he
epoch-making man of early Venice. Some of his pictures, like the S.
Zaccaria Madonna, will compare favorably with any work of any age, and
his landscape backgrounds (see the St. Peter Martyr in the National
Gallery, London) were rather wonderful for the period in which they
were produced.

Of Bellini's contemporaries and followers there were many, and as a
school there was a similarity of style, subject, and color-treatment
carrying through them all, with individual peculiarities in each
painter. After Giovanni Bellini comes Carpaccio (?-1522?), a younger
contemporary, about whose history little is known. He worked with
Gentile Bellini, and was undoubtedly influenced by Giovanni Bellini.
In subject he was more romantic and chivalric than religious, though
painting a number of altar-pieces. The legend was his delight, and his
great success, as the St. Ursula and St. George pictures in Venice
still indicate. He was remarkable for his knowledge of architecture,
costumes, and Oriental settings, put forth in a realistic way, with
much invention and technical ability in the handling of landscape,
perspective, light, and color. There is a truthfulness of
appearance--an out-of-doors feeling--about his work that is quite
captivating. In addition, the spirit of his art was earnestness,
honesty, and sincerity, and even the awkward bits of drawing which
occasionally appeared in his work served to add to the general naive
effect of the whole.

[Illustration: FIG. 37.--ANTONELLO DA MESSINA. UNKNOWN MAN. LOUVRE.]

Cima da Conegliano (1460?-1517?) was probably a pupil of Giovanni
Bellini, with some Carpaccio influence about him. He was the best of
the immediate followers, none of whom came up to the master. They were
trammelled somewhat by being educated in distemper work, and then
midway in their careers changing to the oil medium, that medium
having been introduced into Venice by Antonello da Messina in 1473.
Cima's subjects were largely half-length madonnas, given with strong
qualities of light-and-shade and color. He was not a great originator,
though a man of ability. Catena (?-1531) had a wide reputation in his
day, but it came more from a smooth finish and pretty accessories than
from creative power. He imitated Bellini's style so well that a number
of his pictures pass for works by the master even to this day. Later
he followed Giorgione and Carpaccio. A man possessed of knowledge, he
seemed to have no original propellin