438 THE STONES OF VENICE

long, luxuriously dipped in a common house-painter’s vessel of paint.¹

This was, of course, a large picture. The process has already been continued in an equally destructive, though somewhat more delicate manner, over the whole of the humbler canvases on the ceiling of the Sala del Gran Consiglio; and I heard it threatened when I was last in Venice (1851-2) to the “Paradise” at its extremity, which is yet in tolerable condition,-the largest work of Tintoret, and the most wonderful piece of pure, manly, and masterly oil-painting in the world.²

§ 140. I leave these facts to the consideration of the European patrons of art. Twenty years hence they will be acknowledged and regretted; at present I am well aware that it is of little use to bring them forward, except only to explain the present impossibility of stating what pictures are, and what were in the interior of the Ducal Palace. I can only say that, in the winter of 1851, the “Paradise” of Tintoret was still comparatively uninjured, and that the Camera di Collegio, and its antechamber, and the Sala de’ Pregadi were full of pictures by Veronese and Tintoret, that made their walls as precious as so many kingdoms; so precious, indeed,³ and so full of majesty, that sometimes when walking at evening on the Lido, whence the great

¹ [For other references to the neglect of the Tintorets in the Scuola di San Rocco, see Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. pp. 40, 395), Crown of Wild Olive, § 87, and Munera Pulveris, Preface, § 3.]

² [See in the next volume, Venetian Index, s. “Ducal Palace,” and the fuller description of the “Paradise” at the end of The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret, where it is characterised as “the thoughtfullest and most precious” picture in the world. The picture is now (1903) under “restoration”: see below, p. 466.]

³ [It may be interesting to give the first draft of this closing passage; the words in brackets are those substituted in the author’s intermediate revise:-

“... so precious, indeed, and so full of majesty, that sometimes when walking at evening on the Lido, whence the great chain of the Alps, loaded with silver clouds, might be seen rising above the glowing walk (front) of the Ducal Palace, diminished by distance into a faint confusion of tracery, I used to feel more awe in gazing on the building as on the hills, and could feel that God had done a greater work in breathing into the dust those mighty spirits which had raised its walls (by whom its haughty walls had been raised), and its burning legends written, than in raising the rocks of granite, higher than the clouds of heaven, and veiling them with their various mantle of purple flower and shadowy pine.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]