e line of the
sacred painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of religious faith
animates their works to the last. There is no religion in any work of
Titian's: there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or
sympathies either in himself, or in those for whom he painted. His
larger sacred subjects are merely themes for the exhibition of pictorial
rhetoric,--composition and color. His minor works are generally made
subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the church of the
Frari is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connexion
between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who
surround her.

Now this is not merely because John Bellini was a religious man and
Titian was not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the
school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their
artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own
natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up
in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the
vital religion of Venice had expired.

Sec. XIV. The _vital_ religion, observe, not the formal. Outward
observance was as strict as ever; and doge and senator still were painted,
in almost every important instance, kneeling before the Madonna or St.
Mark; a confession of faith made universal by the pure gold of the
Venetian sequin. But observe the great picture of Titian's in the ducal
palace, of the Doge Antonio Grimani kneeling before Faith: there is a
curious lesson in it. The figure of Faith is a coarse portrait of one of
Titian's least graceful female models: Faith had become carnal. The eye
is first caught by the flash of the Doge's armor. The heart of Venice
was in her wars, not in her worship.

The mind of Tintoret, incomparably more deep and serious than that of
Titian, casts the solemnity of its own tone over the sacred subjects
which it approaches, and sometimes forgets itself into devotion; but the
principle of treatment is altogether the same as Titian's: absolute
subordination of the religious subject to purposes of decoration or
portraiture.

The evidence might be accumulated a thousandfold from the works of
Veronese, and of every succeeding painter,--that the fifteenth century
had taken away the religious heart of Venice.

Sec. XV. Such is the evidence of Painting. To collect that of
Architecture will be our task through many a page to