glowing colours, or showed a more marked predilection for the imitation of fruits, rich stuffs, architectural canopies, jewels, and landscape backgrounds.  Their piety, unlike the mysticism of the Sienese and the deep thought of the Florentine masters, is somewhat superficial and conventional.  The merit of their devotional pictures consists of simplicity, vivacity, and joyousness.  Our Lady and her court of saints seem living and breathing upon earth.  There is no atmosphere of tranced solemnity surrounding them, like that which gives peculiar meaning to similar works of the Van Eycks and Memling—­artists, by the way, who in many important respects are more nearly allied than any others to the spirit of the first age of Venetian painting.[271]

What the Vivarini began, the three Bellini,[272] with Crivelli, Carpaccio, Mansueti, Basaiti, Catena, Cima da Conegliano, Bissolo, Cordegliaghi, continued.  Bright costumes, distinct and sunny landscapes, broad backgrounds of architecture, large skies, polished armour, gilded cornices, young faces of fisherboys and country girls,[273] grave faces of old men brown with sea-wind and sunlight, withered faces of women hearty in a hale old age, the strong manhood of Venetian senators, the dignity of patrician ladies, the gracefulness of children, the rosy whiteness and amber-coloured tresses of the daughters of the Adriatic and lagoons—­these are the source of inspiration to the Venetians of the second period.  Mantegna, a few miles distant, at Padua, was working out his ideal of severely classical design.  Yet he scarcely touched the manner of the Venetians with his influence, though Gian Bellini was his brother-in-law and pupil, and though his genius, in grasp of matter and in management of composition, soared above his neighbours.  Lionardo da Vinci at Milan was perfecting his problems of psychology in painting, offering to the world solutions of the greatest difficulties in the delineation of the spirit by expression.  Yet not a trace of Lionardo’s subtle play of light and shadow upon thoughtful features can be discerned in the work of the Bellini.  For them the mysteries of the inner and the outer world had no attraction.  The externals of a full and vivid existence fascinated their imagination.  Their poetry and their piety were alike simple and objective.  How to depict the world as it is seen—­a miracle of varying lights and melting hues, a pageant substantial to the touch and concrete to the eyes, a combination of forms defined by colours more than outlines—­was their task.  They did not reach their end by anatomy, analysis, and reconstruction.  They undertook to paint just what they felt and saw.