The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiff,
half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration, and are but the
introduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo
of Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. And
throughout the course of its later development, always subordinate to
architectural effect, the work of the Venetian school never escaped from
the influence of its beginnings. Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed,
by naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories, it had no
Giotto, no Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from the stress of thought
and sentiment, which taxed so severely the resources of the generations
of Florentine artists, those earlier Venetian painters, down to
Carpaccio and the Bellini, seem never for a moment to have been tempted
even to lose sight of the scope of their art in its strictness, or to
forget that painting must be, before all things decorative, a thing for
the eye; a space of colour on the wall, only more dexterously blent than
the marking of its precious stone or the chance interchange of sun and
shade upon it--this, to begin and end with--whatever higher matter of
thought, or poetry, or religious reverie might play its part therein,
between.
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