It was Correggio’s distinction to fill an immense decoration with lyrical ecstacy. Michelangelo in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel had done as much in elegiac vein. Both set a destructive example to smaller men who followed. For two centuries after Correggio’s death in 1534 the clouds blew into churches, and rosy angelic apparitions cooled their nude charms in these clouds and dangled their delicate legs therefrom, and painters worked their will upon mere architecture, and the baroque style took possession of all Catholic Europe. At its best it is captivating even to an unwilling Protestant imagination, but it never regained the height of its beginnings in Correggio.

In his religious pieces and mythologies, Correggio is respectful to the grand style. He had in one way or another taken account of his Titian, Raphael, and Michelangelo, and he builds his groups in their active symmetries. But such an allegiance to the decorous style is merely superficial, his affinities are with the following centuries and the devotees of sensibility. Even in a grandly composed picture like the Holy Family called The Day, Figure 286, the women are disquieting in their personal loveliness. There is no relation to the Parthenon marbles, as there always seems to be in Titian, no suggestion of a larger air. These Maries know love, and raptures and tears. In the somewhat earlier Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure 287, at Paris, the mood is simply one of great tenderness. In later pictures like the Madonna with St. George and the Holy Night, at Dresden, the excitement of all the figures becomes almost unpleasant. So, in the mythologies, Leda, or Danae, or Antiope, Figure 288, is not goddesslike but perturbingly feminine and desirable. A most delicate erotic appeal is in all this work. It is like Alexandrian sculpture. It is still noble, but less so than Titian or Raphael, less abstract and stylistic. The exquisite ambiguity of the mood is not quite compatible with the compositional formulas. One feels it is but a step and a legitimate one from Correggio to the rare, sentimental nudes of Gainsborough and Sir Joshua and Romney.

In every phase Correggio’s work is distinguishable by the most beautiful handling of color and light and dark. Like Moretto and Lotto he prefers a blonder scale than the Venetian, and makes his surfaces so many miracles of ivory, silvery grays and straw yellows, invested with shadow tenuously modulated, yet of strongest modelling power. He cares nothing about textures or individually rich passages; it is the whole picture that counts. The brush sweeps lightly and swiftly, there is no loading of color, everywhere an exquisite economy and a subtlety that conceals itself. At all points, technically as well as psychologically, Correggio deals in overtones. And by that token he is not of the Renaissance, but is greater or smaller than it, as you may choose to decide. He is more our contemporary than he is Titian’s.

Meanwhile Titian himself is passing into a subjective phase. In 1545 he was at Rome. Michelangelo, who offered him unusual courtesies, doubtless showed him the Sistine ceiling and the recently finished Last Judgment. Titian, as he writes himself, studied with humble amazement the “marvellous old stones” that the Roman soil was yielding up to the newly founded museums.

Even before the Roman trip, his style begins to show an old man’s restless vehemence. The titanic ceiling decorations for the Salute, of 1543 and 1544, Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, display at once an almost sensational energy and a lesser regard for the superficial attractions of color. The rugged designs are hacked out in bold splotches of light and dark. The method begins to be luministic. The partial foreshortening of the figures to adjust them to being seen from below is the decorative compromise which prevails at Venice from Tintoretto to Tiepolo. The new point of view is easiest studied in Christ crowned with Thorns, in the Louvre. Titian passes swiftly through this overtly dramatic stage. The same year, 1548, that saw the Crowning with Thorns, saw also the equestrian portrait of Charles V, Conqueror, Figure 289, after the battle of Mühlberg. What is odd about the picture is the elimination of all military conventions—no battle reek, no stricken foes, no busy staff. Instead just the pale, inflexible, thoughtful face of a slight old man, physically frail but firmly seated on a cantering horse. There is no frank color except the purple scarf and the gold of armor and horse trappings. Everything is expressed in marvellous grays and browns which contain hints of all the colors. There is no linear drawing; edge melts into edge without abrupt contrasts. A twilight mystery, a veiled quality, adds immensely to the expression of melancholy and might. The mere spectacle of life has become relatively uninteresting to Titian. He rather meditates on those creative throes of the mind which underlie action. His conqueror is a thinker.

