cio. Much as he
loved pageants, he loved homelier scenes as well. His "Dream of St.
Ursula" shows us a young girl asleep in a room filled with the quiet
morning light. Indeed, it may be better described as the picture of a
room with the light playing softly upon its walls, upon the flower-pots
in the window, and upon the writing-table and the cupboards. A young
girl happens to be asleep in the bed, but the picture is far from being
a merely economic illustration to this episode in the life of the saint.
Again, let us take the work in the same series where King Maure
dismisses the ambassadors. Carpaccio has made this a scene of a
chancellery in which the most striking features are neither the king nor
the ambassadors, but the effect of the light that streams through a side
door on the left and a poor clerk labouring at his task. Or, again, take
St. Jerome in his study, in the Scuola di San Giorgio. He is nothing but
a Venetian scholar seated in his comfortable, bright library, in the
midst of his books, with his little shelf of bric-a-brac running along
the wall. There is nothing in his look or surroundings to speak of a
life of self-denial or of arduous devotion to the problems of sin and
redemption. Even the "Presentation of the Virgin," which offered such a
splendid chance for a pageant, Carpaccio, in one instance, turned into
the picture of a simple girl going to her first communion. In other
words, Carpaccio's quality is the quality of a painter of _genre_, of
which he was the earliest Italian master. His _genre_ differs from Dutch
or French not in kind but in degree. Dutch _genre_ is much more
democratic, and, as painting, it is of a far finer quality, but it deals
with its subject, as Carpaccio does, for the sake of its own pictorial
capacities and for the sake of the effects of colour and of light and
shade.

=VII. Easel Pictures and Giorgione.=--At the beginning of the Renaissance
painting was almost wholly confined to the Church. From the Church it
extended to the Council Hall, and thence to the Schools. There it
rapidly developed into an art which had no higher aim than painting the
sumptuous life of the aristocracy. When it had reached this point, there
was no reason whatever why it should not begin to grace the dwellings of
all well-to-do people.

In the sixteenth century painting was not looked upon with the
estranging reverence paid to it now. It was almost as cheap as printing
has become since, and al