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214 and Council of Venice recognized his ability, as did the Dukes of Ferrara and Mantua. As the years went on, kings, popes, and emperors were his friends and patrons. In his home at Biri, a suburb of Venice, from which in one direction the snow-clad Alps are visible and in the other the soft luxuriance of the Venetian lagoon, he maintained a princely household, associating with the greatest and most accomplished men of Venice, working on, until he had reached the age of ninety-nine years. Even then it was no ordinary ailment, but the visitation of the plague, that carried him off; and such was the honor in which he was held, that the law against the burial of the plague-stricken in a church was overruled in his case, and he was laid in the tomb which he had prepared for himself in the great Church of the Frari.



No artist’s life was so completely and sustainedly superb; and such, too, is the character of his work. He was great in portraiture, in landscape, in the painting of religious and mythological subjects. In any one of these departments others have rivaled him, but his glory is that he attained to the highest rank in all; he was an artist of universal gifts. His was an all-embracing genius, courtly, serene, majestic. He viewed the splendor of the world in a big, healthful, ample way; and represented it with the glowing brush of a supreme master of color.