The natural tendency of Venetian taste, nourished for centuries on opulent Oriental stuffs, on gold and gems, ran in the direction of what was soft and pleasing to the sense. The northern Gothic and the Umbrian influences corresponded with this and flattered the natural tendency of the people. For the proper development of Venetian painting some element of Florentine strength and science was absolutely necessary, and this was imparted to the Venetian school by Mantegna through the medium of the Bellini.

The Bellini were a Venetian family of painters, of whom the father was originally an assistant to Gentile da Fabriano, but lived for a while at Padua, where his daughter Nicolosia became the wife of Mantegna. With the two Bellini sons, Gentile and Giovanni, Mantegna became very intimate, and a mutual influence was exercised that was greatly to the benefit of all. Mantegna softened a little what has been termed his " iron style," through the assimilation of some of the suavity and feeling for beauty and colour that were engrained in the Venetians, while on the other hand Mantegna imparted some of his own sternness and his Florentine science to his brothers-in-law, of whom the younger, Giovanni, was the formative master of the later Venetian school.

§ 17. The Painting of the Sixteenth Century: the Mastery of Form.-If we examine a drawing of the human figure by Raphael, Michelangelo, or Correggio, and compare it with the finest examples of Greek figure design on the vases, we note at once that to the ancient artist the form presented itself as a silhouette, and he had to put constraint on himself to realize its depth; whereas the moderns, so to say, think in the third dimension of space and every touch of their pencil presupposes it. The lovely "Aphrodite riding on a Swan," on the large Greck kylix in the British Museum, is posed in an impossible position between the wing of the creature and its body, where there would be no space for her to sit. The lines of her figure are exquisite, but she is pure contour, not form. In a Raphael nude the strokes of the chalk come forward from the back, bringing with them into relief the rounded limb which grows into plastic fullness before our eyes. Whether the parts recede or approach, or sway from side to side, the impression on the eye is equally clear and convincing. The lines do not merely limit a surface but caress the shape and model it by their very direction and comparative force into relief. In other words, these 16th-century masters for the first time perfectly realize the aim which was before the eyes of the Greeks; and Raphael, who in grace and truth and composition may have been only the peer of Apelles, probably surpassed his great predecessor in this easy and instinctive rendering of objects in their solidity. In so far as the work of these masters of the culminating period, in its relation to nature, is of this character it needs no further analysis, and attention should rather be directed to those elements in Italian design of the 16th-century which have a special interest for the after development of the art.

Not only was form mastered as a matter of drawing, but relief was indicated by a subtle treatment of light and shade. Foreshortening as a matter of drawing requires to be accompanied by correct modulation of tone and colour, for as the form in question recedes from the eye, changes of the most delicate kind in the illumination and hue of the parts present themselves for record and reproduction. The artist who first achieved mastery in these refinements of chiaroscuro was Leonardo da Vinci, while Correggio as a colourist added to Leonardesque modelling an equally delicate rendering of the modulation of local colour in relation to the incidence of light, and the greater or less distance of each part from the eye. This represented a great advance in the rendering of natural truth, and prepared the way for the masters of the 17th century. It is not only by

§ 18. The Contribution of Venice.-Before we enter upon this fourth period of the development of the art, something must be said of an all-important contribution that painting owes to the masters of Venice.

The reference is not only to Venetian colouring. This was partly, as we have seen, the result of the temperament and circumstances of the people, and we may ascribe also to the peculiar position of the city another Venetian characteristic. There is at Venice a sense of openness and space, and the artists seem anxious on their canvases to convey the same impression of a large entourage. The landscape background, which we have already found on early Flemish panels, becomes a feature of the pictures of the Venetians, but these avoid the meticulous detail of the Flemings and treat their spaces in a broader and simpler fashion. An indispensable condition however for the rich and varied effects of colour shown on Venetian canvases was the possession by the painters of an adequate technique. In the third part of this article an account is given of the change in technical methods due, not so much to the introduction of the oil medium by the Van Eycks, as to the exploitation at Venice of the unsuspected resources which that medium could be made to afford. Giovanni Bellini, not Hubert van Eyck, is really the primal painter in oil, because he was the first to manipulate it with freedom, and to play off against each other, the various effects of opaque and transparent pigment. His noble picture at Murano, representing the Doge Barbarigo adoring the Madonna, represents his art at its best (see fig. 21, Plate VI.).

Bellini rendered possible the painters of the culminating period of Venetian art, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, with others hardly less great. Giorgione was the first who made the art, as an art of paint not merely of design, speak to the soul. His melting outlines and the crisp clean touches that wake the piece to life; his glowing hues and the pearly neutrals that give them repose and quality; the intimate appeal of his dreamy faces, his refined but voluptuous forms, and the large freedom of his spaces of sky and distance, all combine to impress us with a sense of the poetry and mystery of creation that we derive from the works of no other extant painter. The "Concert" of the Louvre, fig. 22, Plate VII. is typically Giorgionesque.

