re. They were seeking
effects of line, light, color--mere sensuous and pictorial effects, in
which religion and classicism played secondary parts. They believed in
art for art's sake; that painting was a creation, not an illustration;
that it should exist by its pictorial beauties, not by its subject or
story. No matter what their subjects, they invariably painted them so
as to show the beauties they prized the highest. The Venetian
conception was less austere, grand, intellectual, than pictorial,
sensuous, concerning the beautiful as it appealed to the eye. And this
was not a slight or unworthy conception. True it dealt with the
fulness of material life, but regarded as it was by the Venetians--a
thing full-rounded, complete, harmonious, splendid--it became a great
ideal of existence.

[Illustration: FIG. 47.--GIORGIONE(?). ORDEAL OF MOSES. UFFIZI.]

In technical expression color was the note of all the school, with
hardly an exception. This in itself would seem to imply a lightness of
spirit, for color is somehow associated in the popular mind with
decorative gayety; but nothing could be further removed from the
Venetian school than triviality. Color was taken up with the greatest
seriousness, and handled in such masses and with such dignified power
that while it pleased it also awed the spectator. Without having quite
the severity of line, some of the Venetian chromatic schemes rise in
sublimity almost to the Sistine modellings of Michael Angelo. We do
not feel this so much in Giovanni Bellini, fine in color as he was. He
came too early for the full splendor, but he left many pupils who
completed what he had inaugurated.

THE GREAT VENETIANS: The most positive in influence upon his
contemporaries of all the great Venetians was Giorgione (1477?-1511).
He died young, and what few pictures by him are left to us have been
so torn to pieces by historical criticism that at times one begins to
doubt if there ever was such a painter. His different styles have been
confused, and his pictures in consequence thereof attributed to
followers instead of to the master. Painters change their styles, but
seldom their original bent of mind. With Giorgione there was a lyric
feeling as shown in music. The voluptuous swell of line, the melting
tone of color, the sharp dash of light, the undercurrent of
atmosphere, all mingled for him into radiant melody. He sought pure
pictorial beauty and found it in everything of nature. He had litt