in honor of God, his saints and the Serenissima Republica. You will not find poets, scholars, scientists a-plenty at Venice. Her painters have no tendency to be also architects, sculptors, mathematicians, theorists in æsthetics; they stick placidly to the main business of painting. And perhaps just because the Venetian painter refused to be diverted from the problems proper to his craft, his progress was so rapid and assured, and the Venetian school, simply as painting, the most beautiful school of painting the world has ever seen.

It was written in the lagoon itself that Venetian painting should be a school of color. Long before the marble and porphyry palaces and the shining bridges of Renaissance Venice spanned the canals, the brown water gave its satiny reflections of rude hut, coppered galley, tawny sail, and, in days of complete calm, of the serrated ivory of the Julian Alps or the velvety azure of the Euganean Hills. As the city grew palatially, the marble and gold of the palace fronts, and spires and domes, with the buff and red of soaring bell towers, further enriched the shimmering of the lagoon. Its waters were ruffled not merely by winds blending and effacing the weaving of borrowed colors, but also by the passing of gilded processional barges with rhythmical oars celebrating the Assumption of the Virgin or the marriage of Venice to the Adriatic.

Ashore the splendor was hardly less. Along the balustrades of innumerable little bridges, the rose or yellow marble got an ineffable finish from the touch of countless hands. Dusky archways gave upon courts encrusted with variegated marbles, porphyry and mosaics. In the gloomy streets, gay pictorial frescoes enlivened the fronts of the less pretentious houses. In the great Piazza of St. Mark and other open spaces, often passed in solemn procession the religious confraternities called Schools, the members garbed with a splendor rare even in the Renaissance. There were clubs of young fops, not yet broken to the paternal commerce, who gave themselves to the invention and display of the finest tailoring and haberdashery. And the unorganized kindred activities of the women of all ages were as effective from the point of view of social display. Such was the spectacle that Venice offered the painter for record and even more for inspiration. And the greatness of the Venetian painters lay in their capacity to lend to this chiefly material splendor their own kind of ideality.

When Venetian painting about the year 1350 made its first timid assertions of originality, the leading influence was that of the late Byzantine artists of the Slavonian coast and the Ionian Islands. We see their narrative painting assuming a very slightly Italian guise in the composite altar-front preserved in the museum of Trieste. Figure 208. Its date cannot be very late in the fourteenth century, and the stereotyped religious compositions represent models vividly before the Venetian painter up to the Renaissance. Such Venetian masters as Paolo, active from 1332 to 1358, and Lorenzo, whose work falls a generation later, make slight and external improvements on the Byzantine manner.^[70] They reject its more rigid formulas—the gold web over drapery, the multiplied small folds, the painfully schematized muscles. They add on their own account radiant blond coloring, splendid brocades, more gorgeous fashions of gilding, and a new type of architectural arrangement. The elaborate altar-backs with perforated pilasters, and flamboyant arches and cresting; with full-length figures below and half-length of like scale above, become the standard form of Venetic ancona about 1350 and remains so for nearly a century and a half. We may see the form, with the upper central panel modernized, in Lorenzo’s Annunciation of 1357, in the Venetian Academy. The effect depends largely on the frame-maker. Such altar-pieces are made more thoughtfully by Caterino and Donato and indeed persist in all Northern Italy until after 1450. Figure 211. We may study a similar type of ancona with narratives instead of single figures in the very accomplished and colorful work doubtfully ascribed to Nicolo Semitecolo, towards the beginning of the new century. Though the narratives follow pretty closely the old Byzantine requirements, the whole surface shows the flower-bed variety and harmony of color which is proper to Venice. Such work, as a blend of Byzantine and Gothic features, repeats what Siena had effected with far greater originality and finesse about seventy years earlier under Duccio and Simone Martini. Modena and Bologna and Padua through the latter half of the fourteenth century share this development, but again on a basis of rather marked inferiority to Siena.

