As the seventeenth century advanced the character of art and manners underwent a change. Men sought the beautiful in the novel and bizarre, and the complex was preferred to the simple. Venetian art, in all its branches, had passed from the stately and restrained to the pompous and artificial. Yet the barocco style was used by Venice in a way of its own; whimsical, contorted, and overloaded with ornament as it is, it yet compels admiration by its vigorous life and movement. The art of the sei-cento in Venice was extravagant, but it was alive. It escaped the most deadly of all faults, a cold and academic mannerism--and this at a time when the rest of Italy was given over to the inflated followers of Michelangelo and the calculated elaborations of the eclectics. Many of the things we most love in Venice, such as the Salute, the Clock-Tower, the Dogana, the Bridge of Sighs, the Rezzonico and Pesaro Palaces, are additions of the seventeenth century. The barocco intemperance in sculpture was carried on by disciples of Bernini; and as the immediate influence of the great masters declined, painting acquired the same sort of character. The carelessness and rapidity of Tintoretto, which, in his case, proceeded from the lightning speed of his imagination and the unerring sureness of his brush, became a mechanical trick in the hands of superficial students. True art had migrated elsewhere--to the homes of Velasquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt. As art grew more pompous it became less emotional. Painters like Palma Giovine spoilt their ready, lively fancy by the vice of hurry. The nickname of "Fa Presto" was deserved by others besides Luca Giordano, and Venice was overrun by a swarm of painters whose prime standard of excellence was the ability to make haste. Grandeur of conception was forgotten; a grave, ample manner was no longer understood; superficial sentiment and bombastic size carried the day. Yet a few painters, though their forms had become redundant and exaggerated, retained something of what had been the Venetian glory--the deep and moist colour of old. It still glowed with traces of its old lustre on the canvases of Giovanni Contarini, or Tiberio Tinelli, or Pietro Liberi; and though there was a perfect fury of production, without order and without law, there can still be perceived the survival of that sense of the decorative which kept the thread of art. We discover it in the ceiling of the Church of San Pantaleone, where Gianbattista Fumiani paints the glorification of the martyred patron, and which, fantastic and extravagant as it is, with its stupendous, architectural setting, and its acutely, almost absurdly foreshortened throng, is not without a certain grandiose geniality, ample and picturesque, like the buildings of that date. In Alessandro Varotari (il Padovanino), whose "Nozze di Cana" in the Academia is a finely spaced scene, in which a charming use is made of cypresses, we seem to recognise the last ray of the Titianesque. The