In its most rigorous form the Italianist movement produced what is called Romanism, a hybrid art which amalgamated, more or less, a remnant of Flemish realism with the scenes, costumes, themes, and even the rhetoric borrowed from Italy. Much talent was expended in the assimilation of a magnificent ideal, but one quite contrary to the traditions in which these northern artists were still brought up. The results were not often happy. Some times however they do not lack a certain composite charm when the true nature of the artist pierced his disguise. We must, remember that this rather ungrateful school of Romanists pre pared the way for the greatest genius of Flanders after the Van Eycks, the initiator of modern art, Rubens. He, however, was a pupil not of Florence but of Venice.
The first Venetian masters, the Bellinis and Carpaccio, were closely related to the robust and hard Mantegna. But they soon turned towards what we may esteem the original conquests of their school, colour, light and a new conception of the place of the figure in landscape. Of monumental decoration, which has always been one of the principal vocations of Italian art, they evolved a truly new art by the addition of an indefinable quality, sumptuous and triumphant, which had not hitherto been seen in painting. They decorated churches and palaces, the same splendours serving for both. Not, however, as in the time of the Primitives, because the same religious sentiment showed itself more or less openly everywhere. For example when Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted his frescoes in honour of Good Government, vast images of civic life and of country life, which were displayed for the first time on the walls of a public building, these paint ings, in spite of the difference in their subjects, were not very distinct, either in style, or in spirit, from those which Giotto depicted in the basilica of St. Francis of Assisi to the glory of
the seraphic Poverello. Now, on the contrary, a kind of pagan pomp prevailed even in the pictures painted for the churches.
For some time past a profane air, or rather a human one, had been wafted into art; even at a time when painters treated none but religious subjects, it was gradually felt, not perhaps in the frescoes decorating the sanctuary, but in the pictures ordered by kings and princes, and chosen from such Bible stories as would with the greatest plausibility allow nude figures, or a certain amourous or voluptuous character, or a great display of proces sions and costumes : Salome, Susanna, Judith, Bathsheba. Indeed when the Olympian divinities appeared in art they found the way prepared for them.
Since its modest and devout beginnings in the shadow of the church, painting has gradually tried to rid itself of the didactic part allotted to it. On the day when the divorce was complete and irrevocable a new era began in art, an era in which we still live, developing all that was germinating in the masterpieces of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese—for the Venetians played a preponderating part in this revolution. But this is not to say that either the painters or their painting were detached from religious feeling. The artists always accepted with pride and joy their task as servants and auxiliaries of the Church. But they no longer felt themselves charged with the duties of preach ing and instruction. There remained to them the whole vast and multiform domain of sentiment. The delicious and tender Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini and Titian, sometimes familiar, like the Virgin with the Rabbit, sometimes majestic, like the Virgin of the Frani, but always with their eyes glancing affection ately on the faithful spectators, have inspired and accompanied many prayers. As for Tintoretto, in the midst of the brilliant colour harmonies of Venetian painting his feverish and agitated spirit led him to rediscover the pathos of religious drama. Vero nese's main preoccupation seems to be the grouping of beautiful young women and noble senators dressed in silk, brocades and gold chains under white arcades. Indeed he once had difficulties with the Holy Office, which inquired whether so many personages of so worldly an aspect were in place at the side of Christ; he re plied that he had put them there because it looked well and this reply satisfied the tribunal.