s' his best works have a clear jewel brightness, an internal
gem-like fire such as warms a summer twilight. The shadows are intense
and yet transparent, like the Adriatic waves when they lie out of the
sun under the palace bridges.'

Portrait-painting, just beginning, was established in Venice, its later
stronghold, by Gian Bellini. His truthful portrait of the Doge Loredano,
one of the earliest of that series of Doges' portraits which once hung
in state in the ducal palace, is now in our National Gallery.

Of Gentile Bellini, whose work was softer, but less vigorous than his
brother's, the best painting extant is that at Milan of St Mark
preaching at Alexandria, in which the painter showed how he had profited
by his residence at Constantinople in the introduction of much rich
Turkish costume, and of an animal unknown to Europe at the time--a
camelopard.

Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua. He was the son of a farmer. His
early history, according to tradition, is very similar to that of
Giotto. Just as Cimabue adopted Giotto, Squarcione, a painter who had
travelled in Italy and Greece, and made a great collection of antiques,
from which he taught in a famous school of painters, adopted Andrea
Mantegna at the early age of ten years. It was long believed that
Mantegna, in the end, forfeited the favour of his master by marrying
Nicolosa Bellini, the sister of Gentile and Gian Bellini, whose father
was the great rival of Squarcione; and farther, that Mantegna's style of
painting had been considered Bellini. Modern researches, which have
substituted another surname for that of Bellini as the surname of Andrea
Mantegna's wife, contradict this story.

Andrea Mantegna, a man of much energy and fancy, entered young into the
service of the Gonzaga lords of Mantua, receiving from them a salary of
thirty pounds a year and a piece of land, on which the painter built a
house, and painted it within and without--the latter one of the first
examples of artistic waste, followed later by Tintoret and Veronese,
regardless of the fact that painting could not survive in the open air
of Northern Italy.

Andrea Mantegna had his home at Mantua, except when he was called to
Rome to paint for the Pope, Innocent VIII. An anecdote is told by Mrs
Jameson of this commission. It seems the Pope's payments were irregular;
and one day when he visited his painter at work, and his Holiness asked
the meaning of a certain allegorical female figure in t