In technical expression color was the note of all the school, with hardly an exception. This in itself would seem to imply a lightness of spirit, for color is somehow associated in the popular mind with decorative gayety; but nothing could be further removed from the Venetian school than triviality. Color was taken up with the greatest seriousness, and handled in such masses and with such dignified power that while it pleased it also awed the spectator. Without having quite the severity of line, some of the Venetian chromatic schemes rise in sublimity almost to the Sistine modellings of Michael Angelo. We do not feel this so much in Giovanni Bellini, fine in color as he was. He came too early for the full splendor, but he left many pupils who completed what he had inaugurated. THE GREAT VENETIANS: The most positive in influence upon his contemporaries of all the great Venetians was Giorgione (1477?-1511). He died young, and what few pictures by him are left to us have been so torn to pieces by historical criticism that at times one begins to doubt if there ever was such a painter. His different styles have been confused, and his pictures in consequence thereof attributed to followers instead of to the master. Painters change their styles, but seldom their original bent of mind. With Giorgione there was a lyric feeling as shown in music. The voluptuous swell of line, the melting tone of color, the sharp dash of light, the undercurrent of atmosphere, all mingled for him into radiant melody. He sought pure pictorial beauty and found it in everything of nature. He had little grasp of the purely intellectual, and the religious was something he dealt with in no strong devotional way. The fete, the concert, the fable, the legend, with a landscape setting, made a stronger appeal to him. More of a recorder than a thinker he was not the less a leader showing the way into that new Arcadian grove of pleasure whose inhabitants thought not of creeds and faiths and histories and literatures, but were content to lead the life that was sweet in its glow and warmth of color, its light, its shadows, its bending trees, and arching skies. A strong full-blooded race, sober-minded, dignified, rationally happy with their lot, Giorgione portrayed them with an art infinite in variety and consummate in skill. Their least features under his brush seemed to glow like jewels. The sheen of armor and rich robe, a bare forearm, a nude back, or loosened hair--mere morsels of color and light--all took on a new beauty. Even landscape with him became more significant. His master, Bellini, had been realistic enough in the details of trees and hills, but Giorgione grasped the meaning of landscape as an entirety, and rendered it with poetic breadth.