d been that made by the Church
to glorify religion, and very soon the State had followed, using it to
enhance the love which Venetians bore to their city, and to bring home
to them the consciousness of its greatness and glory. Pageants and
processions were an integral part of Venetian life. The people looked
on at them, often as they occurred, with more pride and sense of
proprietorship than a Londoner does at a coronation procession or at the
King going in state to open Parliament. The Venetian loved splendour and
beauty and the story of the city's great achievements, and nothing
provided so welcome a subject for the decoration of the great public
halls as portrayals of the events which had made Venice famous. Artists
had been employed to produce these as early as the end of the fourteenth
century, and those of the Bellini and Alvise Vivarini (which perished in
the great fire) were a rendering on modern lines of the same subjects,
satisfying the more advanced feeling for truth and beauty.

Besides the Church and the public Government, we have already seen the
"Schools," as they were called, becoming important employers. These
schools were the great organised confraternities in the cause of charity
and mutual help, which sprang up in Venice in the fifteenth century.
That of St. Mark was naturally the foremost, but others were banded each
under their patron saint. Each attracted numbers of rich patrons, for it
was the fashion to belong to the confraternities. Riches and endowments
rolled in, and halls for meeting and for transacting business were
built, and were adorned with pictures setting forth the legends of
their patron saints. We have already seen Gentile Bellini employed in
the schools of San Marco and San Giovanni, and now the schools of St.
Ursula and St. George gave commissions to Carpaccio, or perhaps it would
be more correct to say that Gentile, having become pre-eminent in this
art, provided employment for his pupil and assistant, and that by
degrees Carpaccio became a _maestro_ on his own account.

A host of second-rate painters were plying side by side, disciples
first of one master, then drawn off to become followers of a second;
assimilating the influence first of one workshop and then of another.
Carpaccio has been lately identified as a pupil of Lazzaro Bastiani, who
had a school in Venice, and the recent attribution to this painter of
the "Doge before the Madonna," in the National Gallery, gives some