In order to penetrate the characteristics of Venetian art more thoroughly, it will be needful to enter into detailed criticism of the three chief masters who command the school. To begin with Veronese. His canvases are nearly always large--filled with figures of the size of life, massed together in groups or extended in long lines beneath white marble colonnades, which enclose spaces of clear sky and silvery clouds. Armour, shot silks and satins, brocaded canopies, banners, plate, fruit, sceptres, crowns, all things, in fact, that burn and glitter in the sun, form the habitual furniture of his pictures. Rearing horses, dogs, dwarfs, cats, when occasion serves, are used to add reality, vivacity, grotesqueness to his scenes. His men and women are large, well proportioned, vigorous--eminent for pose and gesture rather than for grace or loveliness--distinguished by adult more than adolescent qualities. Veronese has no choice type of beauty for either sex. We find in him, on the contrary, a somewhat coarse display of animal force in men, and of superb voluptuousness in women. He prefers to paint women draped in gorgeous raiment, as if he had not felt the beauty of the nude. Their faces are too frequently unrefined and empty of expression. His noblest creatures are men of about twenty-five, manly, brawny, crisp-haired, full of nerve and blood. In all this Veronese resembles Rubens. But he does not, like Rubens, strike us as gross, sensual, fleshly;[282] he remains proud, powerful, and frigidly materialistic. He raises neither repulsion nor desire, but displays with the calm strength of art the empire of the mundane spirit. All the equipage of wealth and worldliness, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life--such a vision as the fiend offered to Christ on the mountain of temptation; this is Veronese's realm. Again, he has no flashes of poetic imagination like Tintoretto; but his grip on the realities of the world, his faculty for idealising prosaic magnificence, is even greater. Veronese was precisely the painter suited to a nation of merchants, in whom the associations of the counting-house and the exchange mingled with the responsibilities of the Senate and the passions of princes. He never portrayed vehement emotions. There are no brusque movements, no extended arms, like those of Tintoretto's Magdalen in the "Pietà" at Milan, in his pictures. His Christs and Maries and martyrs of all sorts are composed, serious, courtly, well-fed personages, who, like people of the world accidentally overtaken by some tragic misfortune, do not stoop to distortions or express more than a grave surprise, a decorous sense of pain.[283] His angelic beings are equally earthly.