DUCAL PALACE 373

2. Siege of Zara; the first picture on the right on entering the Sala del Scrutinio. It is a mere battle piece, in which the figures, like the arrows, are put in by the score. There are high merits in the thing, and so much invention that it is possible Tintoret may have made the sketch for it; but, if executed by him at all, he has done it merely in the temper in which a sign-painter meets the wishes of an ambitious landlord. He seems to have been ordered to represent all the events of the battle at once; and to have felt that, provided he gave men, arrows, and ships enough, his employers would be perfectly satisfied. The picture is a vast one, some thirty feet by fifteen.

Various other pictures will be pointed out by the custode, in these two rooms, as worthy of attention, but they are only historically, not artistically, interesting. The works of Paul Veronese on the ceiling have been repainted; and the rest of the pictures on the walls are by second-rate men. The traveller must, once for all, be warned against mistaking the works of Domenico Robusti (Domenico Tintoretto¹), a very miserable painter, for those of his illustrious father, Jacopo.

3. The Doge Grimani kneeling before Faith, by Titian; in the Sala delle quattro Porte. To be observed with care, as one of the most striking examples of Titian’s want of feeling and coarseness of conception.² (See above, Vol. IX. p. 32.) As a work of mere art, it is, however, of great value. The traveller who has been accustomed to deride Turner’s indistinctness of touch, ought to examine carefully the mode of painting the Venice in the distance at the bottom of this picture.

4. Frescoes on the roof of the Sala delle quattro Porte, by Tintoret. Once magnificent beyond description, now mere wrecks (the plaster crumbling away in large flakes), but yet deserving of the most earnest study.³

5. Christ taken down from the Cross, by Tintoret; at the upper end of

¹ [For another reference to him, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. vii. § 18.]

² [This was also Ruskin’s first impression of the picture. In the above-mentioned notes of 1845 he writes:-

“There is a semblance of dignity given by the simplicity of the figure, but it is simplicity of the vulgarest kind; the drapery is pocket-handkerchief-like, and would be just as agreeable, or just as disagreeable, if it were thrown any other way. The faces are utterly meaningless, though not without a certain grandeur of feature, resulting, as I conceive, from Titian’s society and subjects, not from his own mind. ... As regards the artistical part of this picture, it is a bad specimen of Titian, and the little good there is in it is destroyed by two vile figures, on side scenes, put on by the modern Italians. The landscape and the lion below are equally slovenly, the former especially nearly unintelligible, and without a straight line in it. The looseness of Tintoret without his power-the obscurity of Turner without his knowledge.”

So again, in his 1846 diary, he writes:-

“In Titian’s picture of Faith in the Doge’s Palace at Venice, there are all kinds of most painful deficiencies. The St. Mark on the left is a vulgar, ugly, grinning beggar; the lion wags his tail in an unlionly way, as if to keep the flies off; the clouds are without the slightest invention or composition; the armour of the kneeling figure is much too far elaborated, and too bright, and attracts the eye from the face.”

For another reference to the picture, see Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 211).]

³ [The subjects are emblematical of the Venetian Empire-Zeus giving Venice the Empire of the Sea; Padua; Treviso; Friuli, etc.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]