e landscape, that he meant to
depict the Battle of Cadore fought in 1508. The latter was a Venetian
victory and an Imperial defeat, the former a Papal defeat and an
Imperial victory. The all-devouring fire of 1577 annihilated the _Battle
of Cadore_ with too many other works of capital importance in the
history both of the primitive and the mature Venetian schools. We have
nothing now to show what it may have been, save the print of Fontana,
and the oil painting in the Venetian Gallery of the Uffizi, reproducing
on a reduced scale part only of the big canvas. This last is of Venetian
origin, and more or less contemporary, but it need hardly be pointed out
that it is a copy from, not a sketch for, the picture.

[Illustration: _The Battle of Cadore (from a reduced copy of part only).
Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by G. Brogi._]

To us who know the vast battle-piece only in the feeble echo of the
print and the picture just now mentioned, it is a little difficult to
account for the enthusiasm that it excited, and the prominent place
accorded to it among the most famous of the Cadorine's works. Though the
whole has abundant movement and passion, and the _mise-en-scene_ is
undoubtedly imposing, the combat is not raised above reality into the
region of the higher and more representative truth by any element of
tragic vastness and significance. Even though the Imperialists are armed
more or less in the antique Roman fashion, to distinguish them from the
Venetians, who appear in the accoutrements of their own day, it is still
that minor and local combat the _Battle of Cadore_ that we have before
us, and not, above and beyond this battle, War, as some masters of the
century, gifted with a higher power of evocation, might have shown it.
Even as the fragment of Leonardo da Vinci's _Battle of Anghiari_
survives in the free translation of Rubens's well-known drawing in the
Louvre, we see how he has made out of the unimportant cavalry combat,
yet without conventionality or undue transposition, a representation
unequalled in art of the frenzy generated in man and beast by the clash
of arms and the scent of blood. And Rubens, too, how incomparably in the
_Battle of the Amazons_ of the Pinakothek at Munich, he evokes the
terrors, not only of one mortal encounter, but of War--the hideous din,
the horror of man let loose and become beast once more, the pitiless
yell of the victors, the despairing cry of the vanquished, the
ir