In Titian’s own portrait, of 1550, at Berlin, the new method is more strongly announced. The form grows out of a silvery gloom by reason of hesitating flickers of light which yet have extraordinary modelling power. In character the work is remarkable. One senses smouldering under the weathered surfaces of this man of seventy-three the most formidable capacities for wrath and for passion.

The nudes and mythologies of these final years, the various Danae’s and the Nymph and Faun at Vienna, the Calisto and Actæon at Bridgewater House, the Venus and Adonis at Madrid, all show a very different temper from the early poesies. There is no suggestion of meditative dalliance, no shy Arcadianism. These are mortals stung and lashed by desire. Love is not sweet on their lips but bitter and fateful. Even Europa, Figure 290, at Fenway Court, the finest of these later poesies, seems to fill the sunlight sky and sea with a spasm of erotic expectancy. Passion becomes cosmic. Strange capacities for tenderness also appear. Compare the Deposition in the Prado, Figure 291, of 1559, with the masterpiece of forty years earlier, Figure 273, at the Louvre. The noble domelike arrangement persists, but within the compositional dome what a change! The body of the Christ is no longer grandly disposed. It crumples as it is turned into the tomb. The thing has the unexpectedness of fact. The canvas is soberly incandescent with half-lit faces which gleam through the deep grays and browns. Each light is a focus of compassion. Titian himself, impersonating St. Joseph of Arimathea, supports the Christ.

In one of the latest poesies, the Education of Cupid, Figure 292, at the Borghese, Rome, the new method may be studied. The forms are built up of little and apparently indeterminate touches of russets and grays that glow from within. The form builds itself out vibratingly. It is no longer as palpable to the hand as that of the early Titians, but it is more palpable to the eye and to the mind. Tone has driven out color; atmospheric envelopment has replaced minute description; the artist merely creates gradations of light which afford the illusion of bulk. It is what we call today, rather loosely, impressionism, or, more accurately, luminism. In the character of these goddesses we have no longer wistfulness, that ineffable adolescent quality of Titian’s early poesies, but women fully conscious of their power to give or take away.

His later pictures, The Crowning with Thorns at Munich (1570) and the Pietà (1576) in the Venice Academy, are nobly tragic in mood. Titian faces the last great event not as a humanist, but as a humble believer sorrowing in the suffering of his Lord. Carried off by the plague in 1576, Titian had lived nearly a century, for over seventy years had been a famous painter. In that long course there is no sign of failure of power. His dominant mood changes according to his age from the ardent pastoralism of his early maturity, through the dramatic energy of his middle age, and the impersonal splendor of his first old age. And when he had passed the scriptural term, he developed new depths of feeling, and created to contain them a pulsating realm of light and dark in twilight. He had begun with the cool preciseness of Giovanni Bellini and closed with a passionate mystery of expression which foretells Rembrandt. So far as Venice was concerned, he not merely led its Renaissance, but was its Renaissance, both in rise and decay. And it is noteworthy that while Raphael and Michelangelo end in ostentation of power and decline of feeling, Titian ends in deeper capacities whether for passion or sympathy, works away from the daylight realities of humanism towards new depths in natural appearance and new depths in his own soul.

Around such a man a throng of able painters naturally grew up. The poorest imitated him, the better took hints from his marvellous practice and went their own way. Among these was Giambattista Moroni of Bergamo, born in 1520 and trained under Moretto of Brescia. Mediocre as a religious painter, he was a portraitist of acutest vision for character. A provincial, he cared little for the idealizations of the time. In such a portrait as the Tailor, at London, or the amazing old Abbess in the Metropolitan Museum, or the Husband and Wife, at Cleveland, or The Widower, at Dublin, Figure 293, he gives us the very look of people, even to their uneasiness as they submit to the ordeal of being portrayed, and withal their intelligence, diligence, and patience. Titian, when overdriven with portrait commissions, habitually referred his clients to Moroni, as an abler artist in the specialty. And indeed Moroni, while lacking Titian’s style, looked harder at his sitters than Titian ever did. He died in 1572, four years before his generous friend.

