ir
details, as far as is possible on the scale compelled by perspective,
being alone sufficient to prevent this, except in the hands of painters
far more practised in effect than either Gentile or Carpaccio. But with
all these discrepancies, Gentile Bellini's church of St. Mark's is the
best church of St. Mark's that has ever been painted, so far as I know;
and I believe the reconciliation of true aerial perspective and
chiaroscuro with the splendor and dignity obtained by the real gilding
and elaborate detail, is a problem yet to be accomplished. With the help
of the Daguerreotype, and the lessons of color given by the later
Venetians, we ought now to be able to accomplish it, more especially as
the right use of gold has been shown us by the greatest master of effect
whom Venice herself produced, Tintoret, who has employed it with
infinite grace on the steps ascended by the young Madonna, in his large
picture in the church of the Madonna dell' Orto. Perugino uses it also
with singular grace, often employing it for golden light on distant
trees, and continually on the high light of hair, and that without
losing relative distances.

Sec. 29. And of the Venetians generally.

The great group of Venetian painters who brought landscape art, for that
time, to its culminating point, have left, as we have already seen,
little that is instructive in architectural painting. The causes of this
I cannot comprehend, for neither Titian nor Tintoret appears to despise
anything that affords them either variety of form or of color, the
latter especially condescending to very trivial details,--as in the
magnificent carpet painting of the Doge Mocenigo; so that it might have
been expected that in the rich colors of St. Mark's, and the magnificent
and fantastic masses of the Byzantine palaces, they would have found
where-upon to dwell with delighted elaboration. This is, however, never
the case, and although frequently compelled to introduce portions of
Venetian locality in their backgrounds, such portions are always treated
in a most hasty and faithless manner, missing frequently all character
of the building, and never advanced to realization. In Titian's picture
of Faith, the view of Venice below is laid in so rapidly and slightly,
the houses all leaning this way and that, and of no color, the sea a
dead gray green, and the ship-sails mere dashes of the brush, that the
most obscure of Turner's Venices would look substantial beside it