The Venetian School of Painting Part 5

Carpaccio is not a very great painter, but a charming one. His treatment of light and water, of distant hills and trees, shows a sense of peace and poetry, and though he is influenced by Gentile's splendid realistic heads, the type which appeals to him is gentler and more idealised. His fancy is caught by Oriental details, to which Gentile would naturally have directed his attention, and of which there was no lack in Venice at this time. All his episodes are very clearly ill.u.s.trated, and his popular brush was kept busily employed. He took a share with other a.s.sistants in the series which Gentile was painting in S. Giovanni Evangelista. In 1502 the Dalmatians inhabiting Venice resolved to decorate their school, which had been founded fifty years earlier, for the relief of dest.i.tute Dalmatian seamen in Venice. The subjects were to be selected from the lives of the Saviour and the patron saints of Dalmatia and Albania, St. Jerome, St. George of the Sclavonians, and St.

Tryphonius. The nine panels and an altarpiece which Carpaccio delivered between 1502 and 1508 still adorn the small but dignified Hall of the school. His "Jerome in his Study" has nothing ascetic, but shows a prosperous Venetian ecclesiastic seated in his well-furnished library among his books and writings. He is less successful in his scenes from the life of Christ; the Gethsemane is an obvious imitation of Mantegna; but when he leaves his own style he is weak and poor, and imaginary scenes are quite beyond him. In the death and interment of St. Jerome he gives a delightful impression of the peace of the old convent garden, and in the scene where the lion introduced by the saint scatters the terrified monks he lets a sense of humour have free play. The monks in their long garments, escaping in all directions, are really comical, and in conjunction with the ingratiating smile of the lion, the scene pa.s.ses into the region of broad farce. We divine the same sense of the comic in the scene in St. Ursula's history, where the 11,000 virgins are hurrying in single file along a winding road which disappears out of the picture.

In the princ.i.p.al scene in the life of St. George, Carpaccio again achieves a masterpiece. The force and vivacity of the saint in armour charging the dragon, lingers long in the memory. The long, decorative lines of lance and war-horse and dragon throw back the whole landscape.

The details show an almost childish delight in the realisation of ghoulish horrors. He rather injures his "Triumph of St. George" by his anxiety to bring in the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem; the flying flags distract the eye, and the whole scene is one of confusion, broken up into different parts, while the dragon is reduced to very unterrifying insignificance. His series for the school of the Albanians dealt with the life of the Virgin, who was their special patron. Its remains are at Bergamo, Milan, and in the Academy. The single figures in the "Presentation," the priest and maiden, are excellent. A child at the side of the steps, leading a unicorn, emblem of chast.i.ty, shows once more what a hold this use of a figure had taken of him. In the "Visitation" the figures are too much scattered, and the fantastic buildings attract more attention than the women. He still produced altarpieces, and the Presentation of the Infant Christ in the Temple, which he was called upon to paint for San Giobbe, where one of Bellini's most famous altarpieces stood, challenged him to put forth all his strength. He never produced anything more simple and n.o.ble or more worthy of the cinque-cento than this altarpiece (now in the Academy). It surpa.s.ses Bellini's arrangement in the way in which the personages are raised upon a step, while the dome overhead and the angel musicians below give them height and dignity. The contrast between the infant and the youthful woman and the old men is purposely marked. Such a contrast between youth and age is a very favourite one. Bellini, in the same church, draws it between SS. Sebastian and Job, and Alvise Vivarini, in his last painting, balances a very youthful Sebastian with St. Jerome.

This is the most grandiose, the least of a _genre_ picture of all Carpaccio's creations, although he does make Simeon into a pontiff with attendant cardinals bearing his train. One of his last works is the S.

