Nothing better shows the slightly anachronistic quality of Tiepolo’s grandeur than a fine Longhi. The Venetian imagination had moved indoors, so to speak, had foregone in favor of individual gratifications the old vision of the collective splendor. Venice no longer dines grandly in the open with Veronese, she coquettishly sips coffee with Longhi. If she had declined in nobility, she had at least kept her sincerity and taste. Her affair had ever been rather with appearances than with ideals or interpretations. But since the Greeks no other nation had considered appearances with such noble candor. She kept to the end the good pictorial habit of letting appearances explain themselves. Thus if a Titian will stand beside a Pheidian marble, so will a Tiepolo beside an Alexandrian masterpiece, while a trim belle of Pietro Longhi need feel no confusion before a Tanagra figurine. Time passes gently over a city whose artistic aims are as limited as her taste is sure. Venice had ever been gracious in her grandeur, and gracious she remained even after she had ceased to be grand. ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VIII TITIAN’S ASSUMPTION THE BEGINNING OF THE VENETIAN GRAND STYLE Titian’s contemporaries were fully aware that the Assumption (1518) marked the beginning of the Grand Style at Venice and that the change was revolutionary. The critic Lodovico Dolce writes in his _Dialogo della Pittura_, Florence, 1735, p. 286 f. putting the words into the mouth of Aretino: “After not much time [after the Fondaco frescoes, 1508] he was given to paint a great panel for the high altar of the Friars Minor; where Titian, still young, painted in oils the Virgin, who rises to heaven among many angels who accompany her, and above her he figured a God Father flanked by two angels. It seems really as if she rises with a face full of humility, and her robes fly lightly. At the bottom are the disciples who with various attitudes manifest joy and amazement, and are mostly larger than life, and assuredly in that picture is contained the grandeur and terribleness of Michelangelo, the pleasingness and grace of Raphael, with the coloring proper to nature, and, moreover, this was the first public work which he made in oils; and he made it in very little time, and young.”