372 VENETIAN INDEX

or belt of the nearer figures, the white distances of heaven are seen filled with floating spirits. The picture is on the whole wonderfully preserved, and the most precious thing that Venice possesses. She will not possess it long; for the Venetian academicians, finding it exceedingly unlike their own works, declare it to want harmony, and are going to retouch it to their own ideas of perfection.¹

¹ [See also Vol. X. pp. 436 n., 466. The “Paradise” is described in detail at the end of the lecture on The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret. It was only gradually that the grandeur of the picture unfolded itself to Ruskin, as we may see by comparing with that description or the one here, his first notes upon it (now among the MSS.), which seem to have formed part of his Diary of 1845:-

“There is nothing now to be felt in the Doge’s palace except simply disgust; there is not a corner undesecrated or in peace; its decaying pictures are all that can tempt one to enter, and of these there is but one of great value and importance-the Paradise of Tintoret. Noble as it is, had I seen this picture only, I should have left Venice with my feelings respecting the master little changed. Tintoret was of all men perhaps the least capable of fully rendering the feeling of a scene whose prevailing spirit was to be peace; the most energetic and fiery of all painters, he is completely defeated when he has to paint rest; neither was his own mind of the quality to understand even the lowest of the joys of heaven. Deprived of human passion and circumstance, he cannot rise to beatific expression, or vary the character and manifestation of Love, and he falls necessarily into the repetition of an unmeaning countenance, variously softened, wrinkled, bronzed or beautified, into the various ages and orders of angelic life, but in itself the same. And at last from the repetition of it in a thousand figures, becoming unmanageable in his wearied hands, and passing into mannerism and coarseness. Of all the faces in this vast picture, and they are literally countless, I saw not one of elevated cast or marked expression-not one that would in any way have rewarded the pains of a separate study. The countenance of the two principal figures ought perhaps to be excepted, for the contour and gesture of these are exceedingly fine; but the faces are too high to be seen.

“Of the composition of the picture it is difficult to judge, unless one were to analyse the groups, and give the whole work a month’s quiet digestion. At first, and for as long a time as I could spare, it must necessarily appear confused, for no composition however good, unless eminently symmetrical, could appear orderly at once, while it contains so vast a number of figures and represents not a part of heaven merely, but the filled infinity. As it is, the disposition in concentric circles, which is hardly seen except from the further end of the vast hall, is marvellously kept among the confused groups, and is, I think, all that the mind requires. It ought to be bewildered, and the fault of the picture is not so much looseness of arrangement as want of interest in the parts. The colour and chiaroscuro are both magnificent; both are grievously injured, but even yet the grey and golden qualities of its miraculous distances, seen through the gaps of the whirling circles, which send them back by their solid dark masses of crimson and blue, are as fine an exertion of his artistical power as I have seen. Tintoret, like Turner, invariably makes mystery one of the chief qualities of his distance, but he is not so careful as Turner in the refinement and finish of that mystery. Generally his distances are comparatively sketchy, even to mannerism, and when in high light he does not allow the shadows to assume their proper relative darkness, so that if the distances of this Paradiso, of the St. Mark miracle, of the Moses striking the rock, or of the Massacre of the Innocents, were cut out from the rest of the picture, they would not look like distances, but like sketches for larger pictures, sketches exceedingly unfinished but of stupendous power.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]