Tintoretto, more intellectually profound, more passionate, writes for us his message in his stormy brush-strokes, now shaking us with terror, now lifting our souls on the wings of his imagination; but with him as with the younger master it is always the painter who speaks, and always in the terms of colour and texture and handling. Lastly, between the two, unapproachable in his majestic calm, stands Titian. Combining the poetry of Giorgione with much of Tintoretto's depth and passion, he is the first, and still perhaps the greatest, of the supreme masters of the painter's art. His masterpiece is the great "Presentation" of the Venice Academy, fig. 23, Plate VII. Painting, it is true, has to advance in its development beyond the ideals of Titian's century, but it loses on the ethical side more than on the technical side it wins, and without the Venetians the world would have never known the full possibilities of the art that began so simply and at so early a stage of human civilization.

§ 19. The Fourth Period: the Realization of the Truth of Space. Changed Relation of Painting to Nature. By the 17th century the development of painting had passed through all its stages, and the picture was no longer a mere silhouette or a transcript

analytical kind, in which we fix the objects successively, noting | each by each their individual characteristics. As the object of painting is to reproduce what is seen as we see it, so in the majority of cases painting corresponds to this, our usual way, of viewing nature. That is to say, all painters of the early schools, and the majority of painters at all times, represent nature in a way that answers to this analytical vision. The treatment of groups of objects in the mass, though, as we have seen, occasionally essayed even in ancient times (see §§ 8, 9), does not become the painter's ideal till the 17th century. We find then, and we find here and there through all the later periods of the art, efforts on the part of the artist to reproduce the effect of vision of the other two kinds, to show how objects look when regarded all together and not one by one, or how they look when we focus our attention on one of them but notice at the same time how all the others that are in the field of vision group themselves round in a penumbra, in which they are seen and yet not seen. The special developments of impressionistic art in recent times in France and England are dealt with in the article on IMPRESSIONISM (see also the appendix to this article on Recent Schools of Painting), but it is mentioned here as a style of painting that is the logical outcome of the evolution of the art which has been traced from the earliest times to the 17th century. For the particular pictorial beauty, on which the modern painter trains his eye, is largely a beauty of relation, and depends on the mutual effect on each other of the elements in a group. Unless these are looked at in the mass their pictorial quality will be entirely missed. This word on impressionism, as corresponding to certain ways of looking at nature, is accordingly a necessary adjunct to the critique of modern painting since the 17th century.

§ 21. Painting in the Modern Schools.-The history of the art has been presented here as an evolution, the ultimate outcome of which was the impressionist painting of 17th-century masters such as Rembrandt and Velazquez. In this form of painting the artist is only concerned with those aspects of nature which give him the sense of pictorial beauty in tone and colour, and these aspects he reproduces on his canvas, not as a mere mirror would, but touched, pervaded, transfigured by his own artistic personality. It does not follow however that these particular ideals of the art have inspired modern painters as a body. No one who visits the picture exhibitions of the day, or even our galleries of older art, will fail to note that a good deal of modern painting since the 17th century has been academic and conventional, or prosaically natural, or merely popular in its appeal. With work of this kind we are not concerned, and accordingly, in the table (VIII.) which follows in Part II. of the article, the names with few exceptions are those of artists who embody the maturer pictorial aims that have been under discussion.

Of the schools of the 17th century that of Spain, owing much to the so-called Italian "naturalists," produced the incomparable Velazquez with one or two notable contemporaries, and later on in the 18th century the interesting figure of Goya; while the influence of Velazquez on Whistler and other painters of to-day is a more important fact connected with the school than the recent appearance in it of brilliant technical executants such as Fortuny.

The schools of Flanders and of France are closely connected, and both owe much to Italian influence. The land of Italy, rather than any works of Italian painters, has been the inspiration of the so-called classical landscapists, among whom the Lorrainer Claude and the French Poussin take the rank of captains of a goodly band of followers. In figure painting the Venetians inspire Rubens, and Raphael stands at the head of the academic draughtsmen and composers of "historical " pieces who have been especially numerous in France. Rubens and Raphael together formed Le Brun in the days of Louis XIV., David and Delaroche in the two succeeding centuries, and the modern decorative figure painters, such as Baudry, whose works adorn the public buildings of France. Flemish influence is also strong in the French painting in a gallant vein of the 18th century

