arriage of this niece and the subsequent
marriage of his nephew broke up the joint-household at S. Benedetto, and
that Gozzi then removed to the neighbouring quarter of S. Angelo.[89]
Almoro and his son Gasparo were appointed executors to Carlo Gozzi's
will, which winds up with the following characteristic admonition to the
young man: "Preserve your affection for your well-bred, well-behaved,
and excellent wife. Look to the careful education of your children, and
protect them from the false maxims of that sophistic science which is
the bane of our age, involving all humanity in disastrous mists of error
and confusion, in labyrinths of infelicity and misery." Gozzi died on
the 4th of April 1806, and was buried in the church of S. Cassiano.

PIETRO LONGHI,

THE PAINTER OF VENETIAN SOCIETY DURING THE PERIOD OF GOZZI AND
GOLDONI.[90]

I.

The eighteenth century was marked in Venice by a partial revival of the
art of painting. Four contemporary masters--Tiepolo, Canaletti, Longhi,
and Guardi--have left abundance of meritorious work, which illustrates
the taste and manners of society, shows how men and women dressed and
moved and took their pastime in the City of the Waters, and preserves
for us the external features of Venice during the last hundred years of
the Republic.[91]

As an artist, Tiepolo was undoubtedly the strongest of these four. In
him alone we recognise a genius of the first order, who, had he been
born in the great age of Italian painting, might have disputed the palm
with men like Tintoretto. His frescoes in the Palazzo Labia,
representing the embarkation of Antony and Cleopatra on the Cydnus, and
their famous banquet at Canopus, are worthy to be classed with the
finest decorative work of Paolo Veronese. Indeed, the sense for colour,
the robust breadth of design, and the firm, unerring execution, which
distinguish that great master, seem to have passed into Tiepolo, who
revives the splendours of the sixteenth century in these superbly
painted pageants. It is to be regretted that one so eminently gifted
should have condescended to the barocco taste of the age in those many
allegories and celestial triumphs which he executed upon the ceilings of
palaces and the cupolas of churches. Little, except the frescoes of the
Labia reception-hall, survives to show what Tiepolo might have achieved
had he remained true to his native instinct for heroic subjects and for
masculine sobriety of workmanship.

O