cy or to search the secrets of the soul of

man.

tributions of light and shade, suggestive of colouring. Time has destroyed his Gian Bellini brought the art of this frescoes. Criticism has reduced the second period of Venetian painting to number of his genuine easel pictures to perfection. In his altar-pictures the rev- half-a-dozen. He exists as a great name. erential spirit of early Italian art is com- Of the undisputed pictures by Giorgione bined with a feeling for colour and a dex- the grandest is his Monk at the Claviterity in its treatment peculiar to Venice. chord, in the Pitti Palace at Florence. Bellini cannot properly be called a mas- The young man has his fingers on the ter of the Renaissance. He falls into the keys; he is modulating in a mood of same category as Francia, Fra Bartolom- grave and sustained emotion; his head is meo, Fra Angelico, Perugino, who ad- turned away towards an old man who hered to medieval modes of thought and stands by him. On his other side is a sentiment, while attaining at isolated boy. These two figures are but foils and points to the freedom of the Renaissance. adjuncts to the musician in the middle; Bellini's ground of superiority was colour. and the whole interest of his face lies in In him the colourists of Venice found a its intense emotion-the very soul of perfect master, and no one has surpassed music, as expressed in Browning's Abt him in the difficult art of giving tone to Vogler, passing through his eyes. This pure and luminous tints in complex com- power of painting the portrait of a soul in bination. There is one picture of Bel- one of its deepest moments, possessed by lini's at Venice in the church of San Zac- Giorgione, is displayed again in the socaria, Madonna enthroned beneath a called Begrüssung of the Dresden Galgilded canopy with Saints, in which the lery. The picture is a large landscape. art of the colourist may be said to culmi- Jacob and Rachel meet and salute each nate in unsurpassable perfection. The other with a kiss. But the shepherd lywhole painting is bathed in a soft but ing beneath the shade of a chestnut tree luminous haze of gold; yet each figure near a well at a little distance has a whole has its own individuality of treatment- Arcadia of intense yearning in the eyes the glowing fire of St. Peter contrasting of sympathy with which he gazes on the with the pearly coolness of the drapery lovers. Fate has dealt less unkindly with and flesh-tints of the Magdalen. No Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, than with brushwork is perceptible. The whole Giorgione. The works of these supreme surface and substance has been elabo-artists, in whom the Venetian Renaisrated into one harmonious homogeneous sance culminated, have been preserved to richness of tone that defies analysis. Be- us in vast numbers and in excellent contween this picture, so strong in its smooth-dition. Chronologically speaking, Titian ness, and any masterpiece of Velasquez, precedes Tintoretto, and Tintoretto is so rugged in its strength, what a wide somewhat anterior to Veronese. But for abyss of inadequate half-achievements, of the purpose of criticism the three paintsmooth feebleness and feeble ruggedness, ers may be considered together as the exists! Giorgione, did we but possess representatives of three marked aspects enough of his authentic work to judge by, in the Venetian Renaissance. would be found the first true painter of the Renaissance among the Venetians the inaugurator of the third and great period. But he died young, at the age of Tintoretto, called by the Italians the thirty-six, the inheritor of unfulfilled re- Thunderbolt of Painting, because of his nown. The part he played in the devel- vehement impulsiveness and rapidity of opment of Venetian art was similar to execution, soars above his brethren in that of Marlowe in the history of our the faculty of pure imagination. It was drama. He first cut painting wholly he too who brought to its perfection the adrift from medieval moorings and poetry of chiaroscuro, expressing moods launched it on the waves of the Renais- of passion and emotion by brusque lights sance liberty. While equal as a colourist and luminous half shadows and opaque to Bellini, though in a different and more darkness, as unmistakably as Beethoven sensuous region, Giorgione by the bold- by contrasted chords. Veronese elevatness and inventiveness of his conception, ed pageantry to the height of art. His proved himself a painter of the calibre of domain is noonday sunlight ablaze on Titian. His drawings, like those of his gorgeous dresses and Palladian architecgreat successors, are miracles of form ture. Titian, in a wise harmony, withevolved without outline by massive dis-out the Eschylean fury of Tintoretto or

Let us first briefly characterize their qualities, and then proceed to more detailed remarks upon their several styles.

