GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE 155

All that you have to notice is that painting has now become a dark instead of bright art, and in many ways a frightful and unpleasant art, or else-I will add once for all, referring you for proof of it to the general examples of Venetian work at this late epoch, supplied as a luxury to foreign courts,-a lascivious art.*

Nevertheless up to the time when Tintoret painted the Crucifixion in the Scuola di San Rocco,¹ Venice had not in heart abjured her religion. The time when the last chord of its faith gives way cannot be discerned, to day and hour; but in that day and hour of which, for external sign, we may best take the death of Tintoret in 1594, the Arts of Venice are at an end.

I have therefore now shown you the complete course of their power, from 1380 at the Academy gates, to 1594-say, broadly, two centuries (her previous art being only architectural, mosaic, or decorative sculpture). We will now go through the rooms, noticing what is best worth notice in each of the epochs defined; essentially, you observe, three. The first we may call the Vivarini epoch, bright, innocent, more or less elementary, entirely religious art,-reaching from 1400 to 1480; the second (which for reasons presently to be shown, we will call the Carpaccian epoch), sometimes classic and mythic, as well as religious, 1480-1520;

* One copy of Titian’s work bearing such commercial value, and showing what was briefly the Gospel preached by Missionary Venice to foreign nations in the sixteenth century, you will find presently in the narrow corridor, No. 340:² on which you will usually also find some modern copyist employed, for missionary purposes; but never on a Vivarini. And in thus becoming dark, terrific, and sensual, Venetian art led the way to the mere naturalism and various baseness of following European art with the rubbish of which that corridor³ is mostly filled.

¹ [For which picture see Vol. IV. p. 270.]

² [No longer in the corridor, but in Room XIX.: “Venus,” ascribed to Giovanni Contarini (1549-1606), a picture suggesting reminiscences of Titian’s “Danaë” in the Museum of Naples.]

³ [Ed. 1 added: “(Sala IX., Numbers 276 to 353).” The Contarini was at the time in the same corridor (called the “Loggia Palladina”), which still contains many of the Dutch and Flemish pictures (the “rubbish” of Ruskin’s note).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]