Carpaccio’s merit as the liveliest and most persuasive of _raconteurs_ seems so definite that it is almost a shock to meet him in other capacities. Also a disappointment to find in the New Testament subjects from the School of the Albanians, 1504, that in such stereotyped subjects he can be almost mediocre. Certainly in the great altar-piece of the Presentation in the Temple, Figure 247, at the Academy, he shows that he fully understands the new monumentality of Giovanni Bellini. The date is 1510. The picture is of the most reverent composure, and as tender as it is grand. In the portrait of Two Courtesans on a Balcony, in the Correr, Carpaccio shows a force of character wholly modern. With a kind of irony he has taken the moral emptiness of his sitters out of doors, flooded it with sunlight and air, given it harshness and ugliness, lavishing upon the rich costumes and fair skins the most delicate pains. John Ruskin will tell you that these are honest women. Such faith is more worthy of reverence than of imitation. The greatness of Carpaccio lies in the impartiality with which he renders a certain kind of life on its own terms. The romancer is capable of appalling truthfulness. [Illustration: FIG. 247. Carpaccio. The Presentation.—_Venice._ ] That he was also a mystic of the most intense sort is hard to believe. Yet if the marvellous Meditation on the Passion, Figure 248, in the Metropolitan Museum, be really by him, such is the case. In a desert the Dead Christ sits in a crumbling throne, while two grim sages, St. Job and St. Onophrius, sit in rapt contemplation. Their mood has evoked the bodily vision of their Lord. Art has produced few such symbols for the hallucinative intensity of the life contemplative. These weather-beaten forms seem an emanation from the sands and blistering sunlight. They have few relations to our world. Their souls move in vast uninhabited spaces. That Carpaccio can have produced this masterpiece as late as 1520, and cast it deliberately in a style learned forty years earlier seems to me a fantastic hypothesis, even if it has enlisted grave authority. The abundant similarities of the landscape with that of the St. Francis of the Frick Collection make me feel that the invention of this picture is Giovanni Bellini’s, at his moment of highest emotional power, about 1480. Since the actual painting is evidently in large part Carpaccio’s, I am driven to the by no means satisfactory hypothesis that Carpaccio may have executed this masterpiece, and the group to which it belongs, while serving as studio assistant to Giovanni Bellini. Such a view at least expresses my conviction that the picture transcends Carpaccio’s powers. [Illustration: FIG. 248.—Ascribed to Carpaccio, perhaps Giovanni Bellini’s Design. Desert Hermits Meditating the Passion.—_New York._ ]