His canvases are nearly always large, filled with figures of the size of life, massed together in brilliant groups, or extended beneath white marble colonnades, enclosing spaces of blue sky and silvery cloud. Armour, shot colours in satins and silks, brocaded canopies, banners, plate, fruit, sceptres, crowns, everything in fact that the sun can shine upon,

the sumptuous arrogance of Veronese, In order to penetrate the characterisrealized the ideal of pure beauty. Con- tics of Venetian art more thoroughly, it tinuing the traditions of Bellini and Gior- will be needful to enter into detailed critgione, with a breadth of treatment, a wis-icism of the three chief masters who comdom of moderation, a vigour and intensity mand the school. To begin with Veroof well balanced genius peculiar to him- nese: What is the world of objects to self, Titian gave to colour in landscape which he introduces us? and the human form a sublime yet sensuous poetry which no other painter in the world has reached. In his Assumption of the Virgin, his Bacchus and Ariadne, his Venus of the Tribune, his allegory of the Three Ages, Titian achieved the most consummate triumphs of Venetian art. Tintoretto and Veronese are both of them excessive: the imagination of Tintoretto is too passionate, too scath-form the habitual furniture of his pictures. ing; the sense of splendour in Veronese Rearing horses, dogs, dwarfs, cats, when is overpoweringly pompous; Titian's ex- occasion serves, are brought in to quisite humanity, his large and sane na- add reality, vivacity, grotesqueness to ture, gives their proper value to the im- his scenes. His men and women are aginative and the pompous elements of large, well-proportioned, vigorous, emiVenetian art without exaggerating either. nent for pose and gesture rather than for In his masterpieces composition, thought, grace and loveliness, distinguished by colour, sentiment are carried to their ul-adult rather than adolescent charms. Vetimate perfection, as the many-sided ex-ronese has no choice type of beauty. We pression of one imaginative intuition, by which the supreme artist gives one harmonious tone to all the parts of his production. Titian, the Venetian Sophocles, has infused into his painting the spirit of music, the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders, making his power incarnate in a form of grace.

Round these great men - Titian, the Sophocles of painting, perfect in his harmonizing faculty, unrivalled in his empire over colour; Tintoretto, the archangel of chiaroscuro, the Titan of audacious composition, the priest of a passionate imagination; Veronese, the poet of insolent and worldly pompare grouped a host of secondary but distinguished painters: the two Palmas, idyllic Bonifazio, Paris Bordone, the Robusti, the Caliari, the Bassani, and others whom it would be tedious to mention. One breath, one afflatus inspired them all. Superior or inferior as they may relatively be among themselves, each bears the indubitable stamp of the Venetian Renaissance, and produces work of a quality that raises him to a high rank among the artists of the world. In the same way the spirit of the Renaissance passing over the dramatists of our Elizabethan era enabled intellects of average force to take rank in the company of the noblest. Ford, Massinger, Heywood, Decker, Webster, Tourneur, Marston, are seated on the steps of the throne at the feet of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Johnson, Fletcher.

find in him on the contrary a somewhat coarse display of animal force in men, and of superb voluptuousness in women. He prefers to paint women draped in gorgeous raiment, as if he had not felt the majestic beauty of statuesque nudity. His noblest creatures are men of about twenty-five, manly, brawny, full of nerve and vigour. In all this Veronese is not unlike Rubens. But he never, like Rubens, appears to us gross, sensual, fleshly; he remains proud, pompous, powerful. He raises neither repulsion nor desire, but displays with the cold strength of art the empire of the mundane spirit. All that is refulgent in pageantry, all the equipage of arrogant wealth, the lust of the eye and the pride of life, such vision as the fiend offered to Christ on the mountain of temptation, this is Veronese's realm.

