in our own days. This alone would have made the Renaissance a
period of peculiar interest, even if it had had no art whatever. But
when ideas are fresh and strong, they are almost sure to find artistic
embodiment, as indeed this whole epoch found in painting, and this
particular period in the works of Tintoretto.

=XV. Sebastiano del Piombo.=--The emancipation of the individual had a
direct effect on the painter in freeing him from his guild. It now
occurred to him that possibly he might become more proficient and have
greater success if he deserted the influences he was under by the
accident of birth and residence, and placed himself in the school that
seemed best adapted to foster his talents. This led to the unfortunate
experiment of Eclecticism which checked the purely organic development
of the separate schools. It brought about their fusion into an art which
no longer appealed to the Italian people, as did the art which sprang
naturally from the soil, but to the small class of _dilettanti_ who
considered a knowledge of art as one of the birthrights of their social
position. Venice, however, suffered little from Eclecticism, perhaps
because a strong sense of individuality was late in getting there, and
by that time the painters were already well enough educated in their
craft to know that they had little to learn elsewhere. The one Venetian
who became an Eclectic, remained in spite of it a great painter.
Sebastiano del Piombo fell under the influence of Michelangelo, but
while this influence was pernicious in most cases, the hand that had
learned to paint under Bellini, Cima, and Giorgione, never wholly lost
its command of colour and tone.

=XVI. Tintoretto.=--Tintoretto stayed at home, but he felt in his own
person a craving for something that Titian could not teach him. The
Venice he was born in was not the Venice of Titian's early youth, and
his own adolescence fell in the period when Spain was rapidly making
herself mistress of Italy. The haunting sense of powers almost
irresistible gave a terrible fascination to Michelangelo's works, which
are swayed by that sense as by a demonic presence. Tintoretto felt this
fascination because he was in sympathy with the spirit which took form
in colossal torsoes and limbs. To him these were not, as they were to
Michelangelo's enrolled followers, merely new patterns after which to
model the nude.

But beside this sense of overwhelming power and gigantic force,
Tintor