Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/448

418 Painting in Venice. and a finished study for the Rape of JZuropa, in the Belvedere, Vienna. We have still to name Jacopo da Ponte, called II Bassano (1510 — 1592), the chief member of a family of artists, and the founder of the Italian School of genre painting, whose works are remarkable for Venetian force of colouring and chiaroscuro. He excelled in painting landscapes, animals, and objects of still life. He is well represented in the National Gallery, which contains a Portrait of a Gentleman ; Christ and the Money-changers ; and the Good Samaritan. The Nativity, in S. Giuseppe, and the Baptism of S. Lucella, in S. Maria delle Grazie, both in Bassano, are considered his master-pieces. The great Italian masters of the Renaissance devoted no inconsiderable portion of their energies to decorative paint- ing — that is to say, to paintings so arranged as to form a part of the ornament of rooms and churches : in their hands this art attained to a perfection never before realized, except perhaps in the best days of Rome. The designs with which the Vatican and other important buildings were adorned comprised human figures, animals, flowers, and endless geometrical combinations. The early part of the fifteenth century was marked by a kind of transition from Gothic ornamentation, in which the grotesque element predominated, to that of the completed Renaissance, which was in effect a revival of the antique style of decorative painting, discovered in such buildings as the Baths of Titus and the mural decorations of Pompeii, stamped with the impress of the original genius of Raphael, who did more than any other master to define the true limits and the true capabilities of purely decorative art.