vista of creepered wall and over the green meadows studded with golden fruit-trees, to the undulating country and tracts of woodland, now bathed in liquid sunshine, now gathered into a soft-enfolding haze--a wide ocean from which the campaniles rise like masts of ships, and over which the distant villas are scattered like shining fishing-boats. “These workmen,” says d’Annunzio of the Venetian artists of the Renaissance, “create in a medium that is itself a joyous mystery--in colour, the ornament of the world, in colour, which seems to be the striving of the spirit to become light. And the entirely new, musical understanding they have of colour acts in such a way that their creation transcends the narrow limits of the symbols it represents and assumes the lofty, revealing faculty of an infinite harmony.” Colour--which seems to be the striving of the spirit to become light. These words recur to us again and again face to face with the Venetian masters. By the primitives the colours are laid on as accessory to the scene, as it were fine enamel; in the Renaissance painters, they are not only woven into the fabric of the picture, it grows and moves through them. We may choose, in illustration, Giovanni Bellini’s small picture of the _Madonna with St. Catherine and the Magdalen_ in the Accademia, because, though it is in one sense less completely representative of the distinguishing features of the Venetian school than, for instance, his masterpiece of the _Frari_, it realises perhaps more fully than any that “new and musical understanding of colour” which was the peculiar gift of the Venetians. It is literally informed with radiance; flesh itself has become spirit, no longer a covering, but an atmosphere--a directly perfect expression. There is no denial or emaciation of the flesh; the forms are strong, the habitations of a potent earth-spirit. The faces are pondering, penetrating, profound, and withal extremely individual; they might seem impassive, were it not that every feature is kindled by the pervading colour till we seem to feel it as a sensuous presence. It is a quality of colour that so subtly determines the poise of their hands, that makes their touch so sensitively penetrating that feeling seems to flow from it without pressure. The solemn harmony of red and green and blue, and of the diffused radiance of the flesh tints, is not only lit from without by the sunlight, it seems literally to burn from within, depth behind depth, with light.