And yet Dutch art and Italian are not wholly discrepant the link, as I have said, comes through the minor figures of religious scenes, or even occasionally through the major. A Dutch homeliness lurks shyly in the background of Italian art, and at times appears boldly in the foreground. From one point of view nothing could be more Dutch than the innumerable Madonnas who suckle their _Bambini_. Nor do their haloes destroy their homeliness. The peasant girl of Tintoretto’s _Annunciation_ in S. Rocco wears a halo, but neither that nor the angel bursting through the crumbling brick of the door can prevent this scene from being a Dutch interior with a cane chair. Realism, smuggled in under the cloak of religion, is none the less realism, and when Moretto shows us the _Bambino_ about to be bathed by mother and nurse, and paints us a basket of belly-bands, he has given us a genre picture none the less because rapt saints and monks look on in defiance of chronology, and, perched on a bank of cloud over a romantic landscape, angels sing on high. Even as early as Giotto the nurse who presides at _The Birth of the Virgin_ is washing the baby’s eyes. Very curious and realistic is the pastoral study which Luca Cambiaso styled _Adoration of the Shepherds_. And in Veronese, for all his magnificence, and in Carpaccio, for all his fairy-tale atmosphere, and above all in Bassano, for all his golden glow, we get well-established half-way houses between High Art and Low. Under the pretext of _The Supper in Emmaus_ Bassano anticipates all Dutch art. Here be cats, dogs, plucked geese, meat in the pan, shining copper utensils scattered around, the pot over the glow of the fire, the rows of plates in the kitchen behind. What loving study of the colour of the wine in the glasses of the guests, and of their robes and their furs! These things it is that, with the busy figures behind the bar or stooping on the floor, fill up the picture, while the Christ on a raised platform in the corner bulks less than the serving-maid, and the centre of the stage is occupied by a casual eater, his napkin across his knees. If this sixteenth-century picture is Venetian in its glowing colour and its comparative indifference to form, it is Dutch in its minuteness and homeliness.