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It is the striking image of a multitude in the air, a rout in the heavens, or rather in purgatory. Here, again, is Mr Ruskin's unequalled estimate of Tintoret's works: 'I should exhaust the patience of the reader if Ion the various stupendous developments of the imagination of Tintoret in the Scuola di San Rocco alone.
Disagreeable voyage on the Po. Venice, beautiful but smelly. Copies Tintoret's "Miracle of the Slave." Thunderstorms. Reflections on the Fourth of July. Leaves Venice. Recoaro. Milan. Reflections on Catholicism and art. Como and Maggiore. The Rigi. Schaffhausen and Heidelberg. Evades the quarantine on French border. Thrilling experience. Paris Takes rooms with Horatio Greenough.
"I have a picture of women like that," said a countryman with a grin, as he pointed to a photograph of one of Tintoret's most beautiful groups, "smoking cigarettes."
I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised. I repaired immediately to the little church of San Cassano, which contains the smaller of Tintoret's two great Crucifixions; and when I had looked at it a while I drew a long breath and felt I could now face any other picture in Venice with proper self- possession.
To Tintoret's great grief, this daughter died as she was thirty years of age, and her father was in his seventy-eighth year. When her end was unmistakably near, the old man took brush and canvas and struggled desperately to preserve a last impression of the beloved child's face, over which death was casting its shadow. Tintoretto died four years later, in 1594.
Titian's "Battle of Cadore," which we know from the copy of a fragment of it, was a landscape with figures in violent action. Tintoret's battle scenes are parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his hunting scenes or his Bacchanals, expressions of his own overweening energy.
The masterpiece of this style, and probably Tintoret's masterpiece therefore, is the great Crucifixion at S. Rocco. To feel its full tragic splendour one must think of the finest things which the early Renaissance achieved, such as Luini's beautiful fresco at Lugano; by the side of the painting at S. Rocco everything is tame, except, perhaps, Rembrandt's etching called the Three Crosses.
She and Ashe were looking at that "Last Supper" of Tintoret's which hangs in the choir of San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice. It is a picture dear to all lovers of Tintoret, breathing in every line and group the passionate and mystical fancy of the master. The scene passes, it will be remembered, in what seems to be the spacious guest-chamber of an inn.
Thus in Tintoret's picture of the fall of the manna, the figure of God the Father is entirely robed in white, contrary to all received custom: in that of Moses striking the rock, it is surrounded by a rainbow. You are not to think, therefore, the difference between the colour of the upper and lower frescos unintentional. The life of St. Francis was always full of joy and triumph.
Christ kneels in the Jordan, with John bending over him, and vague multitudes crowding the banks, distant, dreamlike beneath the yellow storm-light. Of Tintoret's Christ before Pilate, of that figure of the Saviour, long, straight, wrapped in white and luminous like his own wraith, I have spoken already.
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