l; famous throughout Europe for the pomp of her
state equipage, and for the immorality of her private manners; ruled by a
prudent aristocracy, who spent vast wealth on public shows and on the
maintenance of a more than imperial civic majesty: Venice, with her
pavement of liquid chrysoprase, with her palaces of porphyry and marble,
her frescoed facades, her quays and squares aglow with the costumes of the
Levant, her lagoons afloat with the galleys of all nations, her churches
floored with mosaics, her silvery domes and ceilings glittering with
sculpture bathed in molten gold: Venice luxurious in the light and colour
of a vaporous atmosphere, where sea-mists rose into the mounded summer
clouds; arched over by the broad expanse of sky, bounded only by the
horizon of waves and plain and distant mountain ranges, and reflected in
all its many hues of sunrise and sunset upon the glassy surface of smooth
waters: Venice asleep like a miracle of opal or of pearl upon the bosom of
an undulating lake:--here and here only on the face of the whole globe was
the unique city wherein the pride of life might combine with the lustre of
the physical universe to create and stimulate in the artist a sense of all
that was most sumptuous in the pageant of the world of sense.

There is colour in flowers. Gardens of tulips are radiant, and mountain
valleys touch the soul with the beauty of their pure and gemlike hues.
Therefore the painters of Flanders and of Umbria, John van Eyck and
Gentile da Fabriano, penetrated some of the secrets of the world of
colour. But what are the purples and scarlets and blues of iris, anemone,
or columbine, dispersed among deep meadow grasses or trained in quiet
cloister garden-beds, when compared with that melodrama of flame and gold
and rose and orange and azure, which the skies and lagoons of Venice yield
almost daily to the eyes? The Venetians had no green fields and trees, no
garden borders, no blossoming orchards, to teach them the tender
suggestiveness, the quaint poetry of isolated or contrasted tints. Their
meadows were the fruitless furrows of the Adriatic, hued like a peacock's
neck; they called the pearl-shells of their Lido flowers, _fior di mare_.
Nothing distracted their attention from the glories of morning and of
evening presented to them by their sea and sky. It was in consequence of
this that the Venetians conceived colour heroically, not as a matter of
missal-margins or of subordinate decoration,