cence, but the change of architectural style, though it has
modified the tone and extent of colour, is far from dismissing it
altogether. The flat pilasters which support the round arches of its
base are sheeted with a delicately-tinged marble; the flower-work of
their capitals and the mask enclosed within it are gilded like the
continuous billet moulding which runs round in the hollow of each arch,
while the spandrils are filled in with richer and darker marbles, each
broken with a central medallion of gold. The use of gold indeed seems a
"note" of the colouring of the early Renascence; a broad band of gold
wreathes the two rolls beneath and above the cornice, and lozenges of
gold light up the bases of the light pillars in the colonnade above. In
another picture of Carpaccio, the 'Dismissal of the Ambassadors,' one
sees the same principles of colouring extended to the treatment of
interiors. The effect is obtained partly by the contrast of the lighter
marbles with those of deeper colour or with porphyry, partly by the
contrast of both with gold. Everywhere, whether in the earlier buildings
of mediaeval art or in the later efforts of the Renascence, Venice seemed
to clothe itself in robes of Oriental splendour, and to pour over
Western art before its fall the wealth and gorgeousness of the East.

Of the four artist-figures who--in the tradition of Tintoret's
picture--support this "Golden Calf" of Venice, Tintoret himself is the
one specially Venetian. Giorgione was of Castel Franco; Titian came from
the mountains of Cadore; Paolo from Verona. But Jacopo Robusti, the
"little dyer," the Tintoretto, was born, lived, and died in Venice. His
works, rare elsewhere, crowd its churches, its palaces, its galleries.
Its greatest art-building is the shrine of his faith. The school of San
Rocco has rightly been styled by Mr. Ruskin "one of the three most
precious buildings in the world"; it is the one spot where all is
Tintoret. Few contrasts are at first sight more striking than the
contrast between the building of the Renascence which contains his forty
masterpieces and the great mediaeval church of the Frari which stands
beside it. But a certain oneness after all links the two buildings
together. The Friars had burst on the caste spirit of the middle age,
its mere classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of
human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards.
Tintoret found himself facing a new