For Reynolds in Discourse Four, 1770, the painters of the Venetian school are in an inferior class to those painters in the 'epick style' of the Roman, the Florentine, and the Bolognese schools, and even inferior to the work of the 'best of the French school, Poussin, Le Sueur, and Le Brun', who 'formed themselves on Roman models' ( Reynolds, Discourses, p. 63).
Venetian schools, like Flemish schools, owe 'much of their fame to colouring'. Reynolds ( Reynolds, Discourses, p. 66) follows Vasari in asserting the superiority of 'disegno' over 'colore', and therefore the superiority of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and especially Michelangelo, over the Venetian painters, even to Titian who was seen as the greatest of them.
In Discourse Four Reynolds suggests that 'Tintoret, Paul Veronese, and others of the Venetian school, seem to have painted with no other purpose than to be admired for their skill and expertness in the mechanism of painting, and to make a parade of that art, which... the higher stile requires its followers to conceal.' The Venetians are 'sensual' and wish to 'dazzle'. Venetian pictures are full of 'bustle' and tumult'. See Reynolds, Discourses, p. 63 and following.
Moreover, in Discourse Seven, 1776, Veronese and Tintoretto are inferior because of their 'entire inattention to what is justly thought the most essential part of our art, the expression of the passions'. ( Reynolds, Discourses, p. 131)
It is the 'florid eloquence' of Tintoretto and Veronese which Reynolds warns against (Reynolds, Discourses, p. 67); Reynolds on Titian is more sympathetic. Reynolds quotes Tintoretto's view that 'Titian's colouring was the model of perfection', and in Discourse Eleven, 1782, he sums up his own view of Titian, and of the strength and the weakness of what was for him Venetian painting at its best: 'In his colouring he was large and general, as in his design he was minute and partial; in the one he was a genius, in the other not much above a copier' ( Reynolds, Discourses, p. 196)