.

[270] I must refer my readers to Crowe and Cavalcaselle for an estimate
of the influence exercised at Venice by Gentile de Fabriano, John
Alamannus, and the school of Squarcione. Antonello da Messina brought his
method of oil-painting into the city in 1470, and Gian Bellini learned
something at Padua from Andrea Mantegna. The true point about Venice,
however, is that the Venetian character absorbed, assimilated, and
converted to its own originality whatever touched it.

[271] The conditions of art in Flanders--wealthy, bourgeois, proud,
free--were not dissimilar to those of art in Venice. The misty flats of
Belgium have some of the atmospheric qualities of Venice. As Van Eyck is
to the Vivarini, so is Rubens to Paolo Veronese. This expresses the
amount of likeness and of difference.

[272] Jacopo and his sons Gentile and Giovanni.

[273] Notice particularly the Contadina type of S. Catherine in a picture
ascribed to Cordegliaghi in the Venetian Academy.

[274] These Scuole were the halls of meeting for companies called by the
names of patron saints.

[275] Notice in particular, from the series of pictures illustrating the
legend of S. Ursula, the very beautiful faces and figures of the saint
herself, and her young bridegroom, the Prince of Britain. Attendant
squires and pages in these paintings have all the charm of similar
subordinate personages in Pinturicchio, with none of his affectation.

[276] The most beautiful of these _angiolini_, with long flakes of flaxen
hair falling from their foreheads, are in a Sacra Conversazione of
Carpaccio's in the Academy. Gian Bellini's, in many similar pictures, are
of the same delicacy.

[277] What follows above about Giorgione is advanced with diffidence,
since the name of no other great painter has been so freely used to cover
the works of his inferiors.

[278] Lord Lansdowne's Giorgionesque picture of a young man crowned with
vine, playing and singing to two girls in a garden, for example. The
celebrated Concert of the Louvre Gallery, so charming for its landscape
and so voluptuous in its dreamy sense of Arcadian luxury, is given by
Crowe and Cavalcaselle to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo. See
_History of Painting in North Italy_, vol. ii. p. 147.

[279] Under the fire of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's destructive criticism,
it would require more real courage than I possess to speak of the
"Entombment" in the Monte di Pieta at Treviso as genuine. Coarse and
unsele