So stable, rich and proud a city was singularly slow in producing its own art. Venice was never primarily a manufacturing community, and from the first she expected to import most articles of luxury and display. Thus when the manydomed Basilica rose over the body of her patron, St. Mark, Venice called masters from Constantinople to enrich the surfaces with mosaics, and when, towards the end of the fourteenth century, she wished to picture the new Palace of the Doges, she called not her own artists to the task, but those of Padua, Verona and distant Fabriano. Her originality and greatness in painting do not clearly assert themselves until about 1475 in the work of the brothers Bellini, and by 1577, the year of Titian’s death, the period of her artistic supremacy has passed. The whole development is comprised within a century; its acceleration is even more remarkable than the tardiness of its appearance. In three generations Venetian painting made the progress that had required six in Tuscany, and the whole preparatory period, which in Florence stretched over a century and three-quarters, is included in the single life of such a master as Giovanni Bellini. This means that Venetian painting followed simpler and more unperturbed ideals than that of Florence. The composure, complacency, and self-centered quality of the Venetians was a source of strength to their artists and as well a limitation. The city stuck closely to its chief business of gaining greatly in order to live magnificently. And unlike Florence, Venice interprets magnificence in the most material terms, in terms of velvet and veined marbles, fair skins and lustrous hair, in feasting and measured revelry, grave and gentle manners, colorful pageantry in honor of God, his saints and the Serenissima Republica. You will not find poets, scholars, scientists a-plenty at Venice. Her painters have no tendency to be also architects, sculptors, mathematicians, theorists in æsthetics; they stick placidly to the main business of painting. And perhaps just because the Venetian painter refused to be diverted from the problems proper to his craft, his progress was so rapid and assured, and the Venetian school, simply as painting, the most beautiful school of painting the world has ever seen.