Round these great men are grouped a host of secondary but distinguished painters—­Palma with his golden-haired large-bosomed sirens; idyllic Bonifazio; dramatic Pordenone, whose frescoes are all motion and excitement; Paris Bordone, who mingled on his canvas cream and mulberry juice and sunbeams; the Robusti, the Caliari, the Bassani, and others whom it would be tedious to mention.  One breath, one afflatus, inspired them all; and it is due to this coherence in their style and inspiration that the school of Venice, taken as a whole, can show more masterpieces by artists of the second class than any other in Italy.  Superior or inferior as they may relatively be among themselves, each bears the indubitable stamp of the Venetian Renaissance, and produces work of a quality that raises him to high rank among the painters of the world.  In the same way the spirit of the Renaissance, passing over the dramatists of our Elizabethan age, enabled intellects of average force to take rank in the company of the noblest.  Ford, Massinger, Heywood, Decker, Webster, Fletcher, Tourneur, Marston, are seated round the throne at the feet of Shakspere, Marlowe, and Jonson.

In order to penetrate the characteristics of Venetian art more thoroughly, it will be needful to enter into detailed criticism of the three chief masters who command the school.  To begin with Veronese.  His canvases are nearly always large—­filled with figures of the size of life, massed together in groups or extended in long lines beneath white marble colonnades, which enclose spaces of clear sky and silvery clouds.  Armour, shot silks and satins, brocaded canopies, banners, plate, fruit, sceptres, crowns, all things, in fact, that burn and glitter in the sun, form the habitual furniture of his pictures.  Rearing horses, dogs, dwarfs, cats, when occasion serves, are used to add reality, vivacity, grotesqueness to his scenes.  His men and women are large, well proportioned, vigorous—­eminent for pose and gesture rather than for grace or loveliness—­distinguished by adult more than adolescent qualities.

Veronese has no choice type of beauty for either sex.  We find in him, on the contrary, a somewhat coarse display of animal force in men, and of superb voluptuousness in women.  He prefers to paint women draped in gorgeous raiment, as if he had not felt the beauty of the nude.  Their faces are too frequently unrefined and empty of expression.  His noblest creatures are men of about twenty-five, manly, brawny, crisp-haired, full of nerve and blood.  In all this Veronese resembles Rubens.  But he does not, like Rubens, strike us as gross, sensual, fleshly;[282] he remains proud, powerful, and frigidly materialistic.  He raises neither repulsion nor desire, but displays with the calm strength of art the empire of the mundane spirit.  All the equipage of wealth and worldliness, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life—­such a vision as the fiend offered to Christ on the mountain of temptation; this is Veronese’s realm.  Again, he has no flashes of poetic imagination like Tintoretto; but his grip on the realities of the world, his faculty for idealising prosaic magnificence, is even greater.