looked upon
all such qualities as impious in the individual because they were the
strict monopoly of the State. In the portraits of Doges which decorated
the frieze of its great Council Hall, Venice wanted the effigies of
functionaries entirely devoted to the State, and not of great
personalities, and the profile lent itself more readily to the omission
of purely individual traits.

It is significant that Venice was the first state which made a business
of preserving the portraits of its chief rulers. Those which Gentile and
Giovanni Bellini executed for this end must have had no less influence
on portraiture than their mural paintings in the same Hall had on other
branches of the art. But the State was not satisfied with leaving
records of its glory in the Ducal Palace alone. The Church and the
saints were impressed for the same purpose--happily for us, for while
the portraits in the Great Hall have perished, several altar-pieces
still preserve to us the likenesses of some of the Doges.

Early in the sixteenth century, when people began to want pictures in
their own homes as well as in their public halls, personal and
religious motives combined to dictate the choice of subjects. In the
minds of many, painting, although a very familiar art, was too much
connected with solemn religious rites and with state ceremonies to be
used at once for ends of personal pleasure. So landscape had to slide in
under the patronage of St. Jerome; while romantic biblical episodes,
like the "Finding of Moses," or the "Judgment of Solomon," gave an
excuse for _genre_, and the portrait crept in half hidden under the
mantle of a patron saint. Its position once secure, however, the
portrait took no time to cast off all tutelage, and to declare itself
one of the most attractive subjects possible. Over and above the obvious
satisfaction afforded by a likeness, the portrait had to give pleasure
to the eye, and to produce those agreeable moods which were expected
from all other paintings in Giorgione's time. Portraits like that of
Scarampo are scarcely less hard to live with than such a person himself
must have been. They tyrannize rather than soothe and please. But
Giorgione and his immediate followers painted men and women whose very
look leads one to think of sympathetic friends, people whose features
are pleasantly rounded, whose raiment seems soft to touch, whose
surroundings call up the memory of sweet landscapes and refreshing
breezes. In