The most striking pictures are not always the best portraits, as we all know, though we are often inclined to forget it. Most of us at one time or another have stood before a painting by Caravaggio or Gherardo delle Notti, in which men are seen in the act to move, half lighted by a flaring torch, and we have felt a strange and strong desire to know where they are supposed to be and whither they are supposed to be going. Our eyes search the black depths of the picture as if we were peering out into the darkness of a starless night, with an instinctive wish to distinguish some detail that may explain the figures in the foreground; and, failing to find anything, we turn away as from a vision seen in a bad dream. We shall not forget the strong features, the tremendous muscles, the mysterious anxious eyes, and when we think of them we shall still wonder where those men were, in a cavern or out of doors, in the crypt of a church or in the forest, and whether they were alone or were followed by a crowd in the darkness. Who saw them pass? Who heard their low and anxious voices? Upon what nameless errand were they bound? I have often thought that impressions much like these are produced on most minds by the names Bocconio, Tiepolo, Faliero. Yet each of them, in true history, had his companions, his friends, his enemies; and if each stood alone as a type, yet all were the result of their own times, and every one of the three was in himself the cause of a separate train of events. Hitherto the story of Venice has been that of her growth; she has risen from the waves in the clear breath of the northern Adriatic, at once gentle and full of life; she has grown up into the light, full of a sweetness of her own, but burning with youthful courage, and suddenly, in the period of which we now have to treat, she has changed from a child to a full-grown woman. Pursuing, or pursued by, the impression of her strong personality as a living creature rather than as the capital city of a great power and the scene of action in the lives of great men, we may compare her to a woman of divine beauty, yet almost tragically jealous of her own freedom, fierce to her enemies, dangerous to those who trust her, a loving mother to her children so long as they are obedient, but a ruthless and cruel queen towards her rebellious subjects. A woman, in short, possessing a sort of dual nature, aspiring to the dignity of being feared, yet moved by the desire of love; so unwilling to submit to the slightest influence of another that she would willingly despoil herself of all her riches and of every possession, and shed even the last drop of her blood, rather than forego the smallest shred of her proud independence.