serenity of undisturbed security, the luxury of wealth amassed abroad, gave a physiognomy of ease and proud self-confidence to all her edifices."-J. A. Symonds.

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Venice, superficially so unlike, is yet in many of its accidental features, and still more in its spirit, the counterpart of Rome, in its obscure and mixed origin, in its steady growth, in its quick sense of order and early settlement of its polity, in its grand and serious public spirit, in its subordination of the individual to the family and the family to the state, in its combination of remote dominion with the liberty of a solitary and sovereign city. And Rome could not be more contrasted with Athens than Venice with Italian and contemporary Florence-stability with fitfulness; independence impregnable and secure, with a short-lived and troubled liberty; empire meditated and achieved, with a course of barren intrigues and quarrels."-R. W. Church.

Bellini and Titian. "Giovanni Bellini held the position in the school of Venice that Phidias did in that of Greece; he was at that summit level of art at which all the best elements and all the classic dignity and severity were still preserved, and the sensuous element was kept in check by the intellectual and the feeling for the ideal in form. Titian is sometimes reckless of his own reputation and is feebler than himself, but Bellini in the work of his eighty-sixth year is as firm in his touch and as severe in his purpose as in the earliest picture of his. Titian carries the power of color further and gives its orchestration a sweep which Bellini could not have approved, but Bellini's were the principles and the patterns which Titian only embroidered on-that poetry of color in which the truth of nature transcends her facts and sends her messages of beauty home to the heart in a passion which the severest prose version can never awaken. The Giottesques, even down to Gozzoli, had employed color as the means of brightening the church, and the Florentine Renaissance used it as the matter-of-fact language of nature, her prose; but Bellini, and the Venetians with him, sought it as music, and wrought out its contrasts and chords to heighten its brilliancy or intensify its tenderness, or subdued its crudity to the warmth and glow of flesh, or to the pathos of twilight on the landscape. W. J. Stillman, Old Italian Masters.

BASIS OF LECTURE.

Venice, her origin and history strikingly different from that of most of the Italian cities, was associated with few of the problems and events that absorbed the interest of Milan, Florence or Rome. Instead of the Imperial past, the contests between Pope and Emperor, or the fierce party struggles of a democracy, we have rather to keep in mind the compact aristocracy by which Venice was governed, her internal peace and confident pride in her maritime and commercial great

ness, and her intimate association with the East. The great age of Venetian power was indeed over before she felt the full force of the Renaissance, but not to such a degree that her proud traditions did not greatly influence her part in the new movement.

The fullest expression of the Renaissance in Venice as in Florence was found in painting, but the full bloom came later than in Tuscany. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century painters, most of all in Carpaccio and Giovanni Bellini,-the spiritual beauty and devotion which we know so well in the Florentines is still present, with a richness and harmony of color that was never quite reached by the Tuscans. But the great masters after Bellini,-Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, with all their wonderful achievements in drawing and color, reaching as painters a greater height than was attained by any of the Florentines, tended to fall away from the portrayal of the deepest and greatest things in life. With the “supremely powerful art corrupted by taint of death" (Ruskin) of Veronese and Tintoretto, the Renaissance in Venice reached its height and began its decline.

TOPICS FOR CLASS.

1. Venetian life and power (Ruskin and Horatio Brown, Venice). 2. The Ducal Palace and San Marco.

3. Carpaccio and Bellini (Berenson, Ruskin and, for Bellini, the September, 1900, number of Masters in Art).

4. Titian (Berenson and the Masters in Árt magazine for February, 1900). 5. Tintoretto and Veronese.

Leonardo.

LECTURE VI.

The Renaissance at its Height.

"All that Giotto and Masaccio had attained in the rendering of tactile values, all that Fra Angelico or Filippo had achieved in expression, all that Pallaiuolo had accomplished in movement, or Ver

rochio in light and shade, Leonardo, without the faintest trace of that tentativeness, that painfulness of effort which characterized his immediate precursors, equalled or surpassed."

Raphael. "The most famous and most beloved name in modern art, -Raphael Sanzio."

Michelangelo. "At last appeared the man who was the pupil of nobody, the heir of everybody, who felt profoundly and powerfully what to his precursors had been vague instinct, who saw and expressed the meaning of it all. The seed that had produced him had already flowered into a Giotto, and once again into a Masaccio; in him, the last of his race, born in conditions artistically most propitious, all the energies remaining in his stock were concentrated, and in him Florentine art had its logical culmination. Michelangelo had a sense for the materially significant as great as Giotto's or Masaccio's, but he possessed means of rendering that had been undreamt of by them. Add to this that he saw clearly what before him had been felt only dimly, that there was no other such instrument for conveying material significance as the human nude."-Bernhard Berenson.

BASIS OF LECTURE.

It is hard to say when the Italian Renaissance reached its height. But one is apt roughly to think of the end of the fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth as the time when the technique of painting and sculpture had been practically mastered, and the movement of thought and art had reached its culmination. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo may be taken as types. Their names are as those of, say, Ben Jonson, Spencer, Sidney and Shakespere in England, where the genius of the Renaissance found its best expression not in painting but in literature. In Leonardo we see a many-sided genius which perhaps was loftier and more majestic than that of any of his contemporaries,—but with it a restlessness which was also typical in its way of the Renaissance. Raphael has none of this impatience. He is an interpreter of the most attractive side of his time, and his fresco of "The School of Athens" is the most perfect expression in art of the intellectual life of Renaissance Italy. Michelangelo is the most impressive of all. But the terrible bitterness behind the consummate perfection of all his later work seems a fit comment on the crookedness of the time,—the spiritual decline which began even long before the great master's death in 1564.

The best books for constant use in an introductory study of the Italian Renaissance are probably Edmund Gardner's Florence, Symonds' Fine Arts of the Renaissance, and Berenson's Florentine, Venetian and Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance-three most admirable and close-packed books of sympathetic art criticism. If there is only time for a little of Ruskin let it be Giotto and his Works in Padua and some of Mornings in Florence. Try also to get a sympathetic and accurate knowledge of the country and people as a whole. Through books, plans and pictures build up for yourselves the streets of Assisi, Siena or Florence, and make the names of the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence, the Doge's Palace of Venice, Giotto's Companile, the Uffizi and Santa Maria Novella living realities in form and position. Travel in Italy, valuable as it is, is not essential to this. A few books (e. g., Baedeker or Hare, Howells' Tuscan Cities, Smith's Gondola Days, Brown's Life on the Lagoons) and pictures will give you more than many obtain by an actual journey to Italy. Finally, study photographs and reproductions of the paintings. The Masters in Art magazine and such cheap reproductions as the Perry pictures will help those who cannot obtain photographs, and anyone who wishes to purchase photographs will be advised how to obtain them by the Lecturer or by the Secretary (111 South Fifteenth Street, Philadelphia).