The noble ladies of Venice in the sixteenth century were as idle and frivolous as Orientals. The fact must be admitted by any one who studies the times; and if it is not of a nature to please those who idealise that period, it may be partly excused by the consideration that the Venetian nobleman treated his womankind very much as a Turk treats his harem. He was not jealous, as lovers understand jealousy; granted a certain degree of beauty and a dowry of a certain value, he cared very little whom he married. When Kugler, the famous art critic, says of Titian’s picture of the Schiava, the Slave, in the Barberini Gallery in Rome, that the name is utterly meaningless, he shows that he knew nothing of Venetian life. The slave in the sixteenth century not seldom meant everything, where the wife meant nothing; and if the wives were idle and frivolous, we must remember that when they were young and good-looking, they often found themselves in competition with beautiful Georgian and Circassian women for their masters’ favour. Where women are plentiful, beautiful, and not clever, the men who love them are rarely jealous. But those grave and magnificent Venetians, who had not a scruple in politics, nor in matrimony, were excessively sensitive about anything which touched their technical honour, and it seemed to them altogether safer and wiser to teach their wives and daughters what they were pleased to call ‘habits of domestic seclusion.’ To be plain, they encouraged them to stay at home; and sometimes, by way of making obedience easier, they locked them up. M. Yriarte says with partial truth that their ‘seclusion’ was that of the harem, not that of the classic gynaeceum; he did not realise that the latter was nothing but a harem too, and that if the Greeks kept their wives at home, it was that they might sup undisturbed in the society of Phryne. The influence of the East on everything connected with private life in Venice increased with the Renascence, and is even more perceptible then than during the nominal domination of the Byzantine Empire, when Roman traditions still had great force, and new currents of thought reached Venice from the Lombards. Yet in one respect there was nothing oriental about the Venetian noble of the sixteenth century. When he ordered his women to appear in public at all, he sent them out adorned like those miraculous images which are covered with ‘ex voto’ offerings, and they mixed in the crowd that filled the Piazza of Saint Mark’s, shoulder to shoulder with the shameless free.