"Prophet Isaiah," in San Agostino; Sebastian del Piombo's "Scourging of Christ," in San Pietro in Montorio; and Guido's and Domenichino's rival frescoes in the chapel of St. Andrew attached to the old church of San Gregorio. Add to these the frescoed cupola of San Andrea della Valle; the altar-piece of the "Archangel Michael," by Guido, in the church of the Capuchins; Guido's "Crucifixion," in San Lorenzo in Lucina; Volterra's "Descent from the Cross," in Santa Trinità de Monti; and Domenichino's "Martyrdom of St. Sebastian," in Santa Maria degli Angeli.

St. Peter's Church contains scarcely any paintings, properly so called; but is richly adorned with colossal mosaic copies of such famous pictures as Raphael's "Transfiguration," Domenichino's "Last Communion of St. Jerome," Guido's “Archangel Michael," Guercino's "Burial of St. Petronilla," and many others--so wonderfully executed that they accord far better with the vast proportions of the edifice than could any perishable creations of the artist's brush.

THE GALLERY OF VENICE.

THE Gallery of Venice is a feast of color, and a dream of artistic beauty. You glide to it in a gondola, with the Grand Canal before you, and the decaying architecture of the Renaissance round: you enter its cloister, ascend its somewhat dingy staircase and corridors, and at last emerge into the long succession of spacious rooms whose grave quiet is in strange contrast with the glowing paintings on the walls, and the vivid figures, with their sumptuous draperies and warm flesh-tints, who gaze upon you from the canvas. Here is the home of Titian, and the luxury which Veronese delighted to honor. Here is magnificence fit for a doge's eye, and splendor enough to soften a critic's heart.

66

Not that one sees all this in the visible building, for it is no palace, but an ancient Scuola della Carità," yet there is not a gallery in Europe where the pictures are so perfectly in accordance with the whole charm and atmosphere of the place. Venetian artists painted Venice and Venetian life, and you behold the brilliant history spread before you. Venerable doges sit upon their pictured thrones, or are presented by St. Mark to benign virgins; St. Mark, the patron of the republic, pervades every corner with his presence; gay revelers

look down from their banquets in fadeless loveliness; saints are calm and dignified, but not austere; Madonnas are ever tender, and angels ever fair.

"

From the direction in which one usually enters, the first picture to strike the eye is Titian's large and graphic 'Presentation of the Virgin," an immense composition, whose sacred subject the great artist has adapted not only to his own style but to his own surroundings. There is a temple, far from Judean in architecture, at whose entrance the expectant high-priest, a grand, majestic figure, awaits the child-Virgin who ascends the steps, all robed in blue, with her flaxen hair braided quaintly down her back. The throng of monks and maidens who come behind is quite Italian-you might see them any day in the streets of Venice; the landscape of the background is not less Italian; while the old woman selling eggs beside the temple-steps has been even said to be the portrait of Titian's mother. Mrs. Jameson observes that the number of portrait-heads greatly adds to the interest. “Titian himself is looking up, and near him stands his friend Andrea di Franceschi, Grand-Chancellor of Venice, dressed as a cavalier of San Marco. In the fine bearded head of the priest who stands behind the high-priest we may recognize, I think, Cardinal Bembo." Hawthorne, in his Italian tour, speaks enthusiastically of this picture, and of the pleasure with which he viewed it.

The "Saints and Virgins" of Pordenone, Titian's rival, which hang in the same apartment, do not look as if it had cost Titian much trouble to distance his competitor. Paris Bordone's masterpiece of the "Fisherman bringing to the Doge the Ring received from St. Mark," is very national in sentiment and dramatic in action. It commemorates a legend which tells us how a great tempest rose, in the fourteenth century, through the malice of angry demons, which was only stilled by the patron saints, Mark, and George, and Nicholas, who commanded a terrified fisherman to row them across the raging waters that they might instantly calm the storm. When they left his little boat they gave him no reward, but sent him to relate the miracle and to demand payment from the doge. Should the doge and council refuse to listen, he was to show them a sacred ring, usually guarded in a sanctuary, but now intrusted to him by St. Mark in token that he spoke the truth. Bordone has chosen the moment when the fisherman kneels in the marble hall of state to present the

512

doge with the holy ring. Carpaccio's "Presentation of the Infant Christ to Simeon is perfectly Venetian in manner, with sumptuous architectural background, and a high-priest so stately, mild, and dignified, that you cannot but feel how favorable the air and spirit of Venice must have been to ripe and honored old age. Bonifazio, an artist who here appears at his best, has some fine paintings, especially the "Banquet of Dives," "Christ and the Apostles," and the "Adoration of the Magi," a subject of which he was peculiarly fond. As you stand in the centre of the room, looking down the vista of the gallery, you are startled by a picture, at the end of the next hall, so well placed and so astonishing in perspective that it seems to open before you the splendor of a real palace and a real feast, with its lifelike guests and servants, its sunny, transparent atmosphere, its columns and staircase. This is Paul Veronese's famous Feast in the House of Levi," which might have been studied from the home of a Venetian noble.

