Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 30098-h.htm or 30098-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30098/30098-h/30098-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30098/30098-h.zip) Transcriber's note: 1) Variations in the spelling of names and recording of some questionable dates have been left as printed in the original text. 2) Chapter IX--Sala del Gran Consiio possibly should be Sala del Gran Consiglio. 3) Likely corrections are noted in brackets within the text in the format [TN: . . .]. THE VENETIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING [Illustration: _Giorgione._ MADONNA WITH S. LIBERALE AND S. FRANCIS. _Castelfranco._ (_Photo, Anderson._)] THE VENETIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING by EVELYN MARCH PHILLIPPS With Illustrations Books for Libraries Press Freeport, New York First Published 1912 Reprinted 1972 International Standard Book Number: 0-8369-6745-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-37907 Printed in the United States of America By New World Book Manufacturing Co., Inc. Hallandale, Florida 33009 PREFACE Many visits to Venice have brought home the fact that there exists, in English at least, no work which deals as a whole with the Venetian School and its masters. Biographical catalogues there are in plenty, but these, though useful for reference, say little to readers who are not already acquainted with the painters whose career and works are briefly recorded. "Lives" of individual masters abound, but however excellent and essential these may be to an advanced study of the school, the volumes containing them make too large a library to be easily carried about, and a great deal of reading and assimilation is required to set each painter in his place in the long story. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _History of Painting in North Italy_ still remains our sheet anchor; but it is lengthy, over full of detail of minor painters, and lacks the interesting criticism which of late years has collected round each master. There seems room for a portable volume, making an attempt to consider the Venetian painters, in relation to one another, and to help the visitor not only to trace the evolution of the school from its dawn, through its full splendour and to its declining rays, but to realise what the Venetian School was, and what was the philosophy of life which it represented.