Vitale over the high altar of the church of that name, where we forgive the wooden appearance of the horse which the saint rides for the sake of the simple dignity of the rider and the airy effect given by the balcony overhead. Nor must we forget that study of the "Two Courtesans" in the Museo Civico, full of the sarcasm of a deep realism. It conveys to us the matter-of-fact monotony of the long, hot days, and the women and the animals with which they are beguiling their idle hours are painted with the greatest intelligence. It carries us back to another phase of life in Carpaccio's Venice, seen through his observant, humorous eyes, and if there is nothing in his colour distinctive of the impending Venetian richness, it is still arresting in its brilliant limpidity; it seems drawn straight from the transparent ca.n.a.ls and radiant lagoons.

We apprehend the difference at once in Bastiani and in Mansueti, who essay the same sort of compositions. They studied grouping carefully, and it must have seemed easy enough to paint their careful architecture and to place citizens in costume with appropriate action in a "Miracle of the Cross," or the "Preaching of St. Mark"; but these pictures are dry and crowded, they give no illusion of truth, there is none of the careless realism of Carpaccio's crowds,--of incidents taking place which are not essential to the story, and, as in life, are only half seen, but which have their share in producing a full and varied illusion. The scenes want the air and depth in which Carpaccio's pictures are enveloped. We are not stimulated and charmed, taken into the outer air and refreshed by these heavy personages, standing in rows, painted in hot, dry colour, and carrying no conviction in their glance and action.

PRINc.i.p.aL WORKS

Berlin. Madonna and Saints; Consecration of Stephen.

Ferrara. Death of Virgin.

Milan. Presentation of Virgin; Marriage of Virgin; St. Stephen disputing.

Paris. St. Stephen preaching.

Stuttgart. Martyrdom of St. Stephen.

Venice. Academy: The History of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins; Presentation in the Temple.

Museo Correr: Visitation; Two Courtesans.

S. Giorgio degli Schiavone: History of SS. George and Tryphonius; Agony in the Garden; Christ in the House of the Pharisee; History of St. Jerome.

S. Vitale: Altarpiece to S. Vitale.

Lady Layard. Death of the Virgin; St. Ursula taking leave of her Father.

Vienna. Christ adored by Angels.

CHAPTER XI

GIOVANNI BELLINI

The difference between Gian. Bellini and his accomplished brother, that which makes us so conscious that the first was the greater of the two and which sets him in a later artistic generation than Gentile, is a difference of mind. Such pageant-pictures as we hear that Giovanni was engaged upon have all been destroyed. We may suspect that their composition was not particularly congenial to him, and that the strictly religious pictures and the small allegorical studies, by which we must judge him, were more after his heart. It is his poetic and ideal feeling which adds so strongly to his claim to be a great artist; it was this which drew all men to him and enabled him so powerfully to influence the art of his day in Venice.

Jacopo's wife, Anna, in a will of 1429, leaves everything to her two sons, Gentile and Niccolo. Giovanni was evidently not her son, but Vasari speaks of him as the elder of the two, so that it is very possible that he was an illegitimate child, brought up, after the fas.h.i.+on that so often obtained, in the full privileges of his father's house. Doc.u.ments show that Jacopo Bellini was living in Venice in 1437, first near the Piazza, and afterwards in the parish of San Lio. He was a member of S. Giovanni Evangelista, and probably one of the leading artists of the city. His two sons helped him in his great decorative works, and also went with him to Padua, where he painted the Gattamalata Chapel. Their relative position is suggested by a doc.u.ment of 1457, which records that the father received twenty-one ducats for "three figures, done on cloth, put in the Great Hall of the Patriarch," only two of which were to go to the son. In 1459 Gian. Bellini's signature first appears on a doc.u.ment, and at about this time we may suppose that he and his brother began to execute small commissions on their own account. On these visits to Padua the intimacy must have sprung up, which led to Mantegna's marriage in 1453 with Jacopo's daughter. At Padua, too, Bellini, in company with Mantegna, drank in the inspiration left there by Donatello, the greatest master that either of them encountered. It was the humanistic and naturalistic side of Donatello which touched Giovanni Bellini, more than all his cla.s.sic lore. It chimed in, too, with his father's graceful and fanciful quality, and there is no doubt that the Venetian painters soon exercised a marked influence on Mantegna. They "fought for him with Squarcione," and even in the Eremitani frescoes he begins to lose his purely statuesque type and to become frankly Renaissance. In the later scenes of the series a pergola with grapes, a Venetian campanile and doorway replace his cla.s.sic towers and arches of triumph. In the "Martyrdom of St. James"

