and marble, her frescoed facades, her quays and squares aglow with the costumes of the Levant, her lagoons afloat with the galleys of all nations, her churches floored with mosaics, her silvery domes and ceilings glittering with sculpture bathed in molten gold:  Venice luxurious in the light and colour of a vaporous atmosphere, where sea-mists rose into the mounded summer clouds; arched over by the broad expanse of sky, bounded only by the horizon of waves and plain and distant mountain ranges, and reflected in all its many hues of sunrise and sunset upon the glassy surface of smooth waters:  Venice asleep like a miracle of opal or of pearl upon the bosom of an undulating lake:—­here and here only on the face of the whole globe was the unique city wherein the pride of life might combine with the lustre of the physical universe to create and stimulate in the artist a sense of all that was most sumptuous in the pageant of the world of sense.

There is colour in flowers.  Gardens of tulips are radiant, and mountain valleys touch the soul with the beauty of their pure and gemlike hues.  Therefore the painters of Flanders and of Umbria, John van Eyck and Gentile da Fabriano, penetrated some of the secrets of the world of colour.  But what are the purples and scarlets and blues of iris, anemone, or columbine, dispersed among deep meadow grasses or trained in quiet cloister garden-beds, when compared with that melodrama of flame and gold and rose and orange and azure, which the skies and lagoons of Venice yield almost daily to the eyes?  The Venetians had no green fields and trees, no garden borders, no blossoming orchards, to teach them the tender suggestiveness, the quaint poetry of isolated or contrasted tints.  Their meadows were the fruitless furrows of the Adriatic, hued like a peacock’s neck; they called the pearl-shells of their Lido flowers, fior di mare.  Nothing distracted their attention from the glories of morning and of evening presented to them by their sea and sky.  It was in consequence of this that the Venetians conceived colour heroically, not as a matter of missal-margins or of subordinate decoration, but as a motive worthy in itself of sublime treatment.  In like manner, hedged in by no limitary hills, contracted by no city walls, stifled by no narrow streets, but open to the liberal airs of heaven and ocean, the Venetians understood space and imagined pictures almost boundless in their immensity.  Light, colour, air, space:  those are the elemental conditions of Venetian art; of those the painters weaved their ideal world for beautiful and proud humanity.

Shelley’s description of a Venetian sunset strikes the keynote to Venetian painting:[265]—­

    As those who pause on some delightful way,
    Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood
    Looking upon the evening and the flood,
    Which lay between the city and the shore,
    Paved with the image of the sky:  the hoar