1st. Receive the witness of Painting.

It will be remembered that I put the commencement of the Fall of Venice
as far back as 1418.

Now, John Bellini was born in 1423, and Titian in 1480. John Bellini,
and his brother Gentile, two years older than he, close the line of the
sacred painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of religious faith
animates their works to the last. There is no religion in any work of
Titian's: there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or
sympathies either in himself, or in those for whom he painted. His
larger sacred subjects are merely themes for the exhibition of pictorial
rhetoric,--composition and color. His minor works are generally made
subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the church of the
Frari is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connection
between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who
surround her.

Now this is not merely because John Bellini was a religious man and
Titian was not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the
school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their
artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own
natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up
in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the
vital religion of Venice had expired.

SECTION XIV. The _vital_ religion, observe, not the formal. Outward
observance was as strict as ever; and doge and senator still were
painted, in almost every important instance, kneeling before the Madonna
or St. Mark; a confession of faith made universal by the pure gold of