The Bassanos, the father Jacopo and his sons Leandro and Francesco, were too popular to be omitted. Their style is pretty eclectic with something of late Titian and Tintoretto in it. They treat the old religious themes, are good portraitists, and carry out on their own initiative a bucolic sort of painting, with abundant horses, cattle and dogs. So homely a tradition has its place in breaking down the decorum of the grand style. The excellent average of the family in their craft may be judged from Leandro’s Pietà, at Cleveland.

Sometimes over the velvety calm of Venice and the lagoon will roll up a thunder storm. The radiant color becomes more sombrely rich under the tossing clouds. Their steely edges break into the lightning flash; domes and towers for a moment stagger under the lashing of the rain squall. The storm passes, the leaden clouds show saffron backs against the blue, the evening is here with double serenity and purity. Such is Jacopo Tintoretto amid the reflective tranquility, and confident splendors of Venetian painting—a wind of the spirit, a shattering, yet consoling, apparition. Tenderness, tragedy, romance, are his realm. Where his contemporaries dealt in superb averages, he deals in transcendent exceptions. Thus he has ever been a baffling figure to the critics. For the febrile Ruskin, he is among the greatest of painters; for the coolly analytical Kenyon Cox, he is little better than a reckless sensationalist. Every one, friend or foe of his art, must admit its Shakespearean richness and variety. He lacks Titian’s Olympian poise, but is more universal.

Jacopo Robusti,^[84] the dyer’s son, was born in Venice in 1518. At seventeen he was put with Titian. Once passing through the studio Titian saw on the floor a number of Tintoretto’s sketches. Not trusting himself to speak, he sent word that the newcomer should never again enter his studio. An act which contemporary gossip ascribed to jealousy, is rather to be referred to disgust at Tintoretto’s unbridled vehemence. Whoever has studied Tintoretto’s tempera sketches, Figure 294, in the British Museum may realize how Titian felt. The sketches are superb, but Titian in 1535 was in no way to realize their value. Twenty years later he may have appreciated them.

Driven out by the best master in Venice, Tintoretto was reduced to the process of self-education, in which he was aided by that brilliant decorative colorist and ever luckless artist, Andrea Schiavone. Tintoretto’s earliest work of note is the decoration of his own parish church of the Orto, which he undertook about the year 1546 for the costs. The gigantic canvases of the Deluge and Worship of the Golden Calf in the Choir made his fame, but we see his peculiar quality better in the Presentation in the Temple, Figure 295. It was finished only a few years after Titian’s masterpiece in the Scuola della Carità, hence the contrast between the two works on the same theme is enlightening. Titian’s picture is fundamentally a spectacle and a ceremony. Everything goes as arranged and expected. Tintoretto’s picture is a sudden and thrilling event full of unexpected graces. The little Virgin is well within the picture, but keeps her prominence through her position against the sky and even more by reason of the focusing of intense interest on her by all the persons in the composition. It is a charming invention that three mothers and their infant daughters on the steps should share in the glory of her consecration. At the left a prophetic figure suddenly grasps the import of the moment and sways with wide stretched arms towards the hope. From him to the head of the steps rises a pathetic line of cripples and beggars mercifully veiled in half light. These are witnesses to the human misery that the Virgin through her Son is to assuage. The unifying principle, apart from the fine linear design, is the light which floods out of the picture over the beautifully carved steps. Everything is conceived in depth, while Titian’s Presentation is relatively on one plane. Golden browns and yellows of great luminosity are prevailing colors, the crimsons and blues serving merely as relief and accent. With all its richness of illustrative content, the thing is a noble decoration.

