Thanks to the original feeling which each of the masters of this privileged school had for colour, thanks too to their mar vellous facility in finding new arrangements, the Venetians were incomparable decorators. Their pictures in the churches, like the detail which for a moment had disturbed the ecclesiastical magis trates, "looked well." It was already a pious action to contribute to the beauty of the house of God: dilexi decorem domes tune. In fine, the least that can be said of these pictures is that they touched the hearts of the faithful.
It is not without reason that we are reminded here of the part belonging to music in the celebration of the services of the Church. Venetian painting possessed, more than any other paint ing which had preceded it, a musical quality. In this again it can claim the initiative of a transformation in art which has grown greater and greater up to our own day. In many works, which include some of the greatest and most famous, the feeling for music is demonstrated by external signs : in the foreground and the centre of the immense canvas of the Marriage at Cana, Veronese has placed a group of musicians, and he has given them the features of the painters who were then the glory of Venice, his masters, his friends and himself.
Titian's beautiful reclining women, whether called Venus or any other name, are among the most original of the creations of the Venetian school and particularly of its great masters, Giorgione and Titian. They differ greatly from the Florentine nude, which is generally standing, resembling sometimes, in the fine precision of its contours, the precious work of a goldsmith and sometimes a great marble of a sculptor.
In addition Venice invented the most complete and perfect subject of profane inspiration, a subject on which painting has lived through the centuries without exhausting it. One may describe it as the glorification of female beauty in the beauty of nature. From the first a painter of genius who died at the age of 32, Giorgione (c. 1478-1510, gave the theme its most poetical and, at the same time, its most human realization in certain canvases whose subjects are only the more moving because of their enigmatical quality: for instance, the paintings known as the Painter's Family in the Palazzo Giovanelli and the Concert champetre at the Louvre. We may well believe that this inven tion was in harmony with the more or less conscious aspirations of his compatriots and contemporaries for, four years after Giorgione's death and before Titian's pictures developed the theme, while adding to it the particular bias of his imagination, we see the old Giovanni Bellini, then nearly 85, painting the noble and delicious Feast of the Gods (I514), which contained in embryo, and more than in embryo, not only the Bacchanales of Titian but those of Nicolas Poussin. Then, by Titian, in the
Three Ages of Life (Bridgewater House, London) and Sacred and Profane Love, the various possibilities opened by the new theme to the creative faculties were soon affirmed. The painter shows us that he can dispense with the semblance of mythological fable which remains in Bellini's picture, but which Giorgione had already eliminated: beautiful nude figures and others in rich modern costumes are juxtaposed, without any apparent reason, before a vast landscape in which our eyes see a mysterious pro longation of the thought or the dream of the painter, as also of the thought or the dream of these modern deities. From Venice then comes our poetry of the nude, of landscape and of the composition of figures in a landscape, that is to say of three quarters of modern painting.
This art, emancipated from strict obedience to the Church, no longer expressed anything but the dream of happiness which exists in the hearts of all men, and which even the worst mortifications and the darkest and bitterest days do not succeed in stifling. But Venetian painting, despite its triumphant sonorities, shows that a healthy sensuality, which contains nothing base or vulgar, does not escape a noble melancholy.
The Venetians, particularly Titian, who stands above all the others, and Tintoretto, who sometimes rises almost to the heights of his master, were great portraitists. That melancholy which we perceive floating, as it were, on faces young and lovely, imparts to those masterpieces of good painting, a spiritual radiation. Be tween the magnificent nobles and the splendid creatures whom they delighted to deck in silk, velvet, gold and pearls, this light shadow from the depth of the heart appears rather on the masculine faces than on those from which the locks of fair hair fall on to bare shoulders. It is this which forms, for example, the haunting attraction of the Man with a Glove. With the Vene tians as with the whole of modern painting, all that is melancholy or nostalgic, or like some irradiation from beyond reality—and there is not a masterpiece without one at least of these three attributes—is an allusion to things not of this earth.