The Venetian authorities were fully conscious of the backwardness of their own artists. When the Ducal Palace was finished in 1365, they called to fresco its great hall not any of the various local followers of Paolo and Lorenzo, but Guariento from neighboring Padua. He executed the great Coronation of the Virgin which was later damaged by fire and covered by Tintoretto’s Paradise. The temporary removal of Tintoretto’s canvas showed for a time the crumbling remains of Guariento’s fresco. It is in an elaborate Gothic-Byzantine style and abounds in incidental architectural ornament. Below the ceremony of the Coronation there is a screen of pierced marble niches occupied by graceful angels. It is a motive that will often recur in the new century. On the whole Guariento brings little new to Venice, but he does demonstrate the decorative possibilities of the local style. His influence was restricted because the Venetians soon ceased to work in fresco.

The impetus necessary to lift Venetian painting out of its routine condition was supplied in the fifteenth century by Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello. Gentile, who worked in the Ducal Palace about 1410, commanded both the exquisiteness of the Sienese style and its narrative breadth. Unhappily his Venetian frescoes which are lauded in contemporary accounts have perished. His sweetness and ideality are attested by various Madonnas. We may infer his raciness and vivacity as a narrative painter from the predella of his master work, the Adoration of the Kings (1423). The little panel of the Presentation in the Temple is admirable for its architectural inscenation and for the actuality of its incidental figures. We have a man whose eye takes in the look of things. This is even more the case with Pisanello (1397–1455), who worked a little later in the same hall. He has severe notions of draughtsmanship, as befitted the greatest of all medallists. He brought from Verona, where his artistic ideas were formed, the ideal of elaborate and credible setting, especially as regards the relations of figures to architecture. In his ruined fresco of St. George of Verona, Figure 209, we may catch his quality. But the Veronese style is really better represented by such immediate predecessors as Avanzo and Altichiero. Jointly about 1385 they frescoed the great Oratorio of St. George at Padua. Especially remarkable are the legends of the titular saint, Figure 210. Through repainting one may still discern the dignity and discretion of the arrangement, and in particular the just and tasteful elaboration of contemporary architectural features. Florentine and Sienese frescoes of the time are hardly as accomplished. The festal value of the architecture persists as a leading ideal of the school of Verona down to her greatest master, Paolo Veronese, and the ideal was taken up with conviction at Venice—became indeed the distinctive feature of her narrative school.

Jacopo Bellini,^[71] the first great painter whom Venice herself developed, was the pupil of Gentile da Fabriano and also profoundly influenced by the Veronese. Thus he combines in himself the two main strains of early Venetian painting—its desire for sweetness and its desire for vivacity and elaborate truthfulness in narrative. Alongside of Jacopo Bellini worked the faithful imitators of Paolo, Lorenzo, and Guariento. Such artists as Jacobello del Fiore and Michele Giambono, while often inherently attractive, are of small importance. Their contemporary, Antonio Vivarini, though in most ways less sensitively the artist, prepared the way for the conservative school of Murano. Antonio’s quality is somewhat obscured by his habit of working with a German partner, Giovanni. Yet the part of Antonio, as represented by his altar-piece in the Vatican, dated 1464, Figure 211, seems to have been merely to build cautiously on the work of Guariento and Lorenzo. His nephew, Alvise, and his younger brother, Bartolommeo, become influential figures towards the end of the century.

The hope of the future rested with that far more searching spirit, Jacopo Bellini. He gave to art not merely his own indefatigable curiosity but two sons of genius, Gentile and Giovanni. All the leading tendencies of the Early Renaissance in Venice originate with this remarkable family. We first meet Jacopo Bellini in 1424 as an assistant of Gentile da Fabriano and he worked on till 1470. The great decorative canvases which he made for the Ducal Palace, and for the Schools of St. Mark and St. John the Evangelist have perished, while the few pictures remaining from his brush are mostly of late date and inadequately express his ambitions. His Madonnas at the Uffizi, Venice, Paris, and Milan retain the exquisite sweetness of his master’s vein. Their modest grace may be felt in the little Madonna, Figure 212, at Venice. Of admirable gentleness and spirit is the ornate Annunciation painted in 1444, in Sant’ Alessandro at Brescia. Its predella panels, although probably of student execution, show how definitely his narrative compositions derive from Altichiero and the Veronese.

