Recollect, first, the great year 1480. Twice four's eight—you can't mistake it. In that year Michael Angelo was five years old; Titian, three years old; Raphael, within three years of being born.
So see how easily it comes. Michael Angelo five years old—and you divide six between Titian and Raphael,—three on each side of your standard year, 1480.
Then add to 1480, forty years—an easy number to recollect, surely; and you get the exact year of Raphael's death, 1520.
In that forty years all the new effort and deadly catastrophe took place. 1480 to 1520.
Now, you have only to fasten to those forty years, the life of Bellini, who represents the best art before them, and of Tintoret, who represents the best art after them.
217. I cannot fit you these on with a quite comfortable exactness, but with very slight inexactness I can fit them firmly.
John Bellini was ninety years old when he died. He lived fifty years before the great forty of change, and he saw the forty, and died. Then Tintoret is born; lives eighty[42] years after the forty, and closes, in dying, the sixteenth century, and the great arts of the world.
Those are the dates, roughly; now for the facts connected with them.
John Bellini precedes the change, meets, and resists it victoriously to his death. Nothing of flaw or failure is ever to be discerned in him.
Then Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian, together, bring about the deadly change, playing into each other's hands—Michael Angelo being the chief captain in evil; Titian, in natural force.