carve lies, or he must abandon the serenity that was both
natural and easy to the Greek and the earlier Italian. Michael Angelo was
one of these select artistic natures. He used his chisel and his pencil
to express, not merely beautiful artistic motives, but what he felt and
thought about the world in which he had to live: and this world was full
of the ruin of republics, the corruption and humiliation of society, the
subjection of Italy to strangers. In Michael Angelo the student of both
art and history finds an inestimably precious and rare point of contact
between the inner spirit of an age, and its external expression in
sculpture and painting.

CHAPTER VII

VENETIAN PAINTING

Painting bloomed late in Venice--Conditions offered by Venice to
Art--Shelley and Pietro Aretino--Political circumstances of
Venice--Comparison with Florence--The Ducal Palace--Art regarded as an
adjunct to State Pageantry--Myth of Venezia--Heroic Deeds of
Venice--Tintoretto's Paradise and Guardi's Picture of a Ball--Early
Venetian Masters of Murano--Gian Bellini--Carpaccio's little Angels--The
Madonna of S. Zaccaria--Giorgione--Allegory, Idyll, Expression of
Emotion--The Monk at the Clavichord--Titian, Tintoret, and
Veronese--Tintoretto's attempt to dramatise Venetian Art--Veronese's
Mundane Splendour--Titian's Sophoclean Harmony--Their Schools--Further
Characteristics of Veronese--of Tintoretto--His Imaginative
Energy--Predominant Poetry--Titian's Perfection of Balance--Assumption of
Madonna--Spirit common to the Great Venetians.

It was a fact of the greatest importance for the development of the fine
arts in Italy that painting in Venice reached maturity later than in
Florence. Owing to this circumstance one chief aspect of the Renaissance,
its material magnificence and freedom, received consummate treatment at
the hands of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. To idealise the
sensualities of the external universe, to achieve for colour what the
Florentines had done for form, to invest the worldly grandeur of human
life at one of its most gorgeous epochs with the dignity of the highest
art, was what these great artists were called on to accomplish. Their task
could not have been so worthily performed in the fifteenth century as in
the sixteenth, if the development of the aesthetic sense had been more
premature among the Venetians.

Venice was precisely fitted for the part her painters had to play. Free,
isolated, wealthy, powerfu