Venetian painters are one of the major sub-divisions of the Italian school, and the distinction between Florentine and Venetian schools provided a focus for continuing debate. The specific painters to whom Ruskin is referring in the immediate context are Titian and Tintoretto. With Giovanni Bellini and Veronese they are seen as the 'mighty men' who represented the arts of Venice. Compare Works, 4.126 on Tintoretto and Titian 'beside which all other landscape grandeur vanishes', but also the footnote there of 1883 saying that the claim was nonsense. At Works, 7.284 and following there is a summary of the spiritual and moral basis for Venetian attitudes to landscape, and at Works, 5.399 there is a reference to the decline of Italian painting with the claim that Tintoretto was the last of the of the Venetian school of landscape which expired with his death in 1594. Later Italian landscapes in the gallery of the Academy of Venice did not impress Ruskin.