A little later, perhaps in 1548, Tintoretto did the first of three canvases for the Scuola Grande di San Marco. It represents the moment when a Christian slave is about to be brained. The liberating figure of St. Mark, Figure 296, swoops down, the maul snaps in the executioner’s hand. With a singular delicacy the entire interest of the bystanders is concentrated on the helpless white body of the martyr. The suspense is breathless. Only the old magistrate high at the right has seen the miraculous breaking of the executioner’s sledge. His gesture carries the eye to the figure of the downward swooping saint, thus the most sensational feature is last seen and comes as a climax. Such dramatic modulations are of the very essence of Tintoretto’s genius. Again, though the sweeping curves of the linear design are splendidly balanced, the light is the ultimate harmonizer. It ripples out in an increasing wave towards the spectator, kindling as it goes the colors of rich stuffs and the bronzed or pearly roundings of brows, shoulders, throats and limbs. The carrying of a uniform rhythm of motion through earth and sky is again Tintoretto’s invention. He uses it here as elsewhere not as a sprightly device—which was later the baroque attitude—but as a necessary factor in emotional expression.

In 1561 Tintoretto finished the great Marriage at Cana for the Salute. The picture is tremendously developed in depth, and the Christ is set in the distance. The foreground figures alone are concerned with the miracle. Very effective is the contrast of the quiet feasters with those who are stirred by the marvel. The lighting is consummately fine. There are passages of extreme loveliness, such as the swaying row of women’s faces on the right of the table, but the whole thing is far from clear; illustrative and decorative features are imperfectly harmonized. In this great scale Tintoretto’s richness and insatiate inventiveness tend to work against him.

Before considering his colossal labor in the School of St. Roch, we should note his avowed ideal. It might be read on the walls of his studio: “The Drawing of Michelangelo and the Coloring of Titian.” In the studio were casts of Michelangelo’s sculptures brought up at great expense from Florence and Rome. And to Michelangelo we owe the slender and alert proportions of Tintoretto’s figures, quite different as they are from the gravity, almost ponderosity of Titian, Palma, and Paolo Veronese. The color is based on late Titian, but is more sonorous, simple, and uncomplicated by minor tones. The brush stroke is unlike anything earlier—sketchy, impetuous, definitive, working by first intention. Accordingly the surfaces are much broken, and, to a near view, lack preciousness. We have neither the fluent enamel of Giorgione and early Titian, nor yet the muffled richness of Titian’s later manner. But in the best Tintorettos the touch is infallibly crisp, right and expressive. To exaggerate these generously avowed influences of the master who repudiated him and the master he never saw would be easy. As a matter of fact, Tintoretto is always more the illustrator than either of his models. If he adopts the grand poses of Michelangelo, he does so not for abstract beauty, but ever seeks a motive for them. If he chooses Michelangelo’s slender, athletic proportions, he invests them with tenderness and enthusiasm. Unlike Titian, he avoids both classical draperies and rich contemporary costumes, choosing compromise forms of dress which, without ceasing to be classical, should seem familiar, and fit for a real world. If he adopts Titian’s coruscating light, he gives it a special poetry. It does not glow evenly through the picture, but flashes intermittently, as an accent or accompaniment to emotion.

In 1560 the famous charitable confraternity of St. Roch determined to decorate their beautiful School. They called Federico Zuccaro, and Francesco Salviati, who had Roman honors, Tintoretto, and his friends, Schiavone and Paolo Veronese. The subject in competition was to be a cartoon of St. Roch in glory for the ceiling of the refectory. When the day came, Tintoretto unveiled not a cartoon but the finished oval. That was his drawing, he said; he hoped they would not be offended, but he knew no other way. The misunderstandings due to this summary procedure were soon cleared up. Tintoretto became titular painter to the School, later a member, and worked at the two great halls and ante-rooms for twenty-eight years.

St. Roch was the Physician Saint who cared for the plague stricken. Thus the upper hall was pictured with examples of miraculous mercy and deliverance chosen from the Old Testament. The lower hall was devoted to the more familiar stories of the life of Christ and of His Mother. Sadly darkened and neglected, often in impossible light, these pictures baffle all but the enthusiast. One needs all the vicarious enthusiasm that may be drawn from a Ruskin to do San Rocco with any thoroughness. Whoever persists will be rewarded, for while Tintoretto is by no means at his greatest as a painter in this work, it reveals his inexhaustible inventiveness, his warmth and tenderness, and power, as no other series does, whereas it has in the little moonlit landscapes with St. Mary Magdalen and St. Mary of Egypt faery refinements elsewhere lacking in the master.

