we speak of the Venetian School and when we rank it beside that of
Florence, while Giovanni Bellini alone, in his later works, is not
strong enough to bear the burden.

The change which now comes over painting is not so much a technical one
as a change of temper, a new tendency in human thought, and we link it
with Giorgione because he was the channel through which the deep impulse
first burst into the light. We have tried to trace the growth of the
early Venetian School, but it does not develop logically like that of
Florence; it is not the result of long endeavour, adding one acquisition
and discovery to another. Venetian art was peculiarly the outcome of
personalities, and it did not know its own mind till the sixteenth
century. Then, like a hidden spring, it bubbles irresistibly to the
surface, and the spot where it does so is called by the name of a man.

There are beings in most great creative epochs who, with peculiar
facility, seem to embody the purpose of their age and to yield
themselves as ready instruments to its design. When time is ripe they
appear, and are able, with perfect ease, to carry out and give voice to
the desires and tendencies which have been straining for expression.
These desires may owe their origin to national life and temperament; it
may have taken generations to bring them to fruition, but they become
audible through the agency of an individual genius. A genius is
inevitably moulded by his age. Rome, in the seventeenth century,
drew to her in Bernini a man who could with real power illustrate her
determination to be grandiose and ostentatious, and, at the height of
the Renaissance, Venice draws into her service a man whose sensuous
feeling was instilled, accentuated, and welcomed by every element
around him.

More conclusively than ever, at this time, Venice, the world's great
sea-power, was in her full glory as the centre of the world's commerce
and its art and culture. Vasco da Gama had discovered the sea route to
India in 1498, but the stupendous effect which this was to exert on the
whole current of power did not become apparent all at once. Venice was
still the great emporium of the East, linked to it by a thousand ties,
Oriental in her love of Eastern richness.

It would be exaggerating to say that the Venetians of the sixteenth
century could not draw. As there were Tuscans who understood beautiful
harmonies of colour, so there were Venetians who knew a good deal about
form; but