But we get the full stature of the man, not from the minor paintings which chance has spared, but from the two extraordinary sketch books respectively in the Louvre and the National Gallery. Here we trace his day by day exercises. Perspective is his constant concern. He piles up elaborate architecture with an extravagance which even his Veronese exemplars never ventured. The subject matter gets lost in the setting. The Annunciation becomes a mere episode in an architectural extravaganza. So does the Feast of Herod, Figure 213. The buildings generally are of ornate Early Renaissance type. He loves to adorn them with swags and statues and low reliefs. Sometimes he sketches actual Roman sculptures and coins, medallions, and inscriptions. He makes strange, stern backgrounds for his outdoor scenes, with twisted stratified mountains and stately distant cities. He loves wild beasts; draws capital horses for St. George or for Perseus. He is a bit of a humanist, doing bacchanals, with mischievous satyrs. There are a few fine portraits and designs for Madonnas. Thus these sketches with the silver point and quill pen anticipate every mode of the next generation—the narrative style, the altar-piece, the pastoral mythology. One feels in the sketch books a nature rather alert and curious than thorough—a certain lack of concentration and real seriousness. But the sketches evince an inexhaustible fancy, and if they are ever published cheaply, they should rival in popularity the most loved picture-books of fairyland. Jacopo was not only a versatile but a travelled artist. Active for a time at the brilliant court of Lionello d’Este at Ferrara, he had also visited Florence and probably Rome. But his most important move as regards the history of art, was to Padua, about 1453. There the whole course of Venetian painting was shaped by the apparently casual fact that an austere young painter named Andrea Mantegna fell in love with Jacopo’s daughter, Niccolosia, and married her. Through that alliance, the most formidable of brothers-in-law became the artistic mentor of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.

For a moment, indeed, Padua and Mantegna quite efface Venice in interest. For ten years before this lucky marriage, Padua had been the scene of intense artistic activity. Donatello, the most powerful realist sculptor of Florence, was at work on the bronze reliefs for the altar of Sant’ Antonio, and on the Gattamelata statue. He gave young Mantegna a strong impulse in the direction of constructive realism. Such Florentine realists as Paolo Uccello and Fra Filippo Lippi were also transient visitors at this time. And Padua, ever an academic city, saw the first systematic art school started by a shrewd and able master, Francesco Squarcione. Squarcione collected Roman marbles and bronzes, concerned himself with the new mysteries of perspective, foreshortening and precise anatomy. He made his students acquire a line with the resiliency of bronze. He made them copy minutely veined marbles and sculptured reliefs. He insisted that every picture should have garlands of laurel mixed with vegetables and fruits. The whole surface had to be brought to the lustrous surface of an enamel. Severe teaching usually attracts good pupils. So it was in Squarcione’s case; he had scores of pupils from all of the Venetic region and even from Dalmatia beyond the Adriatic. He was too sensible to paint much himself; it didn’t pay so successful a teacher. So the few pictures ascribed to him are either of small importance or of dubious authenticity. But his stamp is on all his pupils. What his teaching meant may be grasped in early Mantegna and even better in a painter who never emancipated himself—Carlo Crivelli, of Venice, “Eques Aureatus.”

