FIG. 230. Gentile Bellini. Corpus Christi Procession in Piazza of S. Marco.—_Venice._ ] Another panel from this series shows Gentile’s really great capacity as an out-of-doors painter. It represents the miraculous recovery of the reliquary of the cross which had fallen into the canal. How perfectly the play of light over the encrusted and plastered palaces is felt, its shimmer upon the smooth water and through the moving crowds! In the essentials of _plein-airisme_ we moderns have not so much surpassed this work. And if Gentile seems after all not quite a great artist, it is due to that impassivity which is proper to a luminist. With equal realism, Gentile’s imitator, Carpaccio, added sentiment, hence he is beloved and Gentile ignored. Yet early Venetian narrative painting is complete with Gentile, and from every consideration of naturalism it is immensely superior to anything produced at Florence in this period. It gains all the smaller points of representation with the most amazing ease, perhaps because it waives the greater issue of monumentality. It is well put together, but shows little selection, is even at its best rather casually full of persons and things. This produces, as compared with Florence, an odd reversal of conditions. The altar-piece, which in Florence is rather intimate, is in Venice far the most monumental type of painting. We study the development of monumental design better in Giovanni Bellini’s altar-backs than in his brother’s narratives. To Gentile, at once a searching spirit in details and a conservative on the whole, it must have been a great satisfaction to have perfected the narrative mode that his father had so brilliantly inaugurated. [Illustration: FIG. 231. Giovanni Bellini. Pietà.—_Milan._ ] After 1500, being in the seventies and ailing, old Gentile acquired the ominous habit of frequently making and unmaking wills. His last one, which became effective in 1507, left to his vigorous brother, Giovanni, the precious paternal sketch books and the heavy duty of finishing for St. Mark’s School the vast Canvas of St. Mark Preaching at Alexandria, which is now at Milan. Giovanni was nearly eighty himself, but he put the great work through handsomely. [Illustration: FIG. 232. Giovanni Bellini. Christ at Gethsemane.—_London._ ]