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does not appear that the Hall of Great Council in Venice was turned into a
students' academy, and, although the paintings there doubtless gave a decided
incentive to artists, their effect upon the public, for whom they were designed,
was even greater. The councillors were not allowed to be the only people to
enjoy fascinating pictures of gorgeous pageants and ceremonials. The Mutual Aid
Societies—the Schools,decorative paintings, as they were called—were not long in getting the masters
who were employed in the Doge's Palace to execute for their own meeting places
pictures equally splendid. The Schools of San Giorgio, Sant' Ursula, and Santo
Stefano, employed Carpaccio, the Schools of San Giovanni and San Marco, Gentile
Bellini, and other Schools employed minor painters. The works carried out for
these Schools are of peculiar importance, both because they are all that remain
to throw light upon the pictures in the Doge's Palace destroyed in the fire of
1576,cheap oil paintings, and because they form a transition to the art of a later day. Just as the
State chose subjects that glorified itself and taught its own history and
policy, so the Schools had pictures painted to glorify their patron saints, and
to keep their deeds and example fresh. Many of these pictures—most in fact—took
the form of pageants; but even in such, intended as they were for almost
domestic purposes, the style of high ceremonial was relaxed,cheap oil paintings for sale, and elements taken
directly from life were introduced. In his "Corpus Christi," Gentile Bellini
paints not only the solemn and dazzling procession in the Piazza, but the
elegant young men who strut about in all their finery, the foreign loungers, and
even the unfailing beggar by the portal of St. Mark's. In his "Miracle of the
True Cross," he introduces gondoliers, taking care to bring out all the beauty
of their lithe, comely figures as they stand to ply the oar,modern abstract art oil painting, and does not reject
even such an episode as a serving-maid standing in a doorway watching a negro
who is about to plunge into the canal. He treats this bit of the picture with
all the charm and much of that delicate feeling for simple effects of light and
colour that we find in such Dutch painters as Vermeer van Delft and Peter de
Hoogh. oil paintings on canvas for sale
Episodes such as this in the works of the earliest great Venetian master must
have acted on the public like a spark on tinder. They certainly found a sudden
and assured popularity, for they play a more and more important part in the
pictures executed for the Schools, many of the subjects of which were readily
turned into studies of ordinary Venetian life. This was particularly true of the
works of Carpaccio. Much as he loved pageants,original oil paintings wholesale, he loved homelier scenes as well.
His "Dream of St. Ursula" shows us a young girl asleep in a room filled with the
quiet morning light. Indeed, it may be better described as the picture of a room
with the light playing softly upon its walls, upon the flower-pots in the
window, and upon the writing-table and the cupboards. A young girl happens to be
asleep in the bed, but the picture is far from being a merely economic
illustration to this episode in the life of the saint. Again,still life oil paintings, let us take the
work in the same series where King Maure dismisses the ambassadors. Carpaccio
has made this a scene of a chancellery in which the most striking features are
neither the king nor the ambassadors, but the effect of the light that streams
through a side door on the left and a poor clerk labouring at his task. Or,
again, take St. Jerome in his study, in the Scuola di San Giorgio. He is nothing
but a Venetian scholar seated in his comfortable, bright library,oil paintings for sale online, in the midst
of his books, with his little shelf of bric-à-brac running along the wall. There
is nothing in his look or surroundings to speak of a life of self-denial or of
arduous devotion to the problems of sin and redemption. Even the "Presentation
of the Virgin," which offered such a splendid chance for a pageant, Carpaccio,
in one instance,modern oil paintings of flowers, turned into the picture of a simple girl going to her first
communion. In other words, Carpaccio's quality is the quality of a painter of
genre, of which he was the earliest Italian master. His genre
differs from Dutch or French not in kind but in degree. Dutch genre is
much more democratic, and, as painting, it is of a far finer quality, but it
deals with its subject, as Carpaccio does, for the sake of its own pictorial
capacities and for the sake of the effects of colour and of light and shade. where to buy oil paintings
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