nly
charm. Just as the Church had educated people to understand painting as
a language, so the love of all the pleasant things that painting
suggested led in time to the love of this art as its own end, serving no
obvious purpose either of decoration or suggestion, but giving pleasure
by the skilful management of light and shadow, and by the intrinsic
beauty of the colours. The third quarter of the sixteenth century thus
saw the rise of the picture-fancier, and the success of the Bassani was
so great because they appealed to this class in a special way. In
Venice there had long been a love of objects for their sensuous beauty.
At an early date the Venetians had perfected an art in which there is
scarcely any intellectual content whatever, and in which colour,
jewel-like or opaline, is almost everything. Venetian glass was at the
same time an outcome of the Venetians' love of sensuous beauty and a
continual stimulant to it. Pope Paul II., for example, who was a
Venetian, took such a delight in the colour and glow of jewels, that he
was always looking at them and always handling them. When painting,
accordingly, had reached the point where it was no longer dependent upon
the Church, nor even expected to be decorative, but when it was used
purely for pleasure, the day could not be far distant when people would
expect painting to give them the same enjoyment they received from
jewels and glass. In Bassano's works this taste found full satisfaction.
Most of his pictures seem at first as dazzling, then as cooling and
soothing, as the best kind of stained glass; while the colouring of
details, particularly of those under high lights, is jewel-like, as
clear and deep and satisfying as rubies and emeralds.

It need scarcely be added after all that has been said about light and
atmosphere in connection with Titian and Tintoretto, and their handling
of real life, that Bassano's treatment of both was even more masterly.
If this were not so, neither picture-fanciers of his own time, nor we
nowadays, should care for his works as we do. They represent life in far
more humble phases than even the pictures of Tintoretto, and, without
recompensing effects of light and atmosphere, they would not be more
enjoyable than the cheap work of the smaller Dutch masters. It must be
added, too, that without his jewel-like colouring, Bassano would often
be no more delightful than Teniers.

Another thing Bassano could not fail to do, working as he d