wing decades of the Renaissance. This led men to take themselves
more seriously, to act with more consideration of consequences, and to
think of life with less hope and exultation. Quieter joys were sought,
the pleasures of friendship and of the affections. Life not having
proved the endless holiday it had promised to be, earnest people began
to question whether under the gross masque of the official religion
there was not something to console them for departed youth and for the
failure of hopes. Thus religion began to revive in Italy, this time not
ethnic nor political, but personal,--an answer to the real needs of the
human soul.

=XII. Lotto.=--It is scarcely to be wondered at that the Venetian artist
in whom we first find the expression of the new feelings, should have
been one who by wide travel had been brought in contact with the
miseries of Italy in a way not possible for those who remained sheltered
in Venice. Lorenzo Lotto, when he is most himself, does not paint the
triumph of man over his environment, but in his altar-pieces, and even
more in his portraits, he shows us people in want of the consolations of
religion, of sober thought, of friendship and affection. They look out
from his canvases as if begging for sympathy.

But real expression for the new order of things was not to be found by
one like Lotto, sensitive of feeling and born in the heyday of the
Renaissance, to whom the new must have come as a disappointment. It had
to come from one who had not been brought in personal contact with the
woes of the rest of Italy, from one less conscious of his environment,
one like Titian who was readier to receive the patronage of the new
master than to feel an oppression which did not touch him personally; or
it had to come from one like Tintoretto, born to the new order of things
and not having to outlive a disappointment before adapting himself to
it.

=XIII. The Late Renaissance and Titian.=--It is as impossible to keep
untouched by what happens to your neighbours as to have a bright sky
over your own house when it is stormy everywhere else. Spain did not
directly dominate Venice, but the new fashions of life and thought
inaugurated by her nearly universal triumph could not be kept out. Her
victims, among whom the Italian scholars must be reckoned, flocked to
Venice for shelter, persecuted by a rule that cherished the Inquisition.
Now for the first time Venetian painters were brought in contact with
me