It can be no matter for wonder that colour was the elected medium of expression for Venice: endowed, by reason of her water, with a twofold gift of light, she was also perhaps more splendid than any other city in the details of her daily life. Colour was its substance. Everything was pictorial and rich and festive. Even on a dark day the rooms of the Accademia seem full of sunshine from the treasure they hold of ancient Venice. If Bellini’s _Procession of the Cross_ on the Piazza of San Marco were missing from its place, we should feel that a light had been put out. The Venetians had always been decorators. The pictures of the first masters--Vivarini, d’Alemagna, Jacobello del Fiore and many others--seem literally spun out of the furnaces of Murano. They are no primitives in their mastery of colour. Consider for a moment the _Madonna and Saints_ of Vivarini and d’Alemagna in the Sala della Presentazione. The natural life of the fields has been made to serve a design of amazing richness. The Virgin’s golden throne is carved With acorns and roses, and luxuriant oak foliage forms its decorative fringe; the fruits of the garden in which she sits are lavished round her; the grass is gemmed with countless tiny flowers, trefoil and strawberry, milkwort and potentilla, and the infant Christ has burst open a golden pomegranate, displaying its burden of rich crimson seeds. There is scarcely a harmony of colour unattempted, scarcely a jewel unset, from the rainbow of the angels’ wings, and the rim of fluctuating colours on the Virgin’s green robe folded back over peacock blue, to the mosaics in the burning gold of the angels’ haloes, in the Virgin’s crown, and in the mitres of the Fathers. There too is the very vermilion of Veronese, that wonderful salvia scarlet to which the _Feast in Levi’s House_ owes so much of its decorative significance. We shall be better equipped for understanding the early colour-masters if we realise that their dowry came to them not only from the lagoon. The marvellous rainbow of Venice the “Ambiguous One” was not their only light nor the deep azure and emerald and gold, which she hung about her, the only jewels they knew. The garment of Venetian art is inwoven with threads of mountain glory, of rich harvests of grape and golden grain: we must go up into the mainland of Venice to understand the art of the first masters no less than that of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, whose conceptions were penetrated with the very sunshine of earth, a warmer-bodied, fuller sunshine than Venice of the waters could know, full of secret throbbings of the hidden springing life for light and ripening. Autumn is the loom on which was woven the robe of Venetian art, autumn with its indomitable splendours of gold and silver, green and cremoisin and the supreme scarlet of the salvia. These colours are steeped in an impermeable dye: they seem saturated with the light, burning out the more gloriously, the more intensely, as