the couple walking by and paying no attention whatever to the tragic event, are very like the people whom Gentile introduces in his backgrounds.

There are few doc.u.ments more interesting in the history of art than the two pictures of the "Agony in the Garden," executed by the brothers-in-law, about 1455, from a design by Jacopo in the British Museum sketch-book. Jacopo draws the mound-like hill, Christ kneeling before the vision of the Chalice, the figures wrapt in slumber, and the distant town. In few pictures up to this time is the landscape conceived in such sympathy with the figures. As we look at this sketch and examine the two finished compositions, which it is so fortunate to find in juxtaposition in the National Gallery, we surmise that the two artists agreed to carry out the same idea and each to give his version of Jacopo's suggestion, and very curious it is to see the rendering each has produced.

Mantegna has made use of the most formal and Squarcionesque contours in his surroundings. The rocks are of an unnatural, geological structure.

The towers of Jerusalem are defined in elaborate perspective, and a band of cla.s.sic figures fills the middle distance. The sleeping forms of the disciples are laid about like so many draped statues taken from their pedestals. The choir of child angels is solid and leaves nothing to the imagination, and if it were not for the beautifully conceived Christ, the whole composition would leave us quite unmoved. On the other hand, we can never look at Bellini's version without a fresh thrill. He, like Mantegna, has followed Jacopo's scheme of winding roads and the city "set on a hill," and has drawn the advancing band of soldiers; but, independent of all details, he gives us the vision of a poet. The still dawn is breaking over the broadly painted landscape, the rosy shafts of light are colouring the sky and casting their magic over every common object, and, lonely and absorbed, the Sacred Figure kneels, wrapt into the Heavenly Vision, which is hardly more definite than a stronger beam of light upon the radiance. One of the disciples, at least, is a successful and natural study of a tired-out man, whose head has fallen back and whose every limb has relaxed in sleep. Bellini is less a.s.sured, less accomplished than Mantegna, but he is able to touch us with the pathos of both natural and spiritual feeling.

Even earlier than this picture, critics place the "Crucifixion" and "Transfiguration" of the Museo Correr and our own "Salvator Mundi." In 1443, when Giovanni was a young man of four or five and twenty, San Bernardino had held a great revival at Padua, and the whole of Venice had thronged to hear him. It is very possible, as Mr. Roger Fry suggests in his _Life of Bellini_, that Giovanni's emotional temperament had been worked upon by the preacher's eloquence, and the very poignant feelings of love and pity which his early art expresses were the deliberate consequence of his sympathy with the deep religious mysteries expounded.

In the two pictures in the Correr, Bellini is still going with the Paduan current. In both we have the winding roads so characteristic of his father, but the rocks in the "Transfiguration" have the jointed, arbitrary character of Mantegna's and the draperies are plastered to the forms beneath; yet the figures here have a beauty and a dignity which no reproduction seems able to convey. The feeling is already more imposing than the execution. Christ and the two prophets tower up against the belt of clouds, the central figure conveying a sense of pathetic isolation; while below, St. John's att.i.tude betrays a state of tension, the feet being drawn up and contorted. This picture prepares us for the overwhelming emotion we find in the "Redeemer" and the group of Pietas.

