When painting in Venice first begins to live a life of its own, Jacobello del Fiore stands out as the most conspicuous of the indigenous Venetians. His father had been president of the Painters' Guild. Jacopo himself was president from 1415 to 1436. He was a rich and popular member of the State and a man of high character. His works, to judge by the specimens left, hardly attained the dignity of art, though in the banner of "Justice," in the Academy, the space is filled in a monumental fashion and the figure of St. Gabriel with the lily has something grand and graceful. We trace the same treatment of flying banners and draperies and rippling hair in the fantastic but picturesque S. Grisogono in the left transept of San Trovaso. Jacobello's will, executed in 1439 in favour of his wife Lucia and his son, Ercole, with provision for a possible posthumous son, shows him to have been a man of considerable possessions. He owned a slave and had other servants, a house, money, and books. Among his fellow-workers who are represented in Venice are Niccolo Semitocolo, Niccolo di Pietro, and Lorenzo Veneziano. The important altarpiece by the last, in the Academy, has evidently been reconstructed; two Eternal Fathers hover over the Annunciation, and the Saints have been restored to the framework in such wise that the backs of many of them are turned on the momentous central event. In the "Marriage of St. Catherine," in the same gallery, Lorenzo gets more natural. The Child, in a light green dress with gold buttons, has a lively expression, and looks round at His Mother as if playing a game. The chapel of San Tarasio in San Zaccaria contains an ancona of which the central panel was only inserted in 1839, and is identical with Lorenzo's other work. One of the finest and most elaborate of all the anconæ is in San Giovanni in Bragora, and is also the work of Lorenzo. In this, as well as in that of San Tarasio, the Mother offers the Child the apple, signifying the fruit of the Tree of Jesse and symbolical of the Incarnation. This incident, which is found thus early in art, was evidently felt to raise the group of the Mother and Child from a representation of a merely earthly relationship to a spiritual scene of the deepest meaning and the highest dignity.