Everybody knows at least the great Calvary, with its sense of cosmic disaster. Marvellous is the storm which sweeps towards the cross from behind, superb alike the cluster of faithful friends at the foot of the cross and the proud riders at the flanks. Hate, love and indifference mingle in the scene. It gets its profound tragedy on terms of fact, is free from all mystical sentimentality. What was it like on that awful evening? is the only question the artist asks himself, and his answer, a sheer gift of the imagination, transcends all the lyrical sweetness and measured solemnity of the ritual crucifixions. Humanism and religion unite for once in this masterpiece.

Among the scores of narratives in the two halls the eye will rest upon Moses Smiting the Rock, for its majesty; upon the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth which has the intensity of Giotto’s fresco at neighboring Padua, with an abandon all its own; upon the Flight into Egypt, with its idyllic landscape; upon the awful tumult and despair of the Massacre of the Innocents; upon the pathos of the white-robed Christ, awaiting his doom from an indifferent proconsul. These occur among many that are equally memorable. Perhaps the subtle humanism of Tintoretto is best shown in the Temptation of Christ, Figure 297. Instead of the ignoble bat-like Satan of the mediæval painters, we have a magnificent starry-eyed youth, a veritable genius of the pride of life. With outstretched, generous arms he offers unstinted power and pleasure. The Christ regards him with tranquil kindness, as one might a splendid animal fawning too eagerly. For so Christian a man as Tintoretto, it implies extraordinary sympathy to imagine a Satan in his own way gloriously sure of his case. In these compositions the method is most various. But where there are many figures Tintoretto generally avoids the convention of placing the chief personages on the picture plane. You look over heads or between bodies to glimpse the Saints or the Blessed Virgin or Christ. And curiously this procedure does not confuse the eye. On the contrary these apparently casual but really most thoughtful arrangements heighten the sense of reality; one feels like a witness, like one himself on the edges of the throng.

Along with the decoration of San Rocco, Tintoretto undertook frequent commissions for the Ducal Palace. But the fire of 1577 consumed his picture of the naval victory at Lepanto, with much else. In the mythologies of the Anticollegio painted in 1578 we have the loveliest poesies of the Venetian school. These are the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Mercury and the Graces, Minerva expelling Mars and the Forge of Vulcan. From the point of view both of decoration and sentiment these are perhaps the finest nudes in painting. They glow with outdoor health, the firm wholesome bodies sway from sheer joy in motion, or hover lightly in the limpid air. The noble forms are fixed for us in transparent shadows, and broad dapplings of light. There is little of the sheer dreaminess of Giorgione, who yet counts for something in the work, nor yet of the explicit sensuousness of Titian. These noble creatures go about our business,—marrying, seeking grace in life, composing strife, providing munitions should strife arise. Miss Phillipps is probably right in divining here an allegory of the greatness of Venice, bride of the Adriatic, protected by her diplomacy, admired for her arts, yet ever ready in her arsenals. What is better worth noting is the combination of breadth and delicacy in the finest of these poesies, The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Figure 298. The interlocking of the superb forms in a flowing rhythm or pattern, the technical miracle of Venus’s easy turn in the air as she offers the ring and the starry crown, the exquisite alternations of light and half light others might conceivably have invented. What is proper to Tintoretto and to him alone is the hesitating hand of Ariadne and her almost resigned and reluctant acceptance of a new love, being mindful of love once betrayed. Also the delicacy of Bacchus’s ardent gesture, as knowing himself to be not only wooer but consoler, is purest Tintoretto. The picture with its companion pieces is the effulgent afterglow of the Arcadianism that began with Giorgione. It breathes a charm that has never since been fully recoverable.

While these poesies were in progress, about 1575, Tintoretto painted for the Church of San Cassiano the most original of his Crucifixions, Figure 299. One looks over the narrow top of Golgotha to a peaceful expanse of marbled evening sky. The heads and serried pikes of the Roman legionaries suggest a throng behind the hill. The sharpest note of color is a banner, and the purple robe just stripped from the Christ. Between John and Mary and the executioners on the ladder and against the sky the strangest episode passes. It is the moment when a Pharisee hands up to the executioner the mocking placard “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.” With a sudden impulse John points out the act to Mary, to console her. Christ’s enemies affirm the truth of him. Even in the hour of defeat and death he is eternally his people’s king. The level light which ripples softly over the nude forms of Christ and the thieves takes away all harshness. At San Rocco Tintoretto presented an epic and cosmic terror. Here he suggests all the intimate and lyrical hopes that have grown out of the sacrifice on Calvary.

