as a symphony—­a symphony of colour, where every hue is brought into harmonious combination—­a symphony of movement, where every line contributes to melodious rhythm—­a symphony of light without a cloud—­a symphony of joy in which the heavens and earth sing Hallelujah.  Tintoretto, in the Scuola di San Rocco, painted an “Assumption of the Virgin” with characteristic energy and impulsiveness.  A group of agitated men around an open tomb, a rush of air and clash of seraph wings above, a blaze of glory, a woman borne with sideways-swaying figure from darkness into light;—­that is his picture, all brio, excitement, speed.  Quickly conceived, hastily executed, this painting (so far as clumsy restoration suffers us to judge) bears the impress of its author’s impetuous genius.  But Titian worked by a different method.  On the earth, among the Apostles, there is action enough and passion; ardent faces straining upward, impatient men raising impotent arms and vainly divesting themselves of their mantles, as though they too might follow her they love.  In heaven is radiance, half eclipsing the archangel who holds the crown, and revealing the father of spirits in an aureole of golden fire.  Between earth and heaven, amid choirs of angelic children, rises the mighty mother of the faith of Christ, who was Mary and is now a goddess, ecstatic yet tranquil, not yet accustomed to the skies, but far above the grossness and the incapacities of earth.  Her womanhood is so complete that those for whom the meaning of her Catholic legend is lost, may hail in her humanity personified.

The grand manner can reach no further than in this picture—­serene, composed, meditated, enduring, yet full of dramatic force and of profound feeling.  Whatever Titian chose to touch, whether it was classical mythology or portrait, history or sacred subject, he treated in this large and healthful style.  It is easy to tire of Veronese; it is possible to be fatigued by Tintoretto.  Titian, like nature, waits not for moods or humours in the spectator.  He gives to the mind joy of which it can never weary, pleasures that cannot satiate, a satisfaction not to be repented of, a sweetness that will not pall.  The least instructed and the simple feel his influence as strongly as the wise or learned.

In the course of this attempt to describe the specific qualities of Tintoretto, Veronese, and Titian, I have been more at pains to distinguish differences than to point out similarities.  What they had in common was the Renaissance spirit as this formed itself in Venice.  Nowhere in Italy was art more wholly emancipated from obedience to ecclesiastical traditions, without losing the character of genial and natural piety.  Nowhere was the Christian history treated with a more vivid realism, harmonised more simply with pagan mythology, or more completely purged of mysticism.  The Umbrian devotion felt by Raphael in his boyhood, the prophecy of Savonarola, and the Platonism of Ficino absorbed by Michael Angelo at