cool and stormy spring of art came the warm and gentle summer.
Life became so full, so beautiful, so pleasant, so alluring, that men
sought for nothing save to quaff its goblet to the dregs. Venice, seated
like a lovely, wanton queen, on her throne of sparkling waters, drew to
her bosom all the devotees of pleasure in the whole of Europe. Her
argosies still brought to her every pomp and glory of vestment with which
to array her body sumptuously; her lovers lavished on her gold and jewels
and palaces and rare exotic luxuries. How all this is reflected in her
great painters, the Bellinis and Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto!
Life is no longer a wonder to them but a banquet; the malady of thought,
the trouble of the soul is not for them. Theirs is the realm of the
senses, and if man could live by sense alone, surely he must revel in
what they offer. They dye their canvasses in such blaze of color and
light as can be seen only in the sunset or in the azure of the
Mediterranean, or in tropical flowers. How they clothe their figures in
every conceivable splendor of orphrey and ermine, in jewels and shining
armor and rich stuff of silk and samite, in robe of scarlet or in yellow
dalmatic! Every house for them is a palace, every bit of landscape an
enchanted garden, every action an ecstasy, every man a hero and every
woman a paragon of voluptuous beauty.

The portrait is one of the most characteristic branches of Renaissance
painting, for it appealed to the newly aroused individualism, the
grandiose egotism of the so optimistic and so self-confident age. After
Leonardo no one sought to make the portrait primarily a character study.
Titian and Raphael and Holbein and most of their contemporaries sought
rather to please and flatter than to analyse. [Sidenote: Titian, c.
1490-1576] But withal there is often a truth to nature that make many
{678} of the portraits of that time like the day of judgment in their
revelation of character. Titian's splendid harmonies of scarlet silk and
crimson satin and gold brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine
many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly
realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France;
than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his
son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish
bestiality with human thought and self-command that fascinates in
Raphael's portra