riental seclusion. The dismissal
of the ambassadors affords the opportunity for drawing an interior with
the street visible through a doorway. A group at the side, of a man
dictating a letter and the scribe taking down his words, writing
laboriously, with his shoulders hunched and his head on one side, is
excellent in its quiet reality. The same life-like vivacity is displayed
in Ursula's consultation with her father. The old nurse crouched upon
the steps is introduced to break the line and to throw back the main
group. Carpaccio has already used such a figure in the funeral scene,
and Titian himself adopts his suggestion.

[Illustration: _Carpaccio._
ARRIVAL OF THE AMBASSADORS.
_Venice._
(_Photo, Anderson._)]

Carpaccio is not a very great painter, but a charming one. His treatment
of light and water, of distant hills and trees, shows a sense of peace
and poetry, and though he is influenced by Gentile's splendid realistic
heads, the type which appeals to him is gentler and more idealised. His
fancy is caught by Oriental details, to which Gentile would naturally
have directed his attention, and of which there was no lack in Venice at
this time. All his episodes are very clearly illustrated, and his
popular brush was kept busily employed. He took a share with other
assistants in the series which Gentile was painting in S. Giovanni
Evangelista. In 1502 the Dalmatians inhabiting Venice resolved to
decorate their school, which had been founded fifty years earlier, for
the relief of destitute Dalmatian seamen in Venice. The subjects were
to be selected from the lives of the Saviour and the patron saints of
Dalmatia and Albania, St. Jerome, St. George of the Sclavonians, and St.
Tryphonius. The nine panels and an altarpiece which Carpaccio delivered
between 1502 and 1508 still adorn the small but dignified Hall of the
school. His "Jerome in his Study" has nothing ascetic, but shows a
prosperous Venetian ecclesiastic seated in his well-furnished library
among his books and writings. He is less successful in his scenes from
the life of Christ; the Gethsemane is an obvious imitation of Mantegna;
but when he leaves his own style he is weak and poor, and imaginary
scenes are quite beyond him. In the death and interment of St. Jerome he
gives a delightful impression of the peace of the old convent garden,
and in the scene where the lion introduced by the saint scatters the
terri