CARPACCIO Vittore Carpaccio was Gentile Bellini's most faithful pupil. He and his master stand apart in having, before the arrival of the Venetian School proper, captured an aspect and a charm inspired by the natural beauty of the City of the Sea. Gentile, as we have seen, paints her historic appearance, and Carpaccio gives us something of the delight we feel to-day in her translucent waters and her ample, sea-washed spaces flooded with limpid light. While others were absorbed in assimilating extraneous influences, he goes on his own way, painting, indeed, the scenes that were asked for, but painting them in his own manner and with his own enjoyment. Pageant-pictures had been the demand of the Venetian State from very early days. The first use of painting had been that made by the Church to glorify religion, and very soon the State had followed, using it to enhance the love which Venetians bore to their city, and to bring home to them the consciousness of its greatness and glory. Pageants and processions were an integral part of Venetian life. The people looked on at them, often as they occurred, with more pride and sense of proprietorship than a Londoner does at a coronation procession or at the King going in state to open Parliament. The Venetian loved splendour and beauty and the story of the city's great achievements, and nothing provided so welcome a subject for the decoration of the great public halls as portrayals of the events which had made Venice famous. Artists had been employed to produce these as early as the end of the fourteenth century, and those of the Bellini and Alvise Vivarini (which perished in the great fire) were a rendering on modern lines of the same subjects, satisfying the more advanced feeling for truth and beauty. Besides the Church and the public Government, we have already seen the "Schools," as they were called, becoming important employers. These schools were the great organised confraternities in the cause of charity and mutual help, which sprang up in Venice in the fifteenth century. That of St. Mark was naturally the foremost, but others were banded each under their patron saint. Each attracted numbers of rich patrons, for it was the fashion to belong to the confraternities. Riches and endowments rolled in, and halls for meeting and for transacting business were built, and were adorned with pictures setting forth the legends of their patron saints. We have already seen Gentile Bellini employed in the schools of San Marco and San Giovanni, and now the schools of St. Ursula and St. George gave commissions to Carpaccio, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that Gentile, having become pre-eminent in this art, provided employment for his pupil and assistant, and that by degrees Carpaccio became a _maestro_ on his own account.