portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technical execution generally.  On the other hand, no extant work of his beginnings suggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino’s pupils—­one of the discipuli, as some of these were fond of describing themselves.  No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of the fifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from the influence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to his following or not.  Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art of Venice and the Veneto an influence not less strong of its kind than that which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regions during his Milanese period.  The latter not only stamped his art on the works of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run the painters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa and Borgognone—­such men as Ambrogio de’ Predis, Bernardino de’ Conti, and, indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself.  To the fashion for the Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class, even Alvise Vivarini, the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocento development, bowed when he painted the Madonnas of the Redentore and S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the Vienna Gallery.  Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr. Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under the paramount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the altar-piece of S. Cristina near Treviso, the Madonna and Child with Saints in the Ellesmere collection, and the Madonna and Child with St. Peter Martyr in the Naples Gallery, while in the Marriage of St. Catherine at Munich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regards exaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour, essentially himself.  Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise’s death, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could, faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in his later years was transformed into something very like a satellite of Giovanni Bellini.  Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather to the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the point of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.

What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both of Giorgione and Titian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is not so much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent lean on Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves.  Neither of them is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutely dependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for a time held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliest manhood held towards Giorgione.  This holds good to a certain extent also of Lorenzo Lotto, who, in