For a fuller working out of this analysis I must refer to my Sketches in Italy, article "Parma." Much that follows is a quotation from that essay.
Much of the controversy about Michael Angelo, which is continually being waged between his admirers and his detractors, might be set at rest if it were acknowledged that there are two distinct ways of judging works of art. We may regard them simply as appealing to our sense of beauty, and affording harmonious intellectual pleasure. Or we may regard them as expressing the thought and spirit of their age, and as utterances made by men whose hearts burned within them. Critics trained in the study of good Greek sculpture, or inclined by temperament to admire the earlier products of Italian painting, are apt to pursue the former path exclusively. They demand serenity and simplicity. Perturbation and violence they denounce as blemishes. It does not occur to them that, though the phenomenon is certainly rare, it does occasionally happen that a man arises whose art is for him the language of his soul, and who lives in sympathetic relation to the sternest interests of his age. If such an artist be born when tranquil thought and serene emotions are impossible for one who feels the meaning of his times with depth, he must either paint and carve lies, or he must abandon the serenity that was both natural and easy to the Greek and the earlier Italian. Michael Angelo was one of these select artistic natures. He used his chisel and his pencil to express, not merely beautiful artistic motives, but what he felt and thought about the world in which he had to live: and this world was full of the ruin of republics, the corruption and humiliation of society, the subjection of Italy to strangers. In Michael Angelo the student of both art and history finds an inestimably precious and rare point of contact between the inner spirit of an age, and its external expression in sculpture and painting.
CHAPTER VII--VENETIAN PAINTING
Painting bloomed late in Venice—Conditions offered by Venice to Art—Shelley and Pietro Aretino—Political circumstances of Venice—Comparison with Florence—The Ducal Palace—Art regarded as an adjunct to State Pageantry—Myth of Venezia—Heroic Deeds of Venice—Tintoretto's Paradise and Guardi's Picture of a Ball—Early Venetian Masters of Murano—Gian Bellini—Carpaccio's little Angels—The Madonna of S. Zaccaria—Giorgione—Allegory, Idyll, Expression of Emotion—The Monk at the Clavichord—Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese—Tintoretto's attempt to dramatise Venetian Art—Veronese's Mundane Splendour—Titian's Sophoclean Harmony—Their Schools—Further Characteristics of Veronese—of Tintoretto—His Imaginative Energy—Predominant Poetry—Titian's Perfection of Balance—Assumption of Madonna—Spirit common to the Great Venetians.
It was a fact of the greatest importance for the development of the fine arts in Italy that painting in Venice reached maturity later than in Florence. Owing to this circumstance one chief aspect of the Renaissance, its material magnificence and freedom, received consummate treatment at the hands of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. To idealise the sensualities of the external universe, to achieve for colour what the Florentines had done for form, to invest the worldly grandeur of human life at one of its most gorgeous epochs with the dignity of the highest art, was what these great artists were called on to accomplish. Their task could not have been so worthily performed in the fifteenth century as in the sixteenth, if the development of the æsthetic sense had been more premature among the Venetians.