Again, he has no flashes of imagination like Tintoretto; but his grip on the realities of the world, his faculty for poetizing prosaic magnificence is greater. Veronese is precisely the painter suited to a nation of bankers, in whom the associations of the counting-house and the exchange mingled with the responsibilities of the Senate and the passions of princes. Veronese never painted vehement emotions. There are no brusque movements, no extended arms, like those of Tintoretto's Magdalen in the Pietà at Milan. His Christs and Maries and martyrs of all sorts are composed, serious, courtly,

well-fed, sleek personages, who, like peo- | prostrate groups of women sunk below ple of the world accidentally overtaken the grief of tears; the temptation of by some tragic misfortune, do not stoop Christ in the wilderness, with its passionto distortions or express more than a ate contrast of the grey-robed Man of grave surprise, a decorous sense of pain. Sorrows and the ruby-winged voluptuous The Venetian Rothschilds undoubtedly fiend; the temptation of Adam in Eden, preferred the sumptuous to the imagin- a luxurious Idyll of the fascination of the ative treatment of sacred subjects. To spirit by the flesh; paradise, a tempest do him justice, Veronese does not make of souls, a drift of saints and angels, what would in his case have been the "running" like Lucretian atoms or goldmistake of choosing the tragedies of the dust in sunbeams "along the illimitable Bible for representation in his pictures. inane," and driven by the celestial whirlIt is the story of Esther, with its royal wind that performs the movement of the audiences, coronations, processions; the spheres; the destruction of the world, in marriage feast of Cana; the banquet in which all the fountains and rivers and the house of Levi, that he selects by pref- lakes and oceans of earth have formed erence. Even these he removes into a one foaming cataract, that thunders with region far from biblical associations. His cities and nations in its rapids down a mise en scène is invariably an idealization bottomless gulf, while all the winds and of Italian luxury vast open palace hurricanes of the air have grown into one courts and loggias, crowded with guests furious blast that carries souls like dead in splendid attire and with magnificent leaves up to judgment; the plague of the lacqueys. The same love of display led fiery serpents - multitudes encoiled and him to delight in allegory—not allegory writhing on a burning waste of sand; the of the deep and mystic order, but of the Massacre of the Innocents, with its spilth pompous and processional, in which Ven- of blood on slippery pavements of porice appears enthroned among the deities, phyry and serpentine; the Delivery of or Jupiter fulminates against the vices, or the Tables of the Law to Moses amid the Genii of the arts are personified as cloud on Mount Sinai -a white, ecstatic, handsome women and blooming boys. lightning-smitten man emerging in the Tintoretto is not at home in this some- splendour of apparent Godhead; the anwhat crass atmosphere of mundane splen-guish of the Magdalen above her mardour. He requires more thought and tyred God; the solemn silence of Christ fancy as a stimulus to creation. He can- before Pilate; the rushing of the wings not be contented to reproduce even in of Seraphim; the clangour of the Trump the most lustrous combination what he that wakes the Dead: these are the awsees around him of gorgeous and magifi- ful and soul-stirring themes that Tintocent and vigorous. There must be some retto handles with the ease of mastery. scope for poetry in the conception, for He is the poet of infinity and passion; audacity in the composition, something the Prospero of arch-angelic Ariels; the in the subject which can rouse the pro- Faust of spiritual Helens; the majestic phetic faculty and evoke the seer in the scene-painter of a theatre as high and artist; or Tintoretto does not rise to his broad and deep as heaven and earth and own altitude. Accordingly we find that hell. But it is not only in the region of Tintoretto, in abrupt contrast with Ve- the vast and tempestuous and tragic that ronese selects by preference the most Tintoretto finds himself at home. He is tragic and dramatic subjects that can be equal to every task that can be imposed found in sacred or profane history.* The upon the imagination. Provided only Crucifixion with its agonizing Deity and that the spiritual fount be stirred, the jet of living water gushes forth pure, inexhaustible, and limpid. In his Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, that most perfect idyll of the sensuous fancy from which sensuality is absent; in his Temptation of Adam, that symphony of greys and browns and ivory more lustrous than the crimson and the gold of sunset skies; in his miracle of St. Agnes, that lamblike maiden with her snow-white lamb among the soldiers and the courtiers and the priests of Rome, Tintoretto has added one more proof that the fiery genius

