In contrast to Giorgione he liked to paint figures in motion, yet he was as typical an outcome of Venetian romance as the earlier painter.  Nothing could be more like a fairy-tale than this picture.  It was no listless dreamer that painted it, but one with a gorgeous imagination and yet a full knowledge of the world, enabling him to give substance to his visions.  Tintoret’s stormy landscapes are as beautiful in their way as Giorgione’s dreamy ones, and each carries out the mood of the rest of the picture.  This one is full of power, mystery, and romance.  Tintoret had modelled his colouring upon Titian and was by nature a great colourist, but too often he used bad materials that have turned black with the lapse of years.  In this picture you see his colour as it was meant to be, rich, and boldly harmonious.  The vivid red and blue of the princess’s clothes are a daring combination with the brilliant green of the landscape, but Tintoret knew what he was doing, and the result is superb.  With his death in 1594 the best of Venetian painting came to an end.

[Illustration:  ST. GEORGE DESTROYING THE DRAGON From the picture by Tintoretto, in the National Gallery, London]

There were as many excellent painters in the fairy city as there had been in Florence; contemporaries of Giovanni Bellini (who, in his early years, worked in close companionship with Mantegna, his brother-in-law), as well as contemporaries of Titian and Tintoret.  The painter Veronese, for instance, 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.