aro
e Celso, at Brescia, is certainly a religious--a great, religious
painter. The famous Gabriel of the Annunciation, aflight, in all the
effortless energy of an angel indeed, and Sebastian, adapted, it was
said, from an ancient statue, yet as novel in design as if Titian had
been the first to handle that so familiar figure in old religious
art--may represent for us a vast and varied amount of work--in which he
expands to their utmost artistic compass the earlier religious dreams
of Mantegna and the Bellini, affording sufficient proof how sacred
themes could rouse his imagination, and all his manual skill, to heroic
efforts. But he is also the painter of the Venus of the Tribune and
the Triumph of Bacchus; and such frank acceptance of the voluptuous
paganism of the Renaissance, the motive of a large proportion of his
work, [91] might make us think that religion, grandly dramatic as was
his conception of it, can have been for him only one of many pictorial
attitudes. There are however painters of that date who, while their
work is great enough to be connected (perhaps groundlessly) with
Titian's personal influence, or directly attributed to his hand,
possess at least this psychological interest, that about their
religiousness there can be no question. Their work is to be looked for
mainly in and about the two sub-alpine towns of Brescia and Bergamo; in
the former of which it becomes definable as a school--the school of
Moretto, in whom the perfected art of the later Renaissance is to be
seen in union with a catholicism as convinced, towards the middle of
the sixteenth century, as that of Giotto or Angelico.

Moretto of Brescia, for instance, is one of the few painters who have
fully understood the artistic opportunities of the subject of Saint
Paul, for whom, for the most part, art has found only the conventional
trappings of a Roman soldier (a soldier, as being in charge of those
prisoners to Damascus), or a somewhat commonplace old age. Moretto
also makes him a nobly accoutred soldier--the rim of the helmet, thrown
backward in his fall to the earth, rings the head already with a faint
circle of glory--but a soldier still in possession of all those
resources of unspoiled youth which he is ready to offer in a [92]
moment to the truth that has just dawned visibly upon him. The
terrified horse, very grandly designed, leaps high against the suddenly
darkened sky above the distant horizon of Damascus, with all Moretto'