The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory over the crowd of her assailants was followed by half a century of peace and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less, her political influence grew greater than ever. The statesmen of France, of England, and of Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her Senate. We need only turn to 'Othello' to find reflected the universal reverence for the wisdom of her policy and the order of her streets. No policy, however wise, could indeed avert her fall. The Turkish occupation of Egypt and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route round the Cape of Good Hope were destined to rob the Republic of that trade with the East which was the life-blood of its commerce. But, though the blow was already dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discernible. On the contrary, the accumulated wealth of centuries poured itself out in an almost riotous prodigality. A new Venice, a Venice of loftier palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino along the line of its canals. In the deep peace of the sixteenth century, a peace unbroken even by religious struggles (for Venice was the one State exempt from the struggle of the Reformation), literature and art won their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for the first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of modern fiction. Painting reached its loftiest height in Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese.
The greatest of colourists sprang from a world of colour. Faded, ruined as the city is now, the frescoes of Giorgione swept from its palace fronts by the sea-wind, its very gondoliers bare and ragged, the glory of its sunsets alone remains vivid as of old. But it is not difficult to restore the many-hued Venice out of which its painters sprang. There are two pictures by Carpaccio in the Accademia which bring back vividly its physical aspect. The scene of the first, the 'Miracle of the Patriarch of Grado' as it is called, lies on the Grand Canal immediately in front of the Rialto. It is the hour of sunset, and darker-edged clouds are beginning to fleck the golden haze of the west which still arches over the broken sky-line, roof and turret and bell-tower and chimneys of strange fashion with quaint conical tops. The canal lies dusk in the eventide, but the dark surface throws into relief a crowd of gondolas, and the lithe, glowing figures of their gondoliers. The boats themselves are long and narrow as now, but without the indented prora which has become universal; the sumptuary law of the Republic has not yet robbed them of colour, and instead of the present "coffin" we see canopies of gaily-hued stuffs supported on four light pillars. The gondolier himself is commonly tricked out in almost fantastic finery; red cap with long golden curls flowing down over the silken doublet, slashed hose, the light dress displaying those graceful attitudes into which the rower naturally falls. On the left side of the canal its white marble steps are crowded with figures of the nobler Venetian life; a black robe here or there breaking the gay variety of golden and purple and red and blue, while in the balcony above a white group of clergy, with golden candlesticks towering overhead, are gathered round the dæmoniac whose cure forms the subject of the picture.