who illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to
express one's relation to them; the whole Venetian art-world is
so near, so familiar, so much an extension and adjunct of the
spreading actual, that it seems almost invidious to say one owes
more to one of them than to the other. Nowhere, not even in
Holland, where the correspondence between the real aspects and
the little polished canvases is so constant and so exquisite, do
art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so
consanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour, all the
Venetian air and the Venetian history are on the walls and
ceilings of the palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all
the images and visions they have left upon canvas, seem to
tremble in the sunbeams and dance upon the waves. That is the
perpetual interest of the place--that you live in a certain sort
of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don't go into the churches
and galleries by way of a change from the streets; you go into
them because they offer you an exquisite reproduction of the
things that surround you. All Venice was both model and painter,
and life was so pictorial that art couldn't help becoming so.
With all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives
an extraordinary freshness to one's perception of the great
Venetian works. You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a
man of the world, and you enjoy them because they are so social
and so true. Perhaps of all works of art that are equally great
they demand least reflection on the part of the spectator--they
make least of a mystery of being enjoyed. Reflection only
confirms your admiration, yet is almost ashamed to show its head.
These things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense that
even when they arrive at the highest style--as in the Tintoret's
"Presentation of the little Virgin at the Temple"--they are still