By the time that Tintoret made his first essays in painting, the Venetian school was the foremost in the world. The great Leonardo had died in France, leaving behind him in Lombardy a company of pupils who were rapidly enslaved by a graceless mannerism. Even earlier than this, the best talents of Umbria had wandered into feeble eccentricities, or had been absorbed by Raphael’s large humanism. Raphael himself was dead, at the height of his popularity and in the prime of his powers, and his disciples were hurrying along the road of imitation into the desert of formalism. Michael Angelo alone survived in central Italy, a Titan too colossal, too individual, to be a schoolmaster, although there were many of the younger brood (Vasari among them) who called him _Maestro_, and fancied that the grimaces and contortions they drew sprang from force and grandeur such as his. But in Venice painting was flourishing; there it had the exuberance and the strength, the joyousness and the splendor, of an art approaching its meridian. John Bellini, the eldest of the great Venetians, had died; but not before there had issued from his studio a wonderful band of disciples, some of whom were destined to surpass him. Giorgione, one of these, had been cut off in his thirty-fourth year, having barely had time to give to the world a few handsels of his genius. The fame of Titian had risen to that height where it has ever since held its station. A troop of lesser men--lesser in comparison with him--were embellishing Venice, or carrying the magic of her art to other parts of Italy.