ing all the spectators feel as they pleased
about what he himself believed to be the greatest event that ever took
place. Among this multitude he allowed the light of heaven to shine upon
the wicked as well as upon the good, and the air to refresh them all
equally. In other words, this enormous canvas is a great sea of air and
light at the bottom of which the scene takes place. Without the
atmosphere and the just distribution of light, it would look as lifeless
and desolate, in spite of the crowd and animation, as if it were the
bottom of a dried up sea.

=XVIII. Tintoretto's Portraits.=--While all these advances were being
made, the art of portraiture had not stood still. Its popularity had
only increased as the years went on. Titian was too busy with
commissions for foreign princes to supply the great demand there was in
Venice alone. Tintoretto painted portraits not only with much of the air
of good breeding of Titian's likenesses, but with even greater
splendour, and with an astonishing rapidity of execution. The Venetian
portrait, it will be remembered, was expected to be more than a
likeness. It was expected to give pleasure to the eye, and to stimulate
the emotions. Tintoretto was ready to give ample satisfaction to all
such expectations. His portraits, although they are not so
individualised as Lotto's, nor such close studies of character as
Titian's, always render the man at his best, in glowing health, full of
life and determination. They give us the sensuous pleasure we get from
jewels, and at the same time they make us look back with amazement to a
State where the human plant was in such vigour as to produce old men of
the kind represented in most of Tintoretto's portraits.

With Tintoretto ends the universal interest the Venetian school arouses;
for although painting does not deteriorate in a day any more than it
grows to maturity in the same brief moment, the story of the decay has
none of the fascination of the growth. But several artists remain to be
considered who were not of the Venetian school in the strict sense of
the term, but who have always been included within it.

=XIX. Venetian Art and the Provinces.=--The Venetian provinces were held
together not merely by force of rule. In language and feeling no less
than in government, they formed a distinct unit within the Italian
peninsula. Painting being so truly a product of the soil as it was in
Italy during the Renaissance, the art of the provi