Like all the Venetians Tintoretto was an admirable portraitist. His sober and powerful vein is well shown in the Madonna with Three Magistrates, Figure 300.

Among the later altar-pieces none is finer than the Miracle of St. Agnes in the Orto. It has all of Tintoretto’s sweetness, power and suddenness, and is nearly in its original condition of color. In 1587, being nearly seventy years old, he got the commission for his greatest and perhaps his last picture, the Paradise, in the Hall of the Great Council in the Ducal Palace. Darkened and dried, it is still to the perceptive observer a billowing sea of rapturous faces of the blest, obeying in its widening circles of cloud-borne angels an oceanic rhythm. During the three years that Tintoretto was painting it, his young daughter and comrade, Marietta, dressed like a Shakespearean page for greater convenience, worked and chattered beside him on the scaffolding. She hardly lived to see the great canvas set on its wall. Tintoretto lived on till 1594, and then his aged and withered body was carried across the canal from his palace to his vault in the Orto. Such friends as Schiavone and Paolo Veronese had gone before him, the old merrymakings and impromptu concerts in his home had ceased. It was a very tired old man who bid his sons continue the honorable trade of painting. He had shared nobly the greatest range of human emotions, and his last artistic vision was of an ecstatic peace in Paradise.

After Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese^[85] seems an anti-climax. His imagination is very limited. His greatest pictures treat the sole theme of stately feasts. His soul is that of a very high class society editor. But no well-advised person looks to Paolo Veronese for soul. One rather seeks in him judgment and fine painting. Both are at their maximum.

Paolo Caliari was born at Verona in 1528, trained by a half primitive master, Antonio Badile, and influenced by the energetic compositions of Brusasorci. Paolo inherited the long Veronese tradition for spectacular narrative painting with splendid architectural accessories, and he carries the local tradition to its close and height. He came to Venice at twenty-seven, a finished and famous artist, bringing with him a novel sort of color. He avoids the contrasts and keen resonances of the true Venetians, painting rather in luminous half tones based on gray and blue. His forms are rich and solid without heavy shadow, and his canvases have the generally blond and uniform color quality of the modern out-of-door school.

His preference is for feasts and pageants. We have the spectacle of a rich and gentle society, dignified in its pleasures and resplendent in its costume. Gold brocade sets off the pearly skins of the portly and gracious ladies in his pictures, and their cavaliers are as magnificently clad in satins, velvets and furs. The feasts are generally half out of doors in great colonnades, with the light glinting impartially upon fair throats and faces and upon channeled columns and sculptured balustrades. Behind, pale cornices and spires swim against a blue sky.

It was the habit of the wealthy chapters of monks who maintained the great Venetian churches to paint in their refectories some Scriptural feast, as a warrant perhaps for their own daily convivialities. Earlier, the most solemn of all meals, The Last Supper, would have been chosen. Not so with Veronese and his contemporaries. They chose instead the Marriage at Cana or the Feast in the House of Simon or of Levi, Figure 301,—splendid events of small or only incidental religious significance, and treated merely as contemporary banquets.

Of the four great feasts painted by Paolo Veronese the Marriage at Cana, in the Louvre, painted in 1563, is earliest, and most imposing. It builds up indefinitely from the marble pavement, with tier upon tier of people, clinging to columns and peering from balconies. One may count no less than two hundred and fifty heads. It has all the stir of a public banquet and everywhere the greatest richness of table accessories and costumes. The theme called for little religious emotion. The miracle itself is a convivial one. Yet Veronese has made this different from other feasts by a most complicated system of guiding lines which always lead the eye to the gentle face of the Christ in the centre. He fairly dominates all this animation and splendor. In the trio of musicians in the foreground Veronese has given us a precious hint of the part music played in the life of all Venetian artists. Paolo himself plays the viola, Tintoretto the ’cello, and Titian the bass. What is remarkable about the great canvas is its unity. Bathed in equable cool light, the eye takes it in at a glance; there is no confusing or distracting emphasis; the whole thing is nobly tranquillizing.

