y-valve for its chief passions. Venice, too, knew the love of
glory, and the passion was perhaps only the more intense because it was
all dedicated to the State. There was nothing the Venetians would not do
to add to its greatness, glory, and splendour. It was this which led
them to make of the city itself that wondrous monument to the love and
awe they felt for their Republic, which still rouses more admiration and
gives more pleasure than any other one achievement of the art-impulse in
man. They were not content to make their city the most beautiful in the
world; they performed ceremonies in its honour partaking of all the
solemnity of religious rites. Processions and pageants by land and by
sea, free from that gross element of improvisation which characterised
them elsewhere in Italy, formed no less a part of the functions of the
Venetian State than the High Mass in the Catholic Church. Such a
function, with Doge and Senators arrayed in gorgeous costumes no less
prescribed than the raiments of ecclesiastics, in the midst of the
fairy-like architecture of the Piazza or canals, was the event most
eagerly looked forward to, and the one that gave most satisfaction to
the Venetian's love of his State, and to his love of splendour, beauty,
and gaiety. He would have had them every day if it were possible, and,
to make up for their rarity, he loved to have representations of them.
So most Venetian pictures of the beginning of the sixteenth century
tended to take the form of magnificent processions, if they did not
actually represent them. They are processions in the Piazza, as in
Gentile Bellini's "Corpus Christi" picture, or on the water, as in
Carpaccio's picture where St. Ursula leaves her home; or they represent
what was a gorgeous but common sight in Venice, the reception or
dismissal of ambassadors, as in several pictures of Carpaccio's St.
Ursula series; or they show simply a collection of splendidly costumed
people in the Piazza, as in Gentile's "Preaching of St. Mark." Not only
the pleasure-loving Carpaccio, but the austere Cima, as he grew older,
turned every biblical and saintly legend into an occasion for the
picture of a pageant.

But there was a further reason for the popularity of such pictures. The
decorations which were then being executed by the most reputed masters
in the Hall of Great Council in the Doge's Palace, were, by the nature
of the subject, required to represent pageants. The Venetian State
encou