Lorenzo, is an early work, refined and dignified. In 1479 the Doge, being asked by Sultan Mahomet II. to recommend a good painter of portraits from Venice, sent Gentile and two assistants to Constantinople and appointed Giovanni to continue his brother’s work in the Ducal Palace. His remarkable portrait of the Sultan is now in the Layard Collection in Venice. Gentile returned, after a comparatively short stay, loaded with presents and honours, to rejoin his brother at the Ducal Palace. In 1487 Titian is said to have entered his workshop as an apprentice. Later, the master painted for the guild of St John the Evangelist the three scenes illustrating the miracles of the Holy Cross, now in the Accademia. Towards the end of his life he began the Preaching of St Mark, now in the Brera at Milan, and, falling sick, left his sketch-book to his brother on condition that he completed the picture. Gentile was a good draughtsman, a brilliant colourist, an alert observer, boldly making use of his Eastern experiences to add local colour to his subjects. His compositions, however, are rather crowded and wanting in central emphasis; his treatment is flat and hard. His death, February 23, 1507, is noted by Sanudo. Giovanni, his more gifted brother, is the tenderest and noblest of Venetian painters. He gave more attention to individual figures than Gentile, uniting grace and firmness of outline with warmth and splendour of colouring; dignity and strength with variety and beauty of form. His creations, once seen, haunt us like memories of beloved friends. In early life Giovanni was much dominated by the personality of his brother-in-law Mantegna, to whom some of his works[71] have been attributed. A good example painted in _tempera_ of his early Madonnas may be seen (No. 583) in the Accademia. An apocryphal story is told of the artist going to Antonello to have his portrait painted in order to learn the secret of painting in oils. But the new method must have been too well known to have made the trick necessary. Venice possesses several altar-pieces by Giovanni, besides the collection in the Accademia, now conveniently placed in Room XVIII. The altar-piece in the Frari and that in S. Zaccaria are the finest examples of the master’s art in Europe, painted in the maturity of his genius--1488 and 1505. They are held by Ruskin to be the two finest pictures in the world. In S. Pietro Martire at Murano is another of the same period. In 1474, says the annalist Malipiero, Zuano and Zentil Bellini, brothers, were employed at the Ducal Palace to restore the pictures of the meeting of Pope Alexander and the Emperor Barbarossa, which had fallen from the walls because of damp and old age. The brothers promised that their work should last two hundred years. They reckoned without the demon of fire, for a hundred years later it was devoured by the conflagration of 1577. An altar-piece in S. Giovanni Grisostomo, painted when Giovanni was