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It should be visited in the late afternoon, because the principal reason for seeing it is Tintoretto's "Presentation," and this lovely picture hangs in a dark chapel which obtains no light until the sinking sun penetrates its window and falls on the canvas. To my mind it is one of the most beautiful pictures that Tintoretto painted a picture in which all his strength has turned to sweetness.
Even if he had not had in him the artist soul, he could scarcely have resisted the temptation to spread those lovely colours on the smooth white walls. Any child would have done the same, but Tintoretto's mischievous fingers already showed signs of talent, and his father, instead of scolding him for wasting colours and spoiling the walls, encouraged him to go on with his pictures.
I reproduce a detail showing the soldiers with the ropes and the group of women at the foot of the cross. The same room has Tintoretto's noble picture of Christ before Pilate and the fine tragic composition "The Road to Calvary," and on the ceiling is the S. Rocco of which I have already spoken the germ from which sprang the whole wonderful series.
They studied his great Crucifixion, as a whole, in detailed groups, and then its separate figures, until they began to realize the magnitude of its conception and rendering. Mr. Sumner had said that nowhere save in Venice can Tintoretto be studied, and all were anxious to understand his work. At the Academy, close by Titian's great Assumption of the Virgin, they found Tintoretto's Miracle of St.
Without the subtle distinction of Titian's art, or the marvellous power of characterisation and expression that he possessed with the earlier men, Tintoretto's work is noble, and almost lyrical in its confidence and beauty.
High on the scaffolding he would see the painters at work, and as he watched the boy would build castles in the air, and dream dreams of a time when he too would be a master-painter, and be bidden by Venice to decorate her walls. To Tintoretto's mind Titian was the greatest man in all the world, and to be taught by him the greatest honour that heart could wish.
Meditating upon Tintoretto's choice of such subjects, we feel that the profoundest characteristic of his genius is the determination toward motives pre-eminently poetic rather than proper to the figurative arts. The poet imagines a situation in which the intellectual or emotional life is paramount, and the body is subordinate.
Here, at least, we might have expected to trace the influence of Rubens, but there is actually no sign of it; and if he sought any inspiration at all from other painters, it was from what he recalled of Tintoretto's work which he had seen and studied in Venice. In the king's eldest boy, Baltazar Carlos, who was born in 1629, Velasquez found a model for two or three of his most charming pictures.
One of these was Tintoretto's three-acre picture in the Great Council Chamber. When I saw it twelve years ago I was not strongly attracted to it the guide told me it was an insurrection in heaven but this was an error. The movement of this great work is very fine. There are ten thousand figures, and they are all doing something. There is a wonderful "go" to the whole composition.
Titian was by many years Tintoretto's senior when, at the age of seventeen, the little dyer obtained leave to study under him. The story has it that so masterly were Tintoretto's early drawings that Titian, fearing rivalry, refused to teach him any longer.
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