Crivelli’s^[72] fame was great but provincial. Originally most of his altar-pieces adorned churches of the Adriatic Marches. Dozens have passed thence to the museums of Europe and America. One and all they seem less painted things than the most splendid of mineral productions. It is incredible that mere brush and paint can achieve so tense a line and such jewel-like surfaces. Entirely typical is an early Madonna, at Verona, Figure 214. The great ancona of 1476 in the National Gallery shows him faithful to the arrangements of the early Venetians. The Annunciation, in the same gallery, painted ten years later, reveals him affected by the narrative tradition of Jacopo Bellini. In America fine Pietàs at Boston, Figure 215, New York, and in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, exemplify his rectitude and energy. While Mrs. Gardner’s St. George and the Dragon, as the most fastidious of fairy tales, consoles us for the absence of this subject among the few pictures of Jacopo Bellini. From his beginnings about 1460 to his death in 1493, Carlo Crivelli remained true to his early teaching. Whoever understands his works has little need to consult further the entirely similar achievement of such great Ferrarese painters as Marco Zoppo (1440 ca.–1498) and Cosimo Tura (1430 ca.–1495). The influence of Squarcione passed to the conservative painters at Venice, and influenced the entire Murano school. We have a resplendent masterpiece of this sort in the single known work of Antonio da Negroponte, Figure 216, in San Francesco della Vigna, at Venice. It combines with its evident Squarcionesque features, the magnificence of the old Gothic-Byzantine style, and much of the sweetness of Jacopo Bellini. Its date is about 1450, and the picture is an excellent point of departure for our understanding of the radical reform that came into Venice and all Lombardy with the activity of Andrea Mantegna.

Born in 1431 at Vicenza, we find Mantegna^[73] enrolled at the tender age of thirteen in the painters’ guild at Padua. He is described as an adoptive son of Squarcione. Mantegna was scarcely twenty-four when he engaged with other fellow pupils to decorate a chapel in the Church of the Eremitani, the subject being the legends of St. James and St. Christopher. In the six panels assigned to Mantegna, his quality and superiority are already manifest. His style is severely archæological and Roman. He endeavors honestly to reconstruct the times of the apostles. But his method is more severe than that of the Romans themselves. The line moves with the slow authority of an engraved contour. The relief is dry and harsh. There is little sense of difference between living forms and sculptured figures. The landscape is built in spiral strata as if worked out of metal. Here transpires clearly the influence of Jacopo Bellini, which is as evident also in the ornate architectural settings. The colors are at once dull and garish, the textures scrupulously studied after Squarcione’s precepts. A most strenuous art this, and with all its pedantry full of power and dignity.

Certain innovations in perspective should be noted. In the fresco, St. James led to Execution, Figure 217, Mantegna avoids the usual conventional perspective, which tilts the picture towards the spectator; and treats the group as if it were on an actual stage set at the height of the fresco. Thus no ground is seen; the projecting floor cuts off the feet of the figures; and all vanishing points are precisely set at the level of the spectator’s eye below. The aim is to create illusion.

Before the completion of the Eremitani frescoes, Mantegna had married Niccolosia Bellini, had profited largely by her father’s advice, and had influenced strongly her two brothers, Gentile and Giovanni. They seem to have been the first eager pupils of the man who was soon to be the artistic schoolmaster for all Northern Italy. Two years after his marriage, in 1455, Mantegna liberated himself from legal bondage to Squarcione, and soon after began the masterpiece of his developed Renaissance style, the altar-back for San Zeno Maggiore at Verona, Figure 218. It was finished in 1459, the artist being twenty-eight years old. It is a little over-rich, finished throughout like a miniature, and very stately. In arrangement it obeys the artist’s new law of illusion. The base of the picture is precisely at the level of the eye, so no floor is seen. The carved classical frame is regarded as the front of an actual pavillion which is continued in paint. Without the frame, the architectural perspective of the picture would not explain itself, and if the picture were set higher or lower all the perspective relations would be wrong. At Siena, a century and more earlier, the Lorenzetti had devised this motive of an open box of which the frame is the plastic front. Mantegna made this sort of illusionism standard for Venice and all Northern Italy. Its value is open to question, but I believe that the monumental altar-pieces of Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini gain something in gravity and stability from this careful adjustment of the perspective to the actual position of the spectator. At any rate it was the rigid logic and probity of Mantegna that gave to Venetian art precisely the tonic stimulus it needed.

