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You get from Tintoret's work the impression that he <i>felt</i>, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically with a heart that never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of his brush.
Correggio's best doing is the decoration of two small church cupolas at Parma; Michael Angelo's of a ceiling in the Pope's private chapel; Tintoret's, of a ceiling and side wall belonging to a charitable society at Venice; while Titian and Veronese threw out their noblest thoughts, not even on the inside, but on the outside of the common brick and plaster walls of Venice.
They made me think of the circlet which Tintoret's Venus swoops down with over the head of the ruddy Bacchus and rose-white Ariadne.
It is necessary to go to Venice to see Tintoret's most famous works, still remaining upon the walls of the churches and buildings for which they were painted, or in which they have been brought together. But the National Gallery is fortunate in possessing one relatively small canvas of his which shows some of his finest qualities. The subject of St. George slaying the dragon was not a new one.
The whole system of Tintoret's great picture of the Miracle of St. Mark is poised on the bars of blue, which cross the white turban of the executioner.
Mark's and the Ducal Palace and other ancient buildings; a complete catalogue of Tintoret's pictures the list he had begun in 1845; and a history of the successive styles of architecture, Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance, interweaving illustrations of the human life and character that made the art what it was.
This is not a representation of the actual reality of the crucifixion, like Tintoret's superb picture at S. Rocco, or Dürer's print, or so many others, which show the hill, the people, the hangman, the ladders and ropes and hammers and tweezers: it is a sort of mystic repetition of it; subjective, if I may say so; existing only in the contemplation of the saints on the opposite side, who are spectators only in the sense that a contemplative Christian may be said to be the mystic spectator of the Passion.
I should be glad if the reader who is interested in the question here raised, would read, as illustrative of the subsequent statement, the account of Tintoret's 'Paradise, in the close of my Oxford lecture on Michael Angelo and Tintoret, which I have printed separately to make it generally accessible.
To Tintoret the contents of the chalice is the all-important matter: where is the majesty of the old Giottesque gesture, preserved by Leonardo, of pushing forward the bread with one hand, the wine with the other, and thus uncovering the head and breast of the Saviour, the gesture which does indeed mean "I am the bread you shall eat, and the wine you shall drink"? There remains, however, to mention another work of Tintoret's which, coming in contact with one's recollections of earlier art, may suggest strange doubts and well nigh shake one's faith in the imaginative efficacy of all that went before: his enormous canvas of the Last Day, at S. Maria dell' Orto.
He set himself to this task, with Tintoret's motto Sempre si fa il mare maggiore, and worked with feverish energy, recording his progress in letters home. "13 Nov.
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