e, died a few years before Tintoret.
For pomp and pageantry his great canvases are eminent. Standing in
some room of the Doge's Palace, decorated entirely by his hand, we
are carried back to the time when Venice was Queen of the Seas,
unrivalled for magnificence and wealth. He was the Master of Ceremonies,
before whom other painters of pomps and vanities pale. Gorgeous
colouring is what all these Venetian painters had in common. We see
it in the early days when Venetian art was struggling into existence.
In her art, as in her skies and waters, we are overwhelmed by a vision
of colour unsurpassed.

We have now touched on a few prominent points in the history of painting
in Italy from its early rise in Florence with Giotto; through its period
of widespread excellence in the first quarter of the sixteenth century,
when Raphael, Giorgione, Michelangelo, and Leonardo were all painting
masterpieces in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Milan at the same moment;
to its final blaze of sunset grandeur in Venice. It is time to return
to the north of Europe. In the next chapter we will try to gain a few
glimpses of the progress of painting in Germany, Holland, Flanders,
and our own country.

CHAPTER VIII

THE RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH

The Renaissance involved a change of outlook towards the whole world
which could not long remain confined to Italy. There were then, as
now, roads over the passes of the Alps by which merchants and scholars
were continually travelling from Italy through Germany and Flanders
to England, communicating to the northern countries whatever changes
of thought stirred in the south.

In Germany, as in Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the
awakening took a different form. We find a different quality in the
art of the north. Italian spontaneity and child-like joy is absent;
so, too, the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy. You remember
how the successors of the Van Eycks in Flanders painted excellent
portraits and small carefully studied pictures of scriptural events
in wonderful detail. They were a strictly practical people whose
painting of stuffs, furs, jewellery, and architecture was marvellously
minute and veracious. But they were not a handsome race, and their
models for saints and virgins seem to have been the people that came
handiest and by no means the best looking. Thus the figures in their
pictures lack personal charm, though the painting is usually full of
vigour, trut