but as a motive worthy in
itself of sublime treatment. In like manner, hedged in by no limitary
hills, contracted by no city walls, stifled by no narrow streets, but open
to the liberal airs of heaven and ocean, the Venetians understood space
and imagined pictures almost boundless in their immensity. Light, colour,
air, space: those are the elemental conditions of Venetian art; of those
the painters weaved their ideal world for beautiful and proud humanity.

Shelley's description of a Venetian sunset strikes the keynote to Venetian
painting:[265]--

As those who pause on some delightful way,
Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood
Looking upon the evening and the flood,
Which lay between the city and the shore,
Paved with the image of the sky: the hoar
And airy Alps, towards the north appeared,
Through mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared
Between the east and west; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep west into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
Among the many-folded hills--they were
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,
As seen from Lido through the harbour piles,
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles--
And then, as if the earth and sea had been
Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade,"
Said my companion, "I will show you soon
A better station." So, o'er the lagune
We glided: and from that funereal bark
I leaned, and saw the city; and could mark
How from their many isles, in evening's gleam,
Its temples and its palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

With this we may compare the following extract from a letter, addressed in
May 1544 to Titian, by one of the most unprincipled of literary bandits
who have ever disgraced humanity, but who nevertheless was solemnised to
the spirit of true poetry by the grandiose aspect of nature as it appeared
to him in Venice. That Pietro Aretino should have so deeply felt the charm
of natural beauty in an age when even the greatest artists and poets
sought inspiration in human life rathe