• Perhaps the most profound characteristic of Tintoretto is that he attempts to depict situations that are eminently poetic. The poet imagines a situation in which spiritual or emotional life is paramount, and a sense of the body subordinate. The painter selects a situation in which the body is of first importance, and a spiritual or emotional activity is suggested. But Tintoretto grapples immediately with poetic ideas, and often fails in his attempt to realize them completely. Michael Augelo did the same. His sculpture in San Lorenzo, compared with Greek sculpture, is an invasion of the proper domain of poetry or music. Moses, in the picture of the Golden Calf in Santa Maria dell' Orto, is a poem and not a true picture. The lean pale ecstatic stretching out his emaciated arms, presents no beauty of attitude or outline. Energy of thought is conspicuous

in the figure.

of Titanic artists can pierce and irradiatements of the passions, a well-tempered the placid and the tender secrets of the harmony in which no thrilling note sugsoul with more consummate mastery than gests the possibility of discord. When falls to the lot of those who make tran- we think of Titian we are irresistibly led quillity their special province. Paolo Ve- to think of music. His Assumption of ronese never penetrated to this inner the Madonna, the greatest single picture shrine of beauty, this Holiest of Holies in the world, if we exclude Raphael's where the Sister Graces dwell. He could Madonna di San Sisto, may best be denot paint waxen limbs, with silver lights scribed as a symphony -a symphony of and golden, and transparent mysteries of colour, in which every hue is brought shadow, like those of Bacchus, Eve, and into melodious play; a symphony of Ariadne. Titian himself was powerless movement in which every line communito imagine movement like that of Aphro- cates celestial sense of rhythm; a symdite floating in the air above the lovers, phony of light in which there is no cloud; or of Madonna adjuring Christ in the a symphony of joy in which saints, angels, Paradiso, or of Christ himself judging by and God himself sing Hallelujah. Tinthe silent simplicity of his divine attitude toretto, in the Scuola di San Rocco, has the worldly judge at whose tribunal he painted an Assumption of the Virgin with stands, or of the tempter raising his jew- characteristic energy and impulsiveness. elled arms aloft to dazzle with meretri- A group of agitated men around an open cious lustre the impassive God above tomb; a rush of air and clash of seraph him, or of Eve leaning in irresistible se- wings above; a blaze of light; a woman ductiveness against the fatal tree, or of borne with sideways swaying figure from St. Mark down-rushing through the air to darkness into splendour; that is his picsave the slave that cried to him, or of the ture: all brio, bustle, speed. Quickly Mary who has fallen asleep with folded conceived, carelessly executed, this painthands from utter exhaustion of agony at ing bears the emphatic impress of its the foot of the Cross. It is in these atti- author's impetuous soul. But Titian has tudes, movements, gestures, that Tintoret- worked on a different method. On the to makes the human body an index and earth among the apostles there is energy symbol of the profoundest, most tragic, and action enough; ardent faces strainmost poetic, most delicious thought and ing upward, impatient men raising impofeeling of the inmost soul. In daylight ra- tent arms, and vainly divesting themdiancy of colour, he is surpassed, perhaps, selves of their raiment, as if they too by Veronese. In perfect mastery of every might follow her they love. In heaven is portion of his art, in solidity of execution, splendour that eclipses half of the archin firm, unwavering grip upon his subject, angel who holds the crown, and reveals he falls below the level of Titian. Hun- the Father of Spirits in a halo of golden dreds of his pictures are unworthy of glory. Between earth and heaven, amid his genius-hurriedly designed, rapidly a choir of angelic children, stands that dashed in, studied by candlelight, with mighty mother of the faith of Christ, that brusque effects of abnormal light and personified Humanity, who was Mary and shadow, hastily daubed with colours that is now a goddess, ecstatic yet tranquil, have not stood the test of time. He is a not yet accustomed to the skies, but far gigantic improvisatore-a Gustave Doré above the grossness and the incapacities or a John Martin on the scale of Michael of earth. The grand style can go no Angelo that is the worst thing we can further than in this picture, serene, comsay of him. But in the swift intuitions of posed, meditated, enduring, yet full of the spirit, in the purities and sublimities dramatic energy and profound feeling. of the prophet-poet's soul, neither Veronese nor Titian can approach him.

