Painting bloomed late in Venice--Conditions offered by Venice to Art--Shelley and Pietro Aretino--Political circumstances of Venice--Comparison with Florence--The Ducal Palace--Art regarded as an adjunct to State Pageantry--Myth of Venezia--Heroic Deeds of Venice--Tintoretto's Paradise and Guardi's Picture of a Ball--Early Venetian Masters of Murano--Gian Bellini--Carpaccio's little Angels--The Madonna of S. Zaccaria--Giorgione--Allegory, Idyll, Expression of Emotion--The Monk at the Clavichord--Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese--Tintoretto's attempt to dramatise Venetian Art--Veronese's Mundane Splendour--Titian's Sophoclean Harmony--Their Schools--Further Characteristics of Veronese--of Tintoretto--His Imaginative Energy--Predominant Poetry--Titian's Perfection of Balance--Assumption of Madonna--Spirit common to the Great Venetians. It was a fact of the greatest importance for the development of the fine arts in Italy that painting in Venice reached maturity later than in Florence. Owing to this circumstance one chief aspect of the Renaissance, its material magnificence and freedom, received consummate treatment at the hands of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. To idealise the sensualities of the external universe, to achieve for colour what the Florentines had done for form, to invest the worldly grandeur of human life at one of its most gorgeous epochs with the dignity of the highest art, was what these great artists were called on to accomplish. Their task could not have been so worthily performed in the fifteenth century as in the sixteenth, if the development of the aesthetic sense had been more premature among the Venetians.