ing up of private collections. In several instances
it has been impossible to trace pictures to their new homes, and of such
the more important remain under the names of their former owners. To the
lists of painters have been added Beccaruzzi, Caprioli, Polidoro
Lanzani, Rocco Marconi, Andrea Schiavone, and Girolamo da Treviso,
artists important enough to be missed, but of merit so unequal that only
their more interesting works are here given. But the bulk of new
additions, amounting to a third as much again as was comprised in the
last edition, is of pictures in the various provincial galleries and
private collections of Great Britain, France, and Germany.

The author takes great pleasure in acknowledging his indebtedness to Mr.
Herbert F. Cook for invaluable aid in visiting some of the almost
numberless British collections.

PREFACE.

The following essay owes its origin to the author's belief that Venetian
painting is the most complete expression in art of the Italian
Renaissance. The Renaissance is even more important typically than
historically. Historically it may be looked upon as an age of glory or
of shame according to the different views entertained of European events
during the past five centuries. But typically it stands for youth, and
youth alone--for intellectual curiosity and energy grasping at the whole
of life as material which it hopes to mould to any shape.

Every generation has an innate sympathy with some epoch of the past
wherein it seems to find itself foreshadowed. Science has of late
revealed and given much, but its revelation and gifts are as nothing to
the promise it holds out of constant acquisition and perpetual growth,
of everlasting youth. We ourselves, because of our faith in science and
the power of work, are instinctively in sympathy with the Renaissance.
Our problems do not seem so easy to solve, our tasks are more difficult
because our vision is wider, but the spirit which animates us was
anticipated by the spirit of the Renaissance, and more than anticipated.
That spirit seems like the small rough model after which ours is being
fashioned.

Italian painting interests many of us more than the painting of any
other school not because of its essential superiority, but because it
expressed the Renaissance; and Venetian painting is interesting above
all because it was at Venice alone that this expression attained
perfection. Elsewhere, particularly in Florence, it died away be