To talk about Titian is a kind of profanity. He does not stir the imagination How, lastly, are we to speak of Titian? like Tintoretto, or sting the senses, or Who shall seize on the salient character- awake unquenchable ardours in the soul. istics of an artist whose glory it is to But he gives to the mind joy of which it offer nothing over-prominent, who keeps can never weary, pure, well-balanced the middle path of sanity and perfection? pleasures that cannot satiate, a satisfacJust as complete health may be defined tion not to be repented of, a sweetness as the absence of any obtrusive sensation, that will not pall. It is easy to tire of just as virtue has been defined as the just Veronese; it is possible to be fatigued proportion between two extravagances, by Tintoretto; Titian waits not for moods so is the art of Titian a golden medioc- or humours in the spectator. Like Narity of joy unbroken by brusque move-ture, like Pheidias, he is imperishable.

From Good Words.

THE PRESCOTTS OF PAMPHILLON.
BY MRS. PARR, AUTHOR OF DOROTHY FOX."

66

CHAPTER VII.

"A SCHEME OF HIS."

In the course of this attempt to analyze the specific qualities of Tintoretto, Veronese, and Titian, we have wandered from the main subject we proposed to treat,the character of the Renaissance as exemplified by the Venetian masters. It was necessary to do so, because the NEVER had Mrs. Labouchere dressed points of difference between them are personal, while their point of accord is herself with more care, surveyed herself complete participation in the spirit of more critically, nor found more reason to Renaissance liberty. Nowhere in Italy be satisfied with her personal appearance, was art more absolutely emancipated than on the morning of her long-wishedfrom servile obedience to ecclesiastical for visit. Her heavy mourning was partraditions than at Venice. Nowhere was ticularly becoming to her fair face and the Christian history treated with a more slender figure. Excitement gave a pretty vivid realism, harmonized more naturally flush to her cheeks, and made her eyes Her chief perplexwith pagan mythology, or more completely brighter than usual. disinfected of medieval mysticism. The ity arose from her doubts as to the manfrank liberty, the scientific positivism, ner in which Stephen would meet her. the absolute sincerity, the candid and She had already decided that she would joyous acceptance of all facts in human take her tone from him. If he was disand physical nature, which were the great-tant and frigid, she would be silent and est qualities of the Renaissance, found grave; if he seemed agitated and emno obstacle whatever to their free devel- barrassed, she felt certain she should break down, for her nerves seemed strung opment in Venice. up to a high pitch.

Finding that Mrs. Prescott was in the morning room, she desired the man not to announce her, but, opening the door herself, she went up to her aunt, around whose neck she threw her arms, and clinging there for an instant, as if to gain courage, she raised her head, and timidly turned her eyes towards Sir Stephen, who, to her great mortification, came most composedly towards her, holding out his hand as he said

The Umbrian pietism which influenced Raphael in his boyhood and from which he broke off too abrubtly in his manhood, the gloomy prophecy of Savonarola which steeped the soul of Michael Angelo in melancholy, the psychological preoccupation of Leonardo, were alike unknown at Venice. Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, were courtiers, men of the world, children of the people, men of pleasure; wealthy, urbane, independent; were all these by turns; but were never monks, or mystics, or philosophers. In the How do you do, Katherine? Glad to Renaissance-spirit which possessed them see you looking so much better. Mother religion found a place; sensuality was tells me you have not been well lately. not rejected, but the religion was sane What an age it is since we met !" and manly; the sensuality was vigourous and virile. In a word Humanity, that marvellous complex of what we call flesh and spirit, lived in them and was mirrored in their hearts with absolute limpidity. There is no prudery, no effeminacy, no licence, no hypocrisy, no morbidity either of surperabundant sensualism or of exaggerated asceticism in their strong, concrete, splendid pageant of the newly dis

covered world.

Mrs. Labouchere felt her face grow crimson. Do all she could, she found it impossible to steady her voice to answer as she wished. Her confusion, however, seemed quite lost upon Sir Stephen, who

went on

"I have been half over the world since

I saw you. I expect you find this climate rather trying after such a sojourn in Italy. I felt myself shivering in the biting wind of yesterday."

And this was the meeting she had yearned for and looked forward to? Yes; and this, too, was the meeting that he' had spent whole days and nights in picturing when, and where, and how it would take place. So devotedly had Stephen Prescott loved Katherine Douglas, so implicitly had he trusted her, so thoroughly had he believed in her, that for years he could not separate the ideal