nce too famous
to remain entirely unmentioned. This is Correggio, a painter affected
also by the pictures of Raphael and Leonardo, but individual in his
vision and his work. He passed his life in Parma, in the north of Italy,
inheriting a North Italian tradition, and hearing only echoes of the
world beyond. His canvases are thronged with fair shapes, pretty women
and dancing children, ethereally soft and lovely. But it is in his
native town that the angels soar aloft with the Virgin in the dome
of the cathedral, and the children frolic on the walls of the convent.
These are his masterpieces you would like best.

In 1550 the impetus given to painting in Italy by the Renaissance was
drawing to an end. The great central epoch may be said to have
terminated in Tuscany a few years after the deaths of Leonardo and
Raphael in 1520. But we have said nothing yet of Venice, where, in
1520, artists whose visions and whose record of them were to be as
wonderful as those of Botticelli and Raphael, were as yet sleeping
in their cradles.

CHAPTER VII

THE RENAISSANCE IN VENICE

A visit to Venice is one of the joys which perhaps few of us have yet
experienced. But whether we have been there or not, we all know that
the very sound of her name is enchanting for those who are fresh from
her magic--her sunrises and sunsets unmatched for colour, and her
streets for silence.

The Venetians were a proud and successful people, wealthier by virtue
of their great sea-trade than the citizens of Florence or of any other
town in Italy; their foremost men lived in great high-roomed palaces,
richly furnished, and decorated with pictures of a sumptuous pageantry.
But the Venetians were not merely a luxurious people. The poetry of
the lagoons, and the glory of the sunset skies, imparted to their lives
the wealth of a rare romance. Even in Venice to-day, now that the
steamers have spoilt the peace of the canals and the old orange-winged
sailing-boats no longer crowd against the quays, the dreamy atmosphere
of the city retains its spell.

Few artists ever felt and expressed this atmosphere better than
Giorgione, the painter of the first of our Venetian pictures. He was
one of the great artists of the Renaissance who died young, ten years
before Raphael, but their greatness is scarcely comparable. Like
Raphael, Giorgione was precocious, but unlike him he painted in a style
of his own that from the very beginning owed little to any one else