feeling for beauty was not
hindered in its natural development. Archaeology would have tried to
submit it to the good taste of the past, a proceeding which rarely
promotes good taste in the present. Too much archaeology and too much
science might have ended in making Venetian art academic, instead of
letting it become what it did, the product of a natural ripening of
interest in life and love of pleasure. In Florence, it is true, painting
had developed almost simultaneously with the other arts, and it may be
due to this very cause that the Florentine painters never quite realised
what a different task from the architect's and sculptor's was theirs. At
the time, therefore, when the Renaissance was beginning to find its best
expression in painting, the Florentines were already too much attached
to classical ideals of form and composition, in other words, too
academic, to give embodiment to the throbbing feeling for life and
pleasure.

Thus it came to pass that in the Venetian pictures of the end of the
fifteenth century we find neither the contrition nor the devotion of
those earlier years when the Church alone employed painting as the
interpreter of emotion, nor the learning which characterised the
Florentines. The Venetian masters of this time, although nominally
continuing to paint the Madonna and saints, were in reality painting
handsome, healthy, sane people like themselves, people who wore their
splendid robes with dignity, who found life worth the mere living and
sought no metaphysical basis for it. In short, the Venetian pictures of
the last decade of the century seemed intended not for devotion, as they
had been, nor for admiration, as they then were in Florence, but for
enjoyment.

The Church itself, as has been said, had educated its children to
understand painting as a language. Now that the passions men dared to
avow were no longer connected with happiness in some future state only,
but mainly with life in the present, painting was expected to give voice
to these more human aspirations and to desert the outgrown ideals of the
Church. In Florence, the painters seemed unable or unwilling to make
their art really popular. Nor was it so necessary there, for Poliziano,
Pulci, and Lorenzo dei Medici supplied the need of self-expression by
addressing the Florentines in the language which their early enthusiasm
for antiquity and their natural gifts had made them understand better
than any other--the language of po