The third, or Ornamental style, could scarcely arise in any other state of Italy than Venice. Venice was the centre of commerce, the repository of the riches of the globe, the splendid toy-shop of the time: its chief inhabitants princely merchants, or a patrician race elevated to rank by accumulations from trade or naval prowess; the bulk of the people mechanics or artisans, administering the means, and, in their turn, fed by the produce of luxury. Of such a system, what could the Art be more than the parasite? Religion itself had exchanged its gravity for the allurements of ear and eye, and even sanctity disgusted, unless arrayed by the gorgeous hand of fashion. Such was, such will always be the birth-place and the theatre of Colour; and hence it is more matter of wonder that the first and greatest colourists should so long have foreborne to overstep the modesty of Nature in the use of that alluring medium, than that they sacrificed, _in part_, propriety to its golden solicitation. I say _in part_, for Tiziano perhaps never, Paolo and Tintoretto, though by much too often, yet not always, spread the enchanting nosegay, which is the characteristic of this style, with indiscriminate hand. The style of Tiziano may be divided into three periods: when he copied, when he imitated, when he strove to generalize, to elevate, or invigorate the tones of Nature. The first is anxious and precise, the second beautiful and voluptuous, the third sublime. In the second the parts lead to the whole, in this the whole to the parts; it is that master-style which in discriminated tones imparts to ornament a monumental grandeur. It gave that celestial colour which consideration like an angel spread over the Salutation in St. Rocco; the colour that wafts its wide expanse and elemental purity over the primitive scenes of his Abel, Abraham, and David, in the Salute; the colour that tinged with artless solemn majesty the Apotheosis of the Virgin in the church de' Frati, embodied adoration in its portraits, and changed the robes of pomp and warlike glitter to servants of simplicity. Such is the tone which diffuses its terrors and its glories in Pietro Martyre over the martyred hermits of the mountain forest, and taught the painter's eye to "glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." If this be ornament, what but the Vatican can the schools of Design oppose to its grandeur and propriety!