By thirty he was famous, and yielding to repeated persuasion, he left Padua for Mantua and the court of the most generous art patrons of the moment, the Gonzagas. His most notable work for them was the decoration of the Camera degli Sposi, 1474, in their great palace, and the canvases of the triumphs of Cæsar, 1481 to 1494, which, sadly damaged and repainted, are now seen at Hampton Court. The two series represent strikingly the dual and never completely harmonized strains in Mantegna’s genius—realism and archaism. He was never more the realist than in the room decorated in honor of the marriage of Lodovico Gonzaga and Barbara of Brandenburg, the Camera degli Sposi. The motives are wholly novel—no religious subjects, nothing mythological, just the Gonzaga family and their courtiers, sitting in conversation, meeting ceremoniously, or preparing for the hunt. Nowhere before had such a consistent use of the principle of illusionism been made, not even in Roman mural painting of the Antonine age. Mantegna has completely painted away the real walls of the room, and has replaced the real architecture by a simulated classical pavillion, with arcades looking out to the country side and a round opening above. All the figures are out of doors. To see the scheme properly you must stand precisely in the centre of the room and turn on your heel. The arrangement in short is periscopic. As you look up you will see a balcony with cupids, Figure 219, standing on the outside ledge and maids of honor and peacocks looking down over the balustrade. You see everything feet foremost as if it were actually there. Then you look out through the arcades where the view of outside doings is sometimes interrupted by a curtain. Generally it is drawn aside that you may see these great folk at ease outside their pleasure house, Figure 220. The portraits are of utmost dignity and authority. In dealing with real people Mantegna’s style is less pinched than in his classical decorations. If I have insisted on the point of illusionism, it is only because the audacious logic of Correggio and a host of baroque followers for a century and more really grows out of this scheme at Mantua. You will see the open well with figures outside the parapet in Correggio’s dome at Parma, and the figures outside the painted roof in the Convent of St. Paolo. Indeed, you have only to let the clouds come down through such open roofs and seat decorative figures on the clouds to arrive at the fully developed baroque style. And it is odd enough that its most romantic extravagances are clearly deducible from this rather sober and pedantic illusionism of Andrea Mantegna.

Of the painted cloths representing the Triumphs of Cæsar, Figure 221, (1484–1492), nine remain in debased condition at Hampton Court, England. Here the classicism of Mantegna finds its most legitimate expression. The designs are better seen in the engravings of his school and in the later woodcut copies by Andreini.

Despite such great commissions, Mantegna lived in something near poverty. He could never resist a beautiful antique, and he was proud and difficult in his relations to exacting patrons. His style after his Roman visit of 1488 to 1490 loses something of its tension and develops breadth. Perhaps the most impressive picture of this time is the Madonna of Victory, Figure 222, in the Louvre, which was painted in 1495 to celebrate Gianfrancesco Gonzaga’s drawn battle with the French at Fornovo. Its severity is mollified by the graciousness of the evergreen bower in which the group is set and by the contrasting seriousness of St. Elizabeth and the kneeling donor. These figures forecast a mystical and tender quality in certain of the later Madonnas.

In his last years Mantegna undertook an attractive but difficult task in decorating the study of the famous bluestocking, Isabella d’Este, wife of Gianfrancesco. With the pertinacity of a suffragette born out of due time, this great lady framed the most elaborate written programmes, upon the literal accomplishment of which she insisted. Her correspondence with such unfortunate protegés as Perugino and Lorenzo Costa is among the delightful eccentricities of Renaissance annals. The resultant decorations reflect the sophisticated and somewhat brittle grace of Isabella’s own personality. None are better than those of Mantegna which were done about the year 1500. His Parnassus, Figure 223, with its romantically picturesque gods and godesses, and its admirable round of dancing muses, is the best that Northern Italy can show in comparison with Botticelli’s mythologies, unless it be the companion piece, Minerva expelling the Vices, Figure 224, which is wonderful alike in energy, inventiveness and grotesque humor, anticipating in its mood similar refinements in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and Milton’s “Comus.” Mantegna in these works becomes the true precursor of that poetic pastoralism which in Giorgione soon dominates the Venetian scene.

Mantegna lived on, none too well treated by the younger Gonzagas, until 1506. To relieve his poverty he offered for sale his most treasured marble, an Agrippina. He left in his studio his most rigid and painful piece,—the Foreshortened Christ he called it. All his probity is in the picture. For Giovanni Bellini and others it served as the highest model of the tragic style, and it refutes the shallow views of such as find Mantegna merely academic and cold. He left many engravings and marvellous drawings in which perhaps better than in the paintings we may feel the exquisiteness of his austerely fastidious taste. Such a drawing as the Judith in the Uffizi, Figure 225, is an epitome of all that Mantegna had to bequeath to the Renaissance.

