Composure is the very soul of the grand style whether in fifth century Athens or in sixteenth century Florence, Rome, or Venice. It accepts the human spectacle as worthy and thrilling, admires without misgivings the best things that come before its eye. That is why radicals hate the grand style—and rightly, for it is always aristocratic, caring rather little for the average man and much for that privileged remnant which lives in highest bodily efficiency and mental ease. The grand style is on the side of what Matthew Arnold called the barbaric virtues of wealth, health, and generous living. The moment the artist begins to question the social order, to be curious about the foibles and fates of individuals as such, the grand style is in peril. This delicate and inquisitive sensibility makes its appearance in Italy not long after the death of Raphael. You will find it in Pontormo, at Florence, in Lorenzo Lotto, in the Venetic region, in Moretto of Brescia, above all in Correggio, more assertively in Tintoretto, and latent in Titian’s last phase. It is a tremor on the sea of history that heralds a new dawn. [Illustration: FIG. 280. Lorenzo Lotto. Adoration of the Shepherds.—_Brescia._ ] Lorenzo Lotto,[82] born at Treviso in 1480, first and most characteristically embodies the new intimacy. He worked widely through Lombardy and the Marches, enjoying a transitory vogue at Venice. Trained in the austere methods of Alvise Vivarini, he soon gave himself to his own native melancholy. One may see his qualities and defects in the great Enthroned Madonna, in San Bartolommeo at Bergamo. Mr. Berenson has well remarked that the saints are no longer demi-gods and objects of worship, but “pious souls in whose faces and gestures we discern the zeal, the fervor, the yearning, the reverie, or even the sentimental ecstacy peculiar to the several temperaments most frequently occurring among the children of Holy Mother Church.” Note too how the stately architecture derived from Giovanni Bellini and the crowded figure group mutually dwarf one another. Intimacy and monumentality do not live well together. This picture was finished in 1516, the year that Titian began the Assumption. Does not the contrast show Lotto an alien in his time and a harbinger of ours? In later pictures of less monumental pretensions,—as in a Nativity, Figure 280, at Brescia, which may profitably be contrasted with Palma’s more assured version,—he attains a penetrating beauty of a morbid kind, and his sensitiveness makes him a most appealing portraitist. He has left an extraordinary gallery of shy, inadequate, sometimes morose and invalid men, and women, Figure 281. They have not the confidence of the Renaissance, but hesitations like our own. Which shows perhaps that the Renaissance mood was ever urban and the affair of a minority of statesmen, merchants and humanists. In the little cities where there was no enlightened court the human spirit