The relation of the two masters—­both of them in the first line of the world’s painters—­was much that of Venice to Antwerp.  The apogee of each city in its different way represented the highest point that modern Europe had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material as distinguished from mental culture.  But then Venice was wrapped in the transfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering above the rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains, the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region.  Reality, with all its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality.  But it was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the method of presentment.  Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the genuine naturalness of such a mode of life.  Art itself could only add to it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression to the beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charm of the people.  This is what Titian, supreme among his contemporaries of the greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which, in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seek for a parallel.

Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly enlist our sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in some special branch of their art; yet, after all, we find ourselves invariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them—­taking him as the standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries and successors.  Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may be, combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world.  But then Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been able to achieve.  The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself so incapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments of a higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extreme limits of old age.  That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great Madonna del Carmelo at the Venice Academy and the magnificent Trinity in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near Udine may be taken to prove.  Yet who would venture to compare him on equal terms to the painter of the Assunta, the Entombment and the Christ at Emmaus?  Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of illumination, a Titanic vastness, an inexplicable