Well his contemporaries knew the value of his example. It rebuked the slackness of their own practice. Alongside the exquisitely modelled foot of his St. Sebastian in the Louvre, stands the severed marble foot from a Greek statue. As he ever measured his work against the antique, so the painters of Milan, Vicenza, Ferrara, Verona and Venice had to measure their work against his. And that simple act of honest comparison in a single generation furthered the art of Northern Italy to a degree that in Tuscany it had taken a century to attain.

At the moment when Mantegna’s influence was at its height, it was happily modified in a realistic direction by the advent of Antonello da Messina.^[74] Despite recent discoveries, the career of this great Sicilian realist remains obscure. Vasari imagined him a traveler in Flanders and a direct pupil of Jan van Eyck, whose invention of oil painting he was believed to have adopted. The legend is thoroughly discredited by newly discovered documents. Antonello came up in Sicily under the influence of visiting Spanish masters. From them he caught at second hand the point of view of Northern realism, from them he learned the advantages of the more fluid and lustrous oil vehicle. But he must also have seen and carefully studied fine paintings of the Flemish school. There were such in Sicily and at Naples. Antonello emerges about 1470 as the most energetic and truthful draughtsman of his time, and a portraitist of powerful character equipped with a new and better technique. In 1475 he was in Venice and Lombardy. Such portraits as the captain of mercenaries, Il Condottiere, Figure 226, at the Louvre, immediately set the standard for the entire region. We no longer find flat profiles, but heads perfectly drawn in three-quarters aspect, modelled minutely, but with no loss of character and effect. No such eye as Antonello’s, unless it were that of Piero della Francesca, had as yet applied itself to the problems of painting. Whether in the nude, in his St. Sebastians and Crucifixions, or in his rare interiors, such as the St. Jerome in his Study, Figure 227, in the National Gallery, he announced new perfections in lighting, modelling and perspective. He painted for the Church of San Cassiano at Venice a stately and massive Madonna which led the local painters in the direction of mass and monumentality. Recent criticism has recognised the mutilated central panel in the Vienna gallery. Antonello’s work imposes itself primarily by its mere intensity of existence. It has no charm, and no especial emotion. Precisely this impersonality makes it an admirable and safe model. Before his coming the Venetians had experimented with oil mediums, but they gladly adopted his lustrous enamels, and strong shadows. He returned soon to his native Sicily, where he died in 1479, but his brief sojourn in the North had left its stamp. Montagna of Vicenza, Cima of Conegliano, Buonsignori of Verona, Alvise Vivarini of Venice are among his conscious emulators, and all the figure painting of Venice assumes new gravity and authority. And we may mark his influence even in the leading masters of the new school, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.

The tardy emergence of these two brothers of genius is one of the puzzles of the Venetian school. Neither makes any impression till he is in his forties, and their work has no directive influence till after 1480. The simplest explanation is that of Mr. Berenson. He suggests that the brothers loyally contented themselves with the position of partners in their father’s bottega until his death in 1470. From that moment their progress is swift. Giovanni enlarges the style of the altar-piece in a Renaissance and monumental sense, and later moves gradually in a pastoral direction. Gentile brings to its perfection the complicated narrative style of his father. Both paint admirable portraits. Since Gentile is less an innovator than a perfector of an established mode, we may well begin with him.

