per.[276] The children are
accustomed to the holy place; therefore their attitudes are both reverent
and natural. They are more earthly than Fra Angelico's melodists, and yet
they are not precisely of human lineage. It is not, perhaps, too much to
say that they strike the keynote of Venetian devotion, at once real and
devoid of pietistic rapture.

Gian Bellini brought the art of this second period to completion. In his
sacred pictures the reverential spirit of early Italian painting is
combined with a feeling for colour and a dexterity in its manipulation
peculiar to Venice. Bellini cannot be called a master of the full
Renaissance. He falls into the same class as Francia and Perugino, who
adhered to _quattrocento_ modes of thought and sentiment, while attaining
at isolated points to the freedom of the Renaissance. In him the
colourists of the next age found an absolute teacher; no one has surpassed
him in the difficult art of giving tone to pure tints in combination.
There is a picture of Bellini's in S. Zaccaria at Venice--Madonna
enthroned with Saints--where the skill of the colourist may be said to
culminate in unsurpassable perfection. The whole painting is bathed in a
soft but luminous haze of gold; yet each figure has its individuality of
treatment, the glowing fire of S. Peter contrasting with the pearly
coolness of the drapery and flesh-tints of the Magdalen. No brush-work is
perceptible. Surface and substance have been elaborated into one
harmonious richness that defies analysis. Between this picture, so strong
in its smoothness, and any masterpiece of Velasquez, so rugged in its
strength, what a wide abyss of inadequate half-achievement, of smooth
feebleness and feeble ruggedness, exists!

Giorgione, did we but possess enough of his authentic works to judge by,
would be found the first painter of the true Renaissance among the
Venetians, the inaugurate of the third and great period.[277] He died at
the age of thirty-six, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown. Time has
destroyed the last vestige of his frescoes. Criticism has reduced the
number of his genuine easel pictures to half a dozen. He exists as a great
name. The part he played in the development of Venetian art was similar to
that of Marlowe in the history of our drama. He first cut painting
altogether adrift from mediaeval moorings, and launched it on the waves of
the Renaissance liberty. While equal as a colourist to Bellini, though in
a different an