t be said that any quality asserts itself to the injury of the
rest. Titian, the Sophocles of painting, has infused into his pictures the
spirit of music, the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders, making
power incarnate in a form of grace.

Round these great men are grouped a host of secondary but distinguished
painters--Palma with his golden-haired large-bosomed sirens; idyllic
Bonifazio; dramatic Pordenone, whose frescoes are all motion and
excitement; Paris Bordone, who mingled on his canvas cream and mulberry
juice and sunbeams; the Robusti, the Caliari, the Bassani, and others
whom it would be tedious to mention. One breath, one afflatus, inspired
them all; and it is due to this coherence in their style and inspiration
that the school of Venice, taken as a whole, can show more masterpieces by
artists of the second class than any other in Italy. Superior or inferior
as they may relatively be among themselves, each bears the indubitable
stamp of the Venetian Renaissance, and produces work of a quality that
raises him to high rank among the painters of the world. In the same way
the spirit of the Renaissance, passing over the dramatists of our
Elizabethan age, enabled intellects of average force to take rank in the
company of the noblest. Ford, Massinger, Heywood, Decker, Webster,
Fletcher, Tourneur, Marston, are seated round the throne at the feet of
Shakspere, Marlowe, and Jonson.

In order to penetrate the characteristics of Venetian art more thoroughly,
it will be needful to enter into detailed criticism of the three chief
masters who command the school. To begin with Veronese. His canvases are
nearly always large--filled with figures of the size of life, massed
together in groups or extended in long lines beneath white marble
colonnades, which enclose spaces of clear sky and silvery clouds. Armour,
shot silks and satins, brocaded canopies, banners, plate, fruit, sceptres,
crowns, all things, in fact, that burn and glitter in the sun, form the
habitual furniture of his pictures. Rearing horses, dogs, dwarfs, cats,
when occasion serves, are used to add reality, vivacity, grotesqueness to
his scenes. His men and women are large, well proportioned,
vigorous--eminent for pose and gesture rather than for grace or
loveliness--distinguished by adult more than adolescent qualities.

Veronese has no choice type of beauty for either sex. We find in him, on
the contrary, a somewhat coarse display of animal force in men,