poraries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and
Velazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a more
demonstrative, a seemingly closer embrace, drawing from the contact a
more exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness some
of the stain of earth. Titian, though he was at least as genuine a
realist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mere
outsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which was
everywhere--in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home of
his adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art had
ever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divine
harmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion, that
distinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art that
is not Italian.

The relation of the two masters--both of them in the first line of the
world's painters--was much that of Venice to Antwerp. The apogee of each
city in its different way represented the highest point that modern
Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as
distinguished from mental culture. But then Venice was wrapped in the
transfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering above
the rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains,
the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region. Reality, with
all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality. But
it was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the method
of presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could
add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the
splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the
genuine naturalness of such a mode of life. Art itself could only add to
it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the
colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression to
the beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charm
of the people. This is what Titian, supreme among his contemporaries of
the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which,
in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek
for a parallel.

Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly enlist
our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in some
special branch of their art; yet, afte