In 1569 Veronese was in Rome. We may possibly see some slight influence of Michelangelo in the frescoes of the Villa Barbaro, at Maser. These contain the only nudes of Veronese that have a real athleticism, and the whole decoration has a more positive and sprightly spirit than is usual in Veronese’s placid style. Working in a country house for liberal and congenial patrons, Daniele Barbaro was himself an architect of merit, Veronese sheds something of that professional dignity which is sometimes excessive in his official work.

Among his numerous altar-pieces, the Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure 302, in the Venetian Church of that name is perhaps the most gracious. The women are adorable—hothouse flowers, incredible for poise, hue and delicate surface bloom. They are not very personal, their charm is a social one. But they are very gentle, reasonably unconscious of their own beauty, and quite unforgettably lovely. It took a wonderful eye to see them at once so simple and so regal.

In the last twelve years of his life, Veronese was constantly employed in the Ducal Palace and the adjoining public buildings. He employed assistants freely, and the work affords difficult critical problems. The work is uneven. In mythology he belies the hopes based on the frescoes at Maser, where it seemed as if he too might attain the Olympian mood. It is sadly lacking in the hoydenish group that enacts Europa and the Bull, Figure 303, in the Ducal Palace. Why are these heavy Venetian lasses risking their skins and skirts and shins near the seaside and a bull? The flat prose of the feeling, or rather the absence of any real feeling, makes one forget the splendor of the painting. Such also is the effect of the superbly painted Venus and Mars, at New York, and of most of the mythologies. We have to do with sheer prose and not very sincere prose at that.

When, however, the theme can be drawn from everyday Venice, Veronese is overpoweringly fine. Again and again in looking at the ceilings of the Ducal Palace one catches his breath before such visions of magnificence as Venice as Justice, Figure 304, Venice as Queen of the World. For all its contemporary quality, it attains a strange other-worldliness. It is as if some one had looked at superb Venice through a magnifying glass that ennobled the forms and greatly enhanced the colors. You feel how Veronese loved it all and how little he cared for anything beyond the splendor, dignity and prosperity of his adoptive city. He gives us the look of Venice at her climax of Renaissance glory, as Carpaccio had given the dying radiance of her mediæval estate. From the point of view of judgment, style and fine craftsmanship, it is impossible to overpraise Veronese. He should be regarded rather as a great painter in the narrower sense than a supreme artist. When he died in 1588, only fifty years old, he left a very enduring inheritance.

It was on the whole his moderate and judicious sumptuousness that inspired the painters of the next century. It was well that they sought his imitable merits and not the passion of Titian and Tintoretto. It was largely thanks to Veronese that Venetian art suffered no such sharp decline as befell that of Florence and Rome. The decorative tradition of Veronese sufficed to nourish a Piazetta and a Tiepolo a century and a half after his death.

For Giovanni Battista Tiepolo^[86] (1695–1770) in sheer force and fertility yields to none of his Renaissance predecessors. There never was a more valiant draughtsman or a more splendid colorist. Such decorations as those of the Scuola del Carmine, and the Labia Palace fall little behind Veronese’s pageantry in grandeur while representing an audacity of stroke and coloration which Veronese lacked. So the tragic scenes of Christ’s Passion at San Luigi have the intensity of Tintoretto if lacking something of his nobility. In the ceiling decorations of Tiepolo, Figure 305, we see the freest fancies of the Baroque, its customary tumult of shimmering clouds and hovering pearly figures, repeated with a lightness and audacity and withal measure which the Baroque itself never attained save in its great initiator Correggio. Such powers as Tiepolo’s soon won him international patronage. He painted in Austria and died at Madrid. With him perishes the grandeur of the Venetian school. Only a tinge of masquerade and exhibitionism puts him lower than his constant exemplar, Paolo Veronese.