from the serious and beautiful art of Watteau (fig. 24, Plate VIII.) to the slighter productions of a Fragonard. Van Dyck, another Fleming of genius, is largely responsible for the British portraiture of the 18th century, which is affiliated to him through Kneller and Sir Peter Lely. There is something of the courtly elegance of Van Dyck in the beautiful Gainsborough at Edinburgh representing the Hon. Mrs Graham (fig. 25, Plate VIII.). On the whole, though the representative masters of these two schools are original, or at any rate personal, in technique, they are in their attitude towards nature largely dependent on the traditions established in the great Italian schools of figure-painting of the 16th century. The contrast when we turn from France and Flanders to Holland is extraordinary. This country produced at the close of the 16th century and in the first half of the 17th a body of painters who owed no direct debt at all to Italy, and, so far as appears, would have been what they were had Titian and Raphael and Michelangelo never existed. They took advantage, it is true, of the mastery over nature and over the material apparatus of painting which had been won for the world by the Italians of the 15th and 16th centuries, but there their debt to the peninsula ended, and in their outlook upon nature they were entirely original.

The Dutch school is indeed an epitome of the art in its modern phase, and all that has been said of this applies with special force to the painting of Holland. Democratic in choice of subject, subtle in observation of tone and atmosphere, refined in colour, free and yet precise in execution, sensitive to every charm of texture and handling, the Dutch painter of the first half of the 17th century represents the most varied and the most finished accomplishment in paint that any school can show Such work as he perfected could not fail to exercise a powerful effect on later art, and accordingly we find a current of influence flowing from Holland through the whole course of modern painting, side by side with the more copious tide that had its fountain-head in Italy. Hogarth and Chardin and Morland in the 18th century, the Norwich painters and Constable in the 19th, with the French Barbizon landscapists who look to the last as their head, all owe an incalculable debt to the sincere and simple but masterly art of the countrymen of Rembrandt. § 22. The Different Kinds of Painting represented in the Modern Schools.-The fact that the Dutch painters have left us masterpieces in so many different walks of painting, makes it convenient that we should add here some brief notes on characteristic modern phases of the art on which they stamped the impress of their genius. The normal subject for the artist, as we have seen, up to the 17th century, was the figure-subject, generally in some connexion with religion. The Egyptian portrayed the men and women of his time, but the pictures, through their connexion with the sepulchre, had a quasi-religious significance. The Assyrian chronicled the acts of semi-divine kings. Greek artists, whether sculptors or painters, were in the majority of cases occupied with the doings of gods and heroes. Christian art, up to the 16th century, was almost exclusively devoted to religious themes. In all this art, as well as in the more secular figure-painting of the modern schools, the personages represented, with their doings and surroundings, were of intrinsic importance, and the portrayal of them was in a measure an act of service and of honour. Portraiture is differentiated from this kind of subject-picture through stages which it would be interesting to trace, but the portrait, though secular, is always treated in such a way as to exalt or dignify the sitter. Another kind of figure-piece, also differentiated by degrees from the subjectpicture of the loftier kind, is the so-called Genre Painting, in which the human actors and their goings-on are in themselves indifferent, trivial, or mean and even repellent; and in which, accordingly, intrinsic interest of subject has disappeared to be replaced by an artistic interest of a different kind. Landscape, in modern times so important a branch of painting, is also an outcome of the traditional figure-piece, for at first it is nothing but a background to a scene in which human figures are prominent. Marine Painting is a branch of landscape art differentiated from this, but supplied at first in the same way with figure-interest.

As portraitists the other great 17th-century masters fall into two sets, Rembrandt and Velazquez contrasting with Rubens and his pupil Van Dyck. The portraits of the two former are individualized studies in which the sitter has been envisaged in an artistic aspect, retaining his personality though sublimated to a harmonious display of tone and colour. The Flemings are more conventional, and representing rather the type than the individual, are disposed to sacrifice the individuality of the sitter to their predetermined scheme of beauty. Both Velazquez and Rubens have left portraits of Isabel de Bourbon, first wife of Philip IV. of Spain, but whereas the Spaniard's version gives us an uncomely face but one full of character, that of the Fleming shows us merely the big-eyed buxom wench we are accustomed to meet on all his canvases, Rembrandt was much less careful than Velazquez or Holbein or Hals to preserve the individuality of the sitter. He did not however, like the Flemings, conventionalize to a type, but worked each piece into an artistic study of tone, colour and texture, in the course of which he might deal somewhat cavalierly with the actual facts of the piece of nature before him. The result, though incomparable in its artistic strength, may sometimes, in comparison with a Velazquez, seem laboured, but there is one Rembrandt portrait, that of Jan Six at Amsterdam, that is painted as directly as a Hals, and with the subtilty of a Velazquez, while it possesses a richness of pictorial quality in which Rembrandt surpasses all his ancient or modern compeers (see fig. 28, Plate IX.).

