382 VENETIAN INDEX

sculpture. The interior of the church is like a large assembly room, and would have been undeserving of a moment’s attention, but that it contains some most precious pictures, namely:¹

1. Gathering the Manna. (On the left hand of the high altar.) One of Tintoret’s most remarkable landscapes. A brook flowing through a mountainous country, studded with thickets and palm-trees: the congregation have been long in the Wilderness, and are employed in various manufactures much more than in gathering the manna. One group is forging, another grinding manna in a mill, another making shoes, one woman making a piece of dress, some washing; the main purpose of Tintoret being evidently to indicate the continuity of the supply of heavenly food. Another painter