nces could not help
holding the same close relation to the art of Venice that their language
and modes of feeling held. But a difference must be made at once between
towns like Verona, with a school of at least as long a growth and with
as independent an evolution as the school of Venice itself, and towns
like Vicenza and Brescia whose chief painters never developed quite
independently of Venice or Verona. What makes Romanino and Moretto of
Brescia, or even the powerful Montagna of Vicenza, except when they are
at their very best, so much less enjoyable as a rule than the
Venetians--that is to say the painters wholly educated in Venice,--is
something they have in common with the Eclectics of a later day. They
are ill at ease about their art, which is no longer the utterly
unpremeditated outcome of a natural impulse. They saw greater painting
than their own in Venice and Verona, and not unfrequently their own
works show an uncouth attempt to adopt that greatness, which comes out
in exaggeration of colour even more than of form, and speaks for that
want of taste which is the indelible stamp of provincialism. But there
were Venetian towns without the traditions even of the schools of
Vicenza and Brescia, where, if you wanted to learn painting, you had to
apprentice yourself to somebody who had been taught by somebody who had
been a pupil of one of Giovanni Bellini's pupils. This was particularly
true of the towns in that long stretch of plain between the Julian Alps
and the sea, known as Friuli. Friuli produced one painter of remarkable
talents and great force, Giovanni Antonio Pordenone, but neither his
talents nor his force, nor even later study in Venice, could erase from
his works that stamp of provincialism which he inherited from his first
provincial master.

Such artists as these, however, never gained great favour in the
capital. Those whom Venice drew to herself when her own strength was
waning and when, like Rome in her decline, she began to absorb into
herself the talent of the provinces, were rather painters such as Paolo
Veronese whose art, although of independent growth, was sufficiently
like her own to be readily understood, or painters with an entirely new
vein, such as the Bassani.

=XX. Paul Veronese.=--Paolo was the product of four or five generations of
Veronese painters, the first two or three of which had spoken the
language of the whole mass of the people in a way that few other artists
had ever