On the sides of the apartment which it adorns one perceives a series of immense compositions-the Venetians did every thing on so broad and ample a scale !-executed in the fifteenth century. On the left are Carpaccio's quaint and entertaining illustrations of the legend of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins. Another picture by Carpaccio of the "Massacre of Ten Thousand Christians upon Mount Ararat is very pre-Raphaelite in its delineation of horrors. On the entrance-wall is an extraordinary specimen of art by Gentile Bellini, representing the miraculous "Finding of a Piece of the True Cross" which had fallen into the canal. The priests, in full canonicals, are wading about like mermaids; crowds of spectators, who throng arcades and balconies, watch the proceeding with solemn faces, and hands in the proper attitude of devotion: at last one of the fathers of the Church has discovered the fragment, all nicely mounted, and is triumphantly swimming ashore. On the right wall Gentile Bellini has also left us a "Grand Procession in the Piazza of San Marco," showing us how all things looked in 1491. These brothers, Gian and Gentile Bellini, inaugurated the triumphs of Venetian painting, and examples of their works are therefore of great interest. Gian, who was the more celebrated of the two, preferred sacred themes; and we meet, in this academy and in the suburbs and churches of Venice, many of his Madonnas, whose invariably modest and serene aspect we soon learn to recognize. A small group from

his hand of Saints Mary, Magdalene, and Catharine, in the room named the "Pinacoteca Renier," is exceedingly sweet.

66

The hall adjoining has little of merit except Andrea Busati's Enthroned St. Mark." He holds an open book, and is in the act of bestowing a benediction. A fruitless but leafy fig-trec in the background is thought to refer to the incident of the barren fig-tree mentioned in his gospel. Why an apple-tree should be likewise behind St. Bernard who stands on his left, has never been explained.

But the gem of the gallery, from which the visitor will not long linger, is Titian's “Assumption of the Virgin," placed in an ornamented saloon, known as the "Hall of the Assumption." This glorious painting, described in the preceding chapter of "World-Pictures," is the culmination of Venetian art both in expression and coloring. It is the one sole instance where the genius of Titian, more at home among earthly Venuses than with holy saints, has worthily rendered the glow of inspiration. This is the more remarkable as the Virgin's face, so far from depending upon sensuous charms, is not even young or fresh. The grand, rapt woman is a matron, no fair maid; but those upturned features beam with the radiance of heaven itself. The only criticism one is inclined to make relates to the size of the canvas, which seems too small for its large and crowded figures, who appear to need a freer, wider space-a singular fault for an artist of a school accustomed to measure canvas by the furlong. It also gave me the effect of having been very lately and very thickly varnished; the gloss of the red drapery of the Virgin and of the apostle in the foreground being quite startling. Viardot remarks that, though Titian executed this wonderful composition in full youth and vigor, its remembrance was in some way lost, till happily Cicognara discovered it, much smoked, on a high wall in the church of the Frari, and exchanged it for a new picture. The same room contains a “Visitation of St. Elizabeth," and an early " Assumption," catalogued. as Titian's first pictures, but of little merit, and his last "Descent from the Cross," left incomplete by his death at the age of ninetynine, but finished by Palma. Other Titians, such as "John the Baptist in the Wilderness," his mother's veritable portrait, and noble masculine portraits, are found in various parts of the academy.

In the Hall of the Assumption we also see a chef-d'œuvre of Tintoretto-"The Miracle of St. Mark"-where St. Mark comes down, head foremost and book in hand, in a marvel of foreshorten

ing, to rescue a slave, his votary, who has been condemned to death. The sudden appearance of the evangelist astounds the executioner and populace, and electrifies the judge, in his red Venetian robe, who starts up from his seat, while the slave lies prostrate with an arrow in his eye. It is a vast picture, twenty feet square, containing fifty figures of the size of life." Tintoretto's great "Crucifixion" is not in this gallery, but in the school of San Rocco, a building in a remote quarter of the city, where are assembled many works of this master, whom Ruskin, in his "Stones of Venice," criticises approvingly yet trenchantly; dealing high praise to some of his compositions, but declaring that others “must have been painted in a couple of hours with a broom for a brush." The "Crucifixion," which Ruskin regards with favor, appears to ordinary eyes very faded and unimpressive in color, and very confused in treatment.

The rich decorative style and luminous tints of Paul Veronese are not limited to the "Feast in the House of Levi," but shine in conspicuous beauty through the entire academy. The "Saints" and "Virgins" who come before us as portly, high-born Venetian ladies, in superb brocade, with all accessories in keeping with their appearance, but utterly out of keeping with their legends, indicate the naïve and wholesale way in which artists of the period translated all history and poetry into the life of the period. A room full of Veroneses, farther on, glorious in amber and crimson and gold, fairly dazzles us with color. These are the altar-pieces and other pictures belonging to the churches of San Salvadore and San Sebastiano, sent here for safety during the restoration of those edifices. They include Veronese's subjects from the life of Esther, particularly “Esther and Ahasuerus." Close by them is one of Giovanni Bellini's large and muchcommended works, a Christ at Emmaus," of which a late author says: "The disciples here are men of noble and dignified bearing, of a race not quite yet extinct in Venice. The divine figure of the Master, conceived at the moment of recognition, awes us by its solemn grandeur and thoughtfulness. With the strange incongruity that we so often find in pictures of this time, and particularly of this school, Giovanni, beside the disciples and their Divine Companion, has introduced a Venetian senator and a man in a Turkish dress into the scene." The latter turbaned head is believed by some authorities to be his brother Gentile.

66

Giorgione, strange to say, does not appear to so much advantage