In the 18th century, though France produced some good limners and Spain Goya, yet on the whole England was the home of the best portraiture. Van Dyck had been in the service of Charles I., and foreign representatives of his style carried on afterwards the tradition of his essentially courtly art, but there existed at the same time a line of native British portraitists of whom the latest and best was Hogarth. One special form of portraiture, the miniature (q.v.), has been characteristically English throughout. The greater English and Scottish portraitists of the latter part of the 18th century, headed by Reynolds, owed much to Van Dyck, and their work was of a pronounced pictorial character. Every portrait, that is to say, was before everything beautiful as a work of art. Detail, either of features or dress, was not insisted on; and the effort was rather to generalize than to accentuate characteristic points. In a word, while the artist recognized the claims of the facts before him to adequate portrayal, he endeavoured to fuse all the elements of the piece into one lovely artistic unity, and in so doing he secured in his work the predominant quality of breadth. This style, handed on to painters of less power, died out in the first half of the 19th century in attenuated productions, in which harmony became emptiness. To this has succeeded in Britain, still the home of the best European portraiture, a more modern style, the dominant notes of which have been truth and force. While the older school was seen at its best when dealing with the softer forms of the female sex and of youth, these moderns excelled in the delineation of character in strongly-marked male heads, and some of them could hardly succeed wth a woman's portrait. The fine appreciation of character in portraiture shown by Sir John Watson Gordon about the middle of the 19th century marked the beginning of this forcible style of the later Victorian period, a style suited to an age of keen intellectual activity, of science and of matterof-fact. More recently still, with the rapid development in certain circles of a taste for the life of fashion and pleasure, the portrait of the showily-dressed lady has come again into vogue, and if any special influence is here to be discerned it may be traced to Paris.

its appearance earlier, it was in the Netherland schools of the first half of the 17th century that it was established as a canonical form of the art. In Egypt we have seen that the subjects from human life have almost always a quasi-religious character, and the earliest examples of genre may be certain designs on early black-figured vases of the 6th century B.C. in Greece. Genre painting proper was introduced at a later period in Greece, and attracted special attention because of its contrast to the general spirit of classical art. It had a special name about which there is some difficulty but which seems to denote the same as genre bas. In early Christian and early medieval painting genre can hardly be recognized, but it makes its appearance in some of the later illuminated MSS. and becomes more common, especially north of the Alps, in the 15th century. It really begins in the treatment in a secular spirit of scenes from the sacred story. These scenes, in Italy, but still more among the prosaic artists of the north, were made more life-like and interesting when they were furnished with personages and accessories drawn from the present world. Real people of the day were as we have just seen introduced as actors in the scriptural events, and in the same way all the objects and accessories in the picture were portrayed from existing models. It was easy sometimes for the spectator to forget that he was looking at biblical characters and at saints and to take the scene from the standpoint of actuality. Rembrandt, one of whose chief titles to fame is derived from his religious pictures, often treats a Holy Family as if it were a mere domestic group of his own day. It was a change sure to come when the religious significance was abandoned, and the persons and objects reduced to the terms of ordinary life. This of course represented a break with a very long established tradition, and it was only by degrees, and in Germany and Flanders rather than in Italy, that the change was brought about. Thus for example, St Eloi, the patron of goldsmiths, might be portrayed as saint, but also as artificer with the impedimenta of the craft about him. The next stage, represented by a charming picture by Quintin Matsys at Paris, shows us a goldsmith, no longer a saint, but busy with the same picturesque accessories (fig. 29, Plate IX.). He has however his wife by his side and she is reading a missal which preserves to the piece a faint religious odour. Afterwards all religious suggestion is dropped, and we have the familiar goldsmith or money changer in his everyday surroundings, of which northern painting has furnished us with so many examples.

Genre painting, however, is something a little more special than is here implied. The term must not be made to cover all figure-pieces from ordinary life. There are pictures by the late Italian "naturalists" of this kind; Caravaggio's "Card Players' at Dresden is a familiar example. These are too large in scale to come under this heading, and the same applies to the bodegones or pictures of kitchens and shops full of pots and pans and eatables, which, largely influenced by the Italian pictures just noticed, were common in Spain in the early days of Velazquez. Nor again are the large and showy subject pictures, which constitute the popular items in the catalogues of Burlington House and the Salon, to be classed as "genre." The genre picture, as represented by its acknowledged masters, is small in scale, as suits the nature of its subject, but is studied in every part and finished with the most fastidious care. The particular incident or phase of life portrayed is as a rule of little intrinsic importance, and only serves to bring figures together with some variety of pose and expression and to motive their surroundings. It is rarely that the masters of genre charge their pictures with satiric or didactic purpose. Jan Steen in Holland and Hogarth in England are the exceptions that prove the rule. The interest is in the main an artistic one, and depends on the nice observance of relations of tone and colour, and a free and yet at the same time precise touch. All these qualities combine to lend to the typical genre picture an intimité, a sympathetic charm, that gives the masters of the style a firm hold on our affections. Probably the most