§ 16. “Hypocrisy,” you say; and “that they might be seen of men.” If we examine ourselves, or any one else, who will give trustworthy answer on this point, so as to ascertain, to the best of our judgment, what the feeling is, which would make a modern English person dislike to be painted praying, we shall not find it, I believe, to be excess of sincerity. Whatever we find it to be, the opposite Venetian feeling is certainly not hypocrisy. It is often conventionalism, implying as little devotion in the person represented, as regular attendance at church does with us. But that it is not hypocrisy, you may ascertain by one simple consideration (supposing you not to have enough knowledge of the expression of sincere persons to judge by the portraits themselves). The Venetians, when they desired to deceive, were much too subtle to attempt it clumsily. If they assumed the mask of religion, the mask must have been of some use. The persons whom it deceived must, therefore, have been religious, and, being so, have believed in the Venetians’ sincerity. If therefore, among other contemporary nations with whom they had intercourse, we can find any, more religious than they, who were duped, or even influenced, by their external religiousness, we might have some ground for suspecting that religiousness to be assumed. But if we can find no one likely to have been deceived, we must believe the Venetian to have been, in reality, what there was no advantage in seeming.
§ 17. I leave the matter to your examination, forewarning you, confidently, that you will discover by severest evidence, that the Venetian religion was true. Not only true, but one of the main motives of their lives. In the field of investigation to which we are here limited, I will collect some of the evidence of this.
For one profane picture by great Venetians, you will find ten of sacred subjects; and those, also, including their grandest, most labored, and most beloved works. Tintoret’s power culminates in two great religious pictures: the Crucifixion, and the Paradise. Titian’s in the Assumption, the Peter Martyr, and Presentation of the Virgin. Veronese’s in the Marriage in Cana. John Bellini and Basaiti never, so far as I remember, painted any other than sacred subjects. By the Palmas, Vincenzo, Catena, and Bonifazio, I remember no profane subject of importance.
§ 18. There is, moreover, one distinction of the very highest import between the treatment of sacred subjects by Venetian painters and by all others.
Throughout the rest of Italy, piety had become abstract, and opposed theoretically to worldly life; hence the Florentine and Umbrian painters generally separated their saints from living men. They delighted in imagining scenes of spiritual perfectness;—Paradises, and companies of the redeemed at the judgment;—glorified meetings of martyrs;—madonnas surrounded by circles of angels. If, which was rare, definite portraitures of living men were introduced, these real characters formed a kind of chorus or attendant company, taking no part in the action. At Venice all this was reversed, and so boldly as at first to shock, with its seeming irreverence, a spectator accustomed to the formalities and abstractions of the so-called sacred schools. The madonnas are no more seated apart on their thrones, the saints no more breathe celestial air. They are on our own plain ground—nay, here in our houses with us. All kind of worldly business going on in their presence, fearlessly; our own friends and respected acquaintances, with all their mortal faults, and in their mortal flesh, looking at them face to face unalarmed: nay, our dearest children playing with their pet dogs at Christ’s very feet.
I once myself thought this irreverent. How foolishly! As if children whom He loved could play anywhere else.
§ 19. The picture most illustrative of this feeling is perhaps that at Dresden, of Veronese’s family, painted by himself.
He wishes to represent them as happy and honored. The best happiness and highest honor he can imagine for them is that they should be presented to the Madonna, to whom, therefore, they are being brought by the three virtues—Faith, Hope, and Charity.