According to some trustworthy authorities, Raphael, Martin Luther, and Rabelais were born in the same year. The fact that they were certainly contemporaries with each other and with many other men of genius of contradictory types is one of the principal features of that most contradictory age. Signor Molmenti compares the gifts of Carpaccio and the two Bellini to rays that warm and gladden, those of Titian and Tintoretto to lights that dazzle but give no heat. In two centuries that immense change in art had taken place; from having spoken to the soul it had come to appeal to the eye. The best painters of the fifteenth century touch us, and remain impersonal to us. What do we know, for instance, of Carpaccio’s dreams or struggles or sufferings while he was painting his great picture of Saint Ursula and her maiden company? We gaze upon those virgin faces, those crowns of martyrdom, those tenderly smiling women’s lips, those almost childlike gestures, and they touch us deeply. Perhaps we should like to ask them the secret of Carpaccio’s melancholy soul. But the lips move not, nor do the eyes answer; the eleven thousand maidens seem rather to beckon us away to that place of refreshment, light and peace, where we may hope that the great painter’s sadness ended at last. They tell us not of him, nor of themselves, but of heaven. A hundred years have gone by, and still artists paint pictures; but they tell us no longer of anything but their own selves, their own lives, their own passions. It is the world that has changed; perhaps it is not faith that is gone, faith the evidence of things unseen, but most assuredly belief has taken flight and left men sceptical, the belief which is the mother of all bright dreams, and which must see in order to believe, if only in imagination, and, believing, cannot fail to see. The time had come when the artists were interesting for their own sakes as well as for what they did, and when the reporter-chronicler thought it worth while to note every anecdote of their daily lives, to put down the names of their models, to tell us who sat to them for their Madonnas. And those names are mostly names of good and honest women, and we know to a nicety why they chose this face for one purpose and that for another. There is an end of all the legends of saintly heads begun by the artist and finished before morning by an angel’s hand. There is an end, too, of dreams of refreshment, light and peace. The artists of the sixteenth century are the most human of mankind, the most subject to humanity’s passions, its weaknesses and even its madness, and their works bear the stamp of the sensuous naturalism in which they lived.