Such early works as the organ shutters of St. Mark’s and the processional banner with the portrait of the Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani, 1465, show that he based himself on Mantegna. His career, however, is associated with narrative mural paintings for the schools, in which work he developes a real originality. Whatever he painted in 1466 for the Great School of St. Mark was soon destroyed in a fire. It was presumably the fame of these canvases that got him in 1469 the titles of knight and count palatine. In 1479, being fifty years old, he was called to Constantinople to serve that cruel voluptuary, Sultan Mahomet II. Gentile’s portrait of him, now in the National Gallery, Figure 228, is an appalling piece of exact characterization. One feels the malignity of a character softened by vices, but retaining all mental lucidity and capacities for both cruelty and calculated self-indulgence. A more amiable souvenir of this trip is the exquisite miniature portrait of a young Moslem prince, Figure 229, which is at Fenway Court. Gentile brought back to Venice the new title of Pasha. We do not find him about his proper work until 1492, when he agrees to do “not for money but by superhuman inspiration” the new canvases necessitated by the fire in the Great School of St. Mark.

The greatest of these is the view of the Piazza of St. Mark’s with the procession made by the School itself on Corpus Christi day, Figure 230. In the centre is their venerated relic of the True Cross. About it attention is fixed and almost military, relaxing gradually at the sides. There are hundreds of figures and scores of portraits in the picture, yet there is no smallness of presentation. Such eighteenth century town painters as Canale and his followers could hardly improve upon the truthfulness of the scene as regards light and air even. Its value as record is immense. And, barring a certain stiffness, its value as art is hardly less.

Another panel from this series shows Gentile’s really great capacity as an out-of-doors painter. It represents the miraculous recovery of the reliquary of the cross which had fallen into the canal. How perfectly the play of light over the encrusted and plastered palaces is felt, its shimmer upon the smooth water and through the moving crowds! In the essentials of plein-airisme we moderns have not so much surpassed this work. And if Gentile seems after all not quite a great artist, it is due to that impassivity which is proper to a luminist. With equal realism, Gentile’s imitator, Carpaccio, added sentiment, hence he is beloved and Gentile ignored. Yet early Venetian narrative painting is complete with Gentile, and from every consideration of naturalism it is immensely superior to anything produced at Florence in this period. It gains all the smaller points of representation with the most amazing ease, perhaps because it waives the greater issue of monumentality. It is well put together, but shows little selection, is even at its best rather casually full of persons and things. This produces, as compared with Florence, an odd reversal of conditions. The altar-piece, which in Florence is rather intimate, is in Venice far the most monumental type of painting. We study the development of monumental design better in Giovanni Bellini’s altar-backs than in his brother’s narratives. To Gentile, at once a searching spirit in details and a conservative on the whole, it must have been a great satisfaction to have perfected the narrative mode that his father had so brilliantly inaugurated.

After 1500, being in the seventies and ailing, old Gentile acquired the ominous habit of frequently making and unmaking wills. His last one, which became effective in 1507, left to his vigorous brother, Giovanni, the precious paternal sketch books and the heavy duty of finishing for St. Mark’s School the vast Canvas of St. Mark Preaching at Alexandria, which is now at Milan. Giovanni was nearly eighty himself, but he put the great work through handsomely.

Giovanni Bellini^[75] was a natural son, but as was the humane Italian custom, taken into his father’s family. He was born about 1430, and his early efforts were completely dominated by Mantegna. Indeed he hardly finds himself artistically until he is fifty, and then he develops a most gracious capacity for growth which ceases only with his death at eighty-five. Of the score of pictures which are Mantegnesque in quality the earliest and most remarkable is the Pietà at Milan, Figure 231. In the tragic power it outdoes Mantegna himself, and with all its hardness, it is more painter-like. The distribution of light and dark is broader, the expression more homely and genuine. Only a little later, perhaps towards 1470, is the Christ on the Mount of Olives, at London, Figure 232. With a very similar picture by Mantegna in the same gallery, it is based on a sketch of Jacopo Bellini’s. Although Giovanni frankly imitates the rigid folds of drapery and landscape from Mantegna, it is with a distinct difference. The mood is gentler, details are less obtrusive, there is an exquisite sense of evening sky, and of hills in gloom, and of the coming of twilight over a river plain. It is the first greatly felt landscape in Venetian painting, and though Giovanni was far to surpass it in fineness and accuracy, even he never excelled it in depth and truthfulness of feeling. The serenity of the eventide is the fitting foil to Our Lord’s single moment of human weakness and despair.