id in the
country, and for country people, was to paint landscape. He had to paint
the real country, and his skill in the treatment of light and atmosphere
was great enough to enable him to do it well. Bassano was in fact the
first modern landscape painter. Titian and Tintoretto and Giorgione,
and even Bellini and Cima before them, had painted beautiful landscapes,
but they were seldom direct studies from nature. They were decorative
backgrounds, or fine harmonising accompaniments to the religious or
human elements of the picture. They never failed to get grand and
effective lines--a setting worthy of the subject. Bassano did not need
such setting for his country versions of Bible stories, and he needed
them even less in his studies of rural life. For pictures of this kind
the country itself naturally seemed the best background and the best
accompaniment possible,--indeed, the only kind desirable. Without
knowing it, therefore, and without intending it, Bassano was the first
Italian who tried to paint the country as it really is, and not arranged
to look like scenery.

=XXII. The Venetians and Velasquez.=--Had Bassano's qualities, however,
been of the kind that appealed only to the collectors of his time, he
would scarcely rouse the strong interest we take in him. We care for him
chiefly because he has so many of the more essential qualities of great
art--truth to life, and spontaneity. He has another interest still, in
that he began to beat out the path which ended at last in Velasquez.
Indeed, one of the attractions of the Venetian school of painting is
that, more than all others, it went to form that great Spanish master.
He began as a sort of follower of Bassano, but his style was not fixed
before he had given years of study to Veronese, to Tintoretto, and to
Titian.

=XXIII. Decline of Venetian Art.=--Bassano appealed to collectors by mere
accident. He certainly did not work for them. The painters who came
after him and after Tintoretto no longer worked unconsciously, as
Veronese did, nor for the whole intelligent class, as Titian and
Tintoretto had done, but for people who prided themselves on their
connoisseurship.

Palma the Younger and Domenico Tintoretto began well enough as natural
followers of Tintoretto, but before long they became aware of their
inferiority to the masters who had preceded them, and, feeling no longer
the strength to go beyond them, fell back upon painting variations of
those pictur