etry. In Venice alone painting
remained what it had been all over Italy in earlier times, the common
tongue of the whole mass of the people. Venetian artists thus had the
strongest inducements to perfect the processes which painters must
employ to make pictures look real to their own generation; and their
generation had an altogether firmer hold on reality than any that had
been known since the triumph of Christianity. Here again the comparison
of the Renaissance to youth must be borne in mind. The grasp that youth
has on reality is not to be compared to that brought by age, and we must
not expect to find in the Renaissance a passion for an acquaintance with
things as they are such as we ourselves have; but still its grasp of
facts was far firmer than that of the Middle Ages.

Painting, in accommodating itself to the new ideas, found that it could
not attain to satisfactory representation merely by form and colour, but
that it required light and shadow and effects of space. Indeed, venial
faults of drawing are perhaps the least disturbing, while faults of
perspective, of spacing, and of colour completely spoil a picture for
people who have an every-day acquaintance with painting such as the
Venetians had. We find the Venetian painters, therefore, more and more
intent upon giving the space they paint its real depth, upon giving
solid objects the full effect of the round, upon keeping the different
parts of a figure within the same plane, and upon compelling things to
hold their proper places one behind the other. As early as the beginning
of the sixteenth century a few of the greater Venetian painters had
succeeded in making distant objects less and less distinct, as well as
smaller and smaller, and had succeeded also in giving some appearance of
reality to the atmosphere. These are a few of the special problems of
painting, as distinct from sculpture for instance, and they are problems
which, among the Italians, only the Venetians and the painters closely
connected with them solved with any success.

=V. Pageant Pictures.=--The painters of the end of the fifteenth century
who met with the greatest success in solving these problems were
Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Cima da Conegliano, and Carpaccio, and we
find each of them enjoyable to the degree that he was in touch with the
life of his day. I have already spoken of pageants and of how
characteristic they were of the Renaissance, forming as they did a sort
of safet