Giovanni Bellini at his best. In 1508, the name of VITTORE CARPACCIO occurs with that of Bastiani in connection with the frescoes of Giorgione upon the facade of the Fondaco de Tedeschi, about which there was a dispute. To Carpaccio we are indebted for the most vivid realization of the contemporary life of Venice; for although his subjects were nominally taken from sacred history or legend, they are treated in a thoroughly secular fashion, giving the clearest idea of the buildings, people, and costume of the Venice of his time, with the greatest variety and richest development. His object is not only to represent single events, but a complete scene, and while we observe this characteristic in one or two pictures by the Bellini, Carpaccio not only shows it much oftener, but carries it to a much fuller development--possibly influenced by the Netherlandish masters. Many of his works are in the Academy at Venice; eight large pictures, painted between 1490 and 1495, represent the history of S. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins. Such a wealth of charming material might have embarrassed a less capable painter, but "the monotonous incident which forms the groundwork of many of them," as Kugler coldly puts it, "is throughout varied and elevated by a free style of grouping and by happy moral allusions." Another series is that of the _Miracles of the Holy Cross_, among which may be especially noticed the cure of a man possessed by a devil; the scene is laid in the loggia of a Venetian palace, and is watched from below by a varied group of figures on the Canal and its banks. Larger and broader treatment may be seen in the _Presentation in the Temple_, painted in 1510, which is also in the Academy, and in the altar-piece of _S. Vitale_, dated 1514. This last brings Carpaccio into closer comparison with the later Venetian painters, being in the nature of a _Santa Conversazione_, where the holy personages are grouped in some definite relation to each other, and not independent figures. PALMA VECCHIO (1480-1528), so called to distinguish him from Giacomo Palma the younger--Palma Giovane,--was so much influenced by Giorgione and Titian that his indebtedness to Bellini appears to have been comparatively slight. The beautiful _Portrait of a Poet_ in the National Gallery has been attributed both to Giorgione and to Titian.