DUCAL PALACE 375

dress; and yet Tintoret’s greatness hardly ever shows more than in the management of such sober tints. I would rather have these two small brown pictures, and two others in the Academy perfectly brown also in their general tone-the “Cain and Abel” and the “Adam and Eve,”¹-than all the other small pictures in Venice put together which he painted in bright colours for altar pieces; but I never saw two pictures which so nearly approached grisailles as these, and yet were delicious pieces of colour. I do not know if I am right in calling one of the saints St. Andrew. He stands holding a great upright wooden cross against the sky. St. Jerome reclines at his feet, against a rock over which some glorious fig-leaves and olive branches are shooting; every line of them studied with the most exquisite care, and yet cast with perfect freedom.

10. Bacchus and Ariadne. The most beautiful of the four careful pictures by Tintoret, which occupy the angles of the Anti-Collegio. Once one of the noblest pictures in the world, but now miserably faded, the sun being allowed to fall on it all day long. The design of the forms of the leafage round the head of the Bacchus, and the floating grace of the female figure above, will, however, always give interest to this picture, unless it be repainted.

The other three Tintorets in this room are careful and fine, but far inferior to the “Bacchus;” and the “Vulcan and the Cyclops” is a singularly meagre and vulgar study of common models.²

11. Europa, by Paul Veronese; in the same room. One of the very few pictures which both possess, and deserve, a high reputation.

12. Venice enthroned, by Paul Veronese; on the roof of the same room. One of the grandest pieces of frank colour in the Ducal Palace.

13. Venice and the Doge Sebastian Venier; at the upper end of the Sala del Collegio. An unrivalled Paul Veronese, far finer even than the “Europa.”

14. Marriage of St. Catherine, by Tintoret; in the same room. An inferior picture, but the figure of St. Catherine is quite exquisite. Note how her veil falls over her form, showing the sky through it, as an alpine cascade falls over a marble rock.

There are three other Tintorets on the walls of this room, but all inferior, though full of power. Note especially the painting of the lion’s wings, and of the coloured carpet, in the one nearest the throne, the Doge Alvise Mocenigo adoring the Redeemer.*

* I was happy enough to obtain the original sketch for this picture, in Venice (it had been long in the possession of Signor Nerly): and after being the most honoured of all pictures at Denmark Hill, until my father’s death, it is now given to my school in Oxford.³

¹ [For other references to these pictures, see Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 173 n.).]

² [One of the other famous pictures in this room-the “Mercury and the Graces”-was selected by Ruskin for representation in his Standard Series at Oxford, as “consummate in unostentatious power,” though showing also “fatal signs of the love of liberty and pleasure which ruined the Venetian State” (see Catalogue of Examples, 1870).]

³ [The above note was added in the “Travellers’ Edition.” For the picture, see in the volume containing Ruskin’s Oxford Catalogues, Instructions in the Preliminary

[Version 0.04: March 2008]