buildings of Venice, though of solid stone, seemed made of some ethereal substance.  Then the sky was full of variety—­here clear and ardent, there dulled and overclouded.  What marvellous clouds there were!  Masses of them in the centre of the scene hung above the house-roofs, while the immediate part was formed of a grey tint inclining to dark.  I gazed astonished at the varied colours they displayed.  The nearer masses burned with flames of sunset; the more remote blushed with a blaze of crimson less afire.  Oh, how splendidly did Nature’s pencil treat and dispose that airy landscape, keeping the sky apart from the palaces, just as Titian does!  On one side the heavens showed a greenish-blue, on another a bluish-green, invented verily by the caprice of Nature, who is mistress of the greatest masters.  With her lights and her darks, there she was harmonising, toning, and bringing out into relief, just as she wished.  Seeing which, I who know that your pencil is the spirit of her inmost soul, cried aloud thrice or four tines, ‘Oh, Titian! where are you now?’”

In order to understand the destiny of Venice in art, it is not enough to concentrate attention on the peculiarities of her physical environment.  Potent as these were in the creation of her style, the political and social conditions of the Republic require also to be taken into account.  Among Italian cities Venice was unique.  She alone was tranquil in her empire, unimpeded in her constitutional development, independent of Church interference, undisturbed by the cross purposes and intrigues of the Despots, inhabited by merchants who were princes, and by a free-born people who had never seen war at their gates.  The serenity of undisturbed security, the luxury of wealth amassed abroad and liberally spent at home, gave a physiognomy of ease and proud self-confidence to all her edifices.  The grim and anxious struggles of the Middle Ages left no mark on Venice.  How different was this town from Florence, every inch of whose domain could tell of civic warfare, whose passionate aspirations after independence ended in the despotism of the bourgeois Medici, whose repeated revolutions had slavery for their climax, whose grey palaces bore on their fronts the stamp of mediaeval vigilance, whose spirit was incarnated in Dante the exile, whose enslavement forced from Michael Angelo those groans of a chained Titan expressed in the marbles of S. Lorenzo!  It is not an insignificant, though a slight, detail, that the predominant colour of Florence is brown, while the predominant colour of Venice is that of mother-of-pearl, concealing within its general whiteness every tint that can be placed upon the palette of a painter.  The conditions of Florence stimulated mental energy and turned the forces of the soul inwards.  Those of Venice inclined the individual to accept life as he found it.  Instead of exciting him to think, they disposed him to enjoy, or to acquire by industry the means of manifold enjoyment.  To represent