It was written in the lagoon itself that Venetian painting should be a school of color. Long before the marble and porphyry palaces and the shining bridges of Renaissance Venice spanned the canals, the brown water gave its satiny reflections of rude hut, coppered galley, tawny sail, and, in days of complete calm, of the serrated ivory of the Julian Alps or the velvety azure of the Euganean Hills. As the city grew palatially, the marble and gold of the palace fronts, and spires and domes, with the buff and red of soaring bell towers, further enriched the shimmering of the lagoon. Its waters were ruffled not merely by winds blending and effacing the weaving of borrowed colors, but also by the passing of gilded processional barges with rhythmical oars celebrating the Assumption of the Virgin or the marriage of Venice to the Adriatic. Ashore the splendor was hardly less. Along the balustrades of innumerable little bridges, the rose or yellow marble got an ineffable finish from the touch of countless hands. Dusky archways gave upon courts encrusted with variegated marbles, porphyry and mosaics. In the gloomy streets, gay pictorial frescoes enlivened the fronts of the less pretentious houses. In the great Piazza of St. Mark and other open spaces, often passed in solemn procession the religious confraternities called Schools, the members garbed with a splendor rare even in the Renaissance. There were clubs of young fops, not yet broken to the paternal commerce, who gave themselves to the invention and display of the finest tailoring and haberdashery. And the unorganized kindred activities of the women of all ages were as effective from the point of view of social display. Such was the spectacle that Venice offered the painter for record and even more for inspiration. And the greatness of the Venetian painters lay in their capacity to lend to this chiefly material splendor their own kind of ideality. [Illustration: FIG. 208. Presentation; Flight to Egypt; Miracle at Cana; Temptation. From an Italo-Byzantine Altar-front of about 1350.—_Trieste._ ]