Indeed the simplicity which is the most enduring charm of any art is more felt in the minor Venetians of Tiepolo’s time, as in Antonio Canale, called Canaletto, Figure 306, who painted the irradiated panorama of the Venetian lagoon and canals with the ardent precision of a reborn Gentile Bellini. Francesco Guardi^[87] (1712–1765), Canaletto’s pupil, with a freer brush and fancy paints the spectacle of Venice, Figure 307, its balls and promenades and water pageants, with the sensitiveness of a Carpaccio. But Carpaccio’s youthful world is no longer there to paint. Romance has given way to casual amorous intrigue, sentiment to show. But out of the welter of sophisticated gayety still rise clean against the heavens the pale domes and bell towers of an older and finer Venice. Guardi is perhaps at his best in the numerous tiny oil sketches which deal with the remote and solitary groves and ruins of the lagoon. Here we have felicities of broken color and niceties of observation, accurate notations of evanescent effects of light, which can still give lessons to the most modern landscapists.

In Pietro Longhi (1702–1762) Venice developed a sympathetic chronicler of her social pleasures, Figure 308. The world of his delicate and witty little canvases is that of the card party, the formal call, the vanity and ceremony of philandering, the shop, the musicale, the masked ball. Only Holland has given so true and sympathetic a record of her smaller affairs, and at the moment, only Hogarth in England and Chardin in France were doing the thing with equal ability.

Nothing better shows the slightly anachronistic quality of Tiepolo’s grandeur than a fine Longhi. The Venetian imagination had moved indoors, so to speak, had foregone in favor of individual gratifications the old vision of the collective splendor. Venice no longer dines grandly in the open with Veronese, she coquettishly sips coffee with Longhi. If she had declined in nobility, she had at least kept her sincerity and taste. Her affair had ever been rather with appearances than with ideals or interpretations. But since the Greeks no other nation had considered appearances with such noble candor. She kept to the end the good pictorial habit of letting appearances explain themselves. Thus if a Titian will stand beside a Pheidian marble, so will a Tiepolo beside an Alexandrian masterpiece, while a trim belle of Pietro Longhi need feel no confusion before a Tanagra figurine. Time passes gently over a city whose artistic aims are as limited as her taste is sure. Venice had ever been gracious in her grandeur, and gracious she remained even after she had ceased to be grand.

Titian’s Assumption the Beginning of the Venetian Grand Style

Titian’s contemporaries were fully aware that the Assumption (1518) marked the beginning of the Grand Style at Venice and that the change was revolutionary. The critic Lodovico Dolce writes in his Dialogo della Pittura, Florence, 1735, p. 286 f. putting the words into the mouth of Aretino:

“After not much time [after the Fondaco frescoes, 1508] he was given to paint a great panel for the high altar of the Friars Minor; where Titian, still young, painted in oils the Virgin, who rises to heaven among many angels who accompany her, and above her he figured a God Father flanked by two angels. It seems really as if she rises with a face full of humility, and her robes fly lightly. At the bottom are the disciples who with various attitudes manifest joy and amazement, and are mostly larger than life, and assuredly in that picture is contained the grandeur and terribleness of Michelangelo, the pleasingness and grace of Raphael, with the coloring proper to nature, and, moreover, this was the first public work which he made in oils; and he made it in very little time, and young.”

“Thereupon the stupid painters and the vulgar herd who up to then had seen nothing but the cold and dead things of Giovanni Bellini, of Gentile, and of [Alvise] Vivarini (since Giorgione, working in oils, had not yet had any public work; and for the most part made no other works than half figures and portraits) which were without movement and without relief, spake great ill of that picture. Afterwards, as envy cooled, and opening their eyes a little to the truth, the people began to be amazed at the new manner discovered in Venice by Titian: and all the painters from then on strove to imitate it; but being off their own path, became confused. And surely it must seem a miracle that Titian, without having at that time seen the antiquities of Rome, which were the light of all the good painters, solely with that little spark, which he had discovered in the works of Giorgione, saw and perceived the idea of perfect painting.”

The general critical justness of this statement must condone its abundant overstatements and errors of fact.