The treatment of the Christ was a development of the early _motif_ of angels flying forward on either side of the Cross, but here the sacred blood pouring into the chalice is also sacramental and connected with the intensified religious fervour which had led to the foundation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, ill.u.s.trations of which are met with in the miniatures and wood-engravings of fifteenth-century books of devotion. The accessories, the antique reliefs, the low wall, the distant buildings, have an allegorical meaning underlying each one, and common to trecento and, in a less degree, to quattrocento art. Paradise regained is signified by the paved court with the open door, in contradistinction to the Hortus Clausus, or enclosed court; the type of the old covenant. In one of the bas-reliefs Mucius Scaevola thrusts his hand into the fire, the ancient type of heroic readiness to suffer. The other represents a pagan sacrifice, foreshadowing the sacrifice upon the Cross. Figures in the background are leaving a ruined temple and making their way towards the new Christian city, fortified and crowned with a church tower, and in the midst of all this symbolism, Christ and the attendant angel are placed, vibrating with nervous feeling.

During the next few years, Bellini devoted himself to two subjects of the highest devotional order. These are the Madonna and Child, the great exercise in every age for painters, and the Pieta, which he has made peculiarly his own.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Giovanni Bellini._ PIETa.

_Brera, Milan._ (_Photo, Brogi._)]

Close by, at Padua, Giotto had left a rendering of the last subject, so full of pa.s.sionate sorrow that it is hardly possible that it should not, if only half consciously, have stimulated the artistic sensibilities of the most sensitive of painters; but Bellini's pathos shrinks from all exaggeration. He conceives grief with the tenderest insight. His interest in the subject was so intense that he never left the execution to others, and though not a single one bears his signature, yet each is entirely by his own hand. Besides the Pieta at Milan, which is perhaps the best known, there is one in the Correr Museum, another in the Doge's Palace, and yet others at Rimini and at Berlin. The version he adopts, which places the Body of Christ within the sarcophagus, was a favourite in North Italy. Donatello uses it in a bas-relief (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), but whether he brought or found the suggestion in Padua nothing exists to show. Jacopo has left sketches in which the whole group is within the tomb, and this rendering is followed by Carpaccio, Crivelli, Marco Zoppo, and others. It is never found in trecento art, and is probably traceable to the Paduan impulse to make use of cla.s.sic remains.

Giovanni Bellini's Pietas fall into two groups. In one, the Christ is placed between the Virgin and St. John, who are embodiments of the agony of bereavement. In the other, the dead Redeemer is supported by angels, who express the amazement and grief of immortal beings who see their Lord suffering an indignity from which they are immune.

Mary and St. John _inside_ the sarcophagus shows that they are conceived mystically; Mary as the Church, and St. John as the personification of Christian Philosophy--a significance frequently attached to these figures. Such a picture was designed to hang over the altar, at which the mystical sacrifice of the Ma.s.s was perpetually offered.

In his treatment of the Brera example Bellini has shaken off the Paduan tradition, and is forming his own style and giving free play to his own feeling. The winding roads and evening sky, barred with clouds, are the accessories he used in the "Agony in the Garden," but the figures are treated much more boldly; the drapery falls in broad ma.s.ses, and scarcely a trace is left of sculpturesque treatment. Careful as is the study of the nude, everything is subordinated to the emotion expressed by the three figures: the helpless, indifferent calm of the dead, the tender solicitude of the Mother, the wandering, dazed look of the despairing friend. Here there is nothing of beautiful or pathetic symbol; the group is intense with the common sorrow of all the world.

Mary presses the corpse to her as if to impart her own life, and gazes with anguished yearning on the beloved face. Bellini seems to have pa.s.sed to a more complex age in his a.n.a.lysis of suffering, yet here is none of the extravagance which the primitive masters share with the Caracci: his restraint is as admirable as his intensity.

In the Rimini version the tender concern and questioning surprise of the attendant angels contrast with the inert weight of the beautiful dead body they support. Their childish limbs and b.u.t.terfly wings make a sinuous pattern against the lacquered black of the ground-work, and Mr.

Roger Fry makes the interesting suggestion that the effect, reminiscent of Greek vase-painting, and the likeness of the Head of Christ to an old bronze, may, in a composition painted for Sigismondo Malatesta, be no mere accident, but a concession to the patron's enthusiasm for cla.s.sic art.

In 1470 Bellini received his first commission in the Scuola di San Marco. Gentile had been employed there since 1466 on the history of the Israelites in the desert. Bellini agreed to paint "The Deluge and the Ark of Noah" with all its attendant circ.u.mstances, but of these, except from Vasari's descriptions, we can form no idea. These great pageant-pictures had become identified with the Bellini and their following, while the production of altarpieces was peculiarly the province of the Vivarini. Here Bellini effected a change, for sacred subjects best suited the restrained and simple perfection of his style, and afforded the most sympathetic opening for his idealistic spirit. For the next twenty years or more, however, he was unavoidably absorbed in public work, for we hear of his being given the direction of that which Gentile left unfinished in the Ducal Palace when he went to the East in 1479. In 1492, Giovanni being ill, Gentile superintended the work for him, and in that year he was appointed to paint in the Hall of the Grand Council, at an annual salary of sixty ducats. Other commissions were turned out of the _bottega_ he had set up with his brother in 1471, and between that year and 1480 he went to Pesaro to paint the important altarpiece that still holds its place there. It is in some ways the greatest and most powerful thing that Bellini ever accomplished. The central figures and the attendant saints have a large gravity and carefully studied individuality. St. Jerome, absorbed in his theological books, an ascetic recluse, is admirably contrasted with the sympathetic, cultured St. Paul. The landscape, set in a marble frame, is a gem of beauty, and proves what an appeal nature was making to the painter. The predella, ill.u.s.trating the princ.i.p.al scenes in the lives of the saints around the altar, is full of Oriental costumes. The horses are small Eastern horses, very unlike the ponderous Italian war-horse, and the whole is evidently inspired by the sketches which Gentile brought back on his return from Constantinople in 1481.

Looking from one to another of the cycle of Madonna pictures which Bellini produced, and of which so many hang side by side in the Academy, we are able to note how his conception varied. In one of the earliest the Child lies across its Mother's knee, in the att.i.tude borrowed from his father and the Vivarini, from whom, too, he takes the uplifted hands, placed palm to palm. The earlier pictures are of the gentle and adoring type, but his later Madonnas are stately Venetian ladies. He gives us a queenly woman, with full throat and stately poise, in the Madonna degli Alberi, in which the two little trees are symbols of the Old and New Testament; or, again, he paints a lovely intellectual face with chiselled and refined features, and sad dark eyes, and contrasts it dramatically with the bluff St. George in armour; and there is another Madonna between St. Francis and St. Catherine, a picture which has a curious effect of artificial light.

CHAPTER XII

GIOVANNI BELLINI (_continued_)

In 1497 the Maggior Consiglio of the Venetian Republic appointed Bellini superintendent of the Great Hall, and conferred on him the honourable t.i.tle of State Painter. In this capacity he was the overseer of all public works of painting, and was expected to devote a part of his time to the decoration of the Hall. Sansovino enumerates nine of his historical paintings, which had been painted before the State appointment, all having reference to the visit of Pope Alexander; but though he must have been much engrossed, he seems to have suspended the work from time to time, for between 1485 and 1488 he painted the large altarpiece in the Frari, that at San Pietro in Murano, and the one in the Academy, which was painted for San Giobbe. Of these three, the last shows the greatest advance and is fullest of experiment. The Madonna is a grand ecclesiastical figure. It has been said with truth that it is a picture which must have afforded great support and dignity to the Church. The Infant has an expression of omniscience, and the Mother gazes out of the picture, extending invitation and encouragement to the advancing wors.h.i.+ppers. The religious feeling is less profound; the artist has been more absorbed in the contrast between the beautiful, youthful body of St. Sebastian and that of St. Giobbe, older but not emaciated, and with the exquisite surface that his now complete mastery of oil-painting enabled him to produce. This technique has evidently been a great delight, and is here carried to perfection; the skin of St. Sebastian gleams with a gloss like the coat of a horse in high condition. Everything that architecture, sculpture, and rich material can supply is borrowed to enhance the grandeur of the group; but the line of sight is still close to the bottom of the picture, and if it were not for the exquisite grace with which the angels are placed, the Madonna would have a broad, clumsy effect. The Madonna of the Frari is the most splendid in colour of all his works. As he paints the rich light of a golden interior and the fused and splendid colours, he seems to pa.s.s out of his own time and gives a foretaste of the glory that is to follow. The Murano altarpiece is quite a different conception; instead of the seclusion of the sanctuary, it is a smiling, _plein air_ scene: the Mother benign, the Child soft and playful, the old Doge Barbarigo and the patron saints kneeling among bright birds, and a garden and mediaeval townlet filling up the background, for which, by the way, he uses the same sketch as in the Pesaro picture. It says much for his versatility that he could within a short time produce three such different versions.

Among Bellini's most fascinating achievements in the last years of the fifteenth century are his allegorical paintings, known to us by the "Pelerinage de l'ame" in the Uffizi and the little series in the Academy. The meaning of the first has been unravelled by Dr. Ludwig from a mediaeval poem by Guillaume de Guilleville, a Cistercian monk who wrote about 1335, and it is interesting to see the hold it has taken on Bellini's mystic spirit. The paved s.p.a.ce, set within the marble rail, signifies, as in the "Salvator Mundi," the Paradise where souls await the Resurrection. The new-born souls cl.u.s.ter round the Tree of Life and shake its boughs. The poem says:

There is no pilgrim who is not sometimes sad Who has not those who wound his heart, And to whom it is not often necessary To play and be solaced And be soothed like a child With something comforting.

Know that those playing There in order to allay their sorrow Have found beneath that tree An apple that great comfort gives To those that play with it.[2]

[2] This translation is by Miss Cameron Taylor.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Giovanni Bellini._ AN ALLEGORY.

_Florence._ (_Photo, Anderson._)]

This may be an allusion to sacramental comfort. St. Peter and St. Paul guard the door, beside which the Madonna and a saint sit in holy conversation. A very beautiful figure on the left, wrapped in a black shawl, requires explanation, and it has been suggested that it is the donor, a woman who may have lost husband and children, and who, still in life, is introduced, watching the happiness of the souls in Paradise.

SS. Giobbe and Sebastian, who might have stepped out of the San Giobbe altarpiece, are obviously the patron saints of the family, and St.

Catherine, at the Virgin's side, may be the donor's own saint. This picture, with its delicious landscape bathed in atmospheric light, is a forerunner of those Giorgionesque compositions of "pure and unquestioning delight in the sensuous charm of rare and beautiful things" in which the artistic nature is even more engrossed than with the intellectual conception, and within its small s.p.a.ce Bellini seems to have enshrined all his artistic creed. The allegories in the Academy are also full of meaning. They are decorative works, and were probably painted for some small cabinet. They seem too small for a ca.s.sone. They are ruined by over-painting, but still full of grace and fancy. The figure in the cla.s.sic chariot, bearing fruit, in the encounter between Luxury and Industry, is drawn from Jacopo's triumphant Bacchus. Fortune floats in her barque, holding the globe, and the souls who gather round her are some full of triumphant success, others clinging to her for comfort, while several are sinking, overwhelmed in the dark waters.

"Prudence," the only example of a female nude in Bellini's works, holds a looking-gla.s.s. Hypocrisy or Calumny is torn writhing from his refuge.

The Summa Virtus is an ugly representation of all the virtues; a waddling deformity with eyes bound holds the scales of justice; the pitcher in its hand means prudence, and the gold upon its feet symbolises charity. The landscape, both of this and of the "Fortune,"

resembles that which he was painting in his larger works at the end of the century. Soon after 1501 Bellini entered into relations with Isabela d'Este, Marchioness of Gonzaga. That distinguished collector and connoisseur writes through her agent to get the promise of a picture, "a story or fable of antiquity," to be placed in position with the allegories which Mantegna had contributed to her "Paradiso." Bellini agreed to supply this, and received twenty-five ducats on account. He seems, however, to have felt that he would be at a disadvantage in competing with Mantegna on his own ground, and asks to be allowed to choose his subject. Isabela was unwillingly obliged to content herself with a sacred picture, and a "Nativity" was selected. She is at once full of suggestions, desiring to add a St. John Baptist, whom Bellini demurs at introducing except as a child, but in April 1504 the commission is still unaccomplished, and Isabela angrily demands the return of her money. This brings a letter of humble apology from Bellini, and presently the picture is forwarded. Lorenzo of Pavia writes that it is quite beautiful, and that "though Giovanni has behaved as badly as possible, yet the bad must be taken with the good." The joy of its acquisition appeased Isabela, who at once began to lay plans to get a further work out of Bellini, and in 1505 Bembo wrote to her that he would take a fresh commission always providing he might fix the subject.

From the catalogue of her Mantovan pictures we gather that the picture "sul a.s.se" (on panel) represented the "B.V., il Putto, S. Giovanni Battista, S. Giovanni Evangelista, S. Girolamo, and Santa Caterina."

The great altarpieces which remain strike us less by their research, their preoccupation with new problems of paint or grouping, than by their intense delight in beauty. Bellini was now nearly eighty years old, and in 1504 the young Giorgione had proclaimed a revolution in art with his Castelfranco Madonna. In composition and detail the Madonna of San Zaccaria is in some degree a protest against the Arcadian, innovating fas.h.i.+on of approaching a religious scene, of which the Church had long since decided on the treatment, yet Bellini cannot escape the indirect suggestion of the new manner. The same leaven was at work in him which was transforming the men of a younger generation. In this altarpiece, in the Baptism at Vicenza, in others, perhaps, which have perished, and above all in the hermit saint in S. Giovanni Crisostomo he is linked in feeling and in treatment with the later Venetian School.

The new device, which he adopts quite naturally, of raising the line of sight, sets the figures in increased depth. For the first time he gives height and majesty to the young Mother by carrying the draperies down over the steps. He realises to the full the contrast between the young, fragile heads of his girl-saints and the dark, venerable countenances of the old men. The head of S. Lucy, detaching itself like a flower upon its stem, reminds us of the type which we saw in his Watcher in the sacred allegory of the Uffizi. The arched, dome-like niche opens on a distance bathed in golden light. Bellini keeps the traditions of the old hieratic art, but he has grasped a new perfection of feeling and atmosphere. Who the saints are matters little; it is the collective enjoyment of a company of congenial people that pleases us so much. The "Baptism" in S. Corona, at Vicenza, painted sixteen years later than Cima's in S. Giovanni in Bragora, is in frank imitation of the younger man. Christ and the Baptist, traditional figures, are drawn without much zest, in a weak, conventional way, but the artist's true interest comes out in the beauty of face and gesture of the group of women holding the garments, and above all in the sombre gloom of the distance, which replaces Cima's charming landscape, and which keys the whole picture to the significance of a portent. In the enthronement of the old hermit, S.

Chrysostom himself, painted in 1513, Bellini keeps his love for the golden dome, but he lets us look through its arch, at rolling mountain solitudes, with mists rising between their folds. The geranium robe of the saint, an exquisite, vivid bit of colouring, is caught by the golden sunset rays, the fine ascetic head stands out against the evening sky, and in the faces of the two saints who stand on either side of the aged visionary Bellini has gone back to all his old intensity of religious feeling, a feeling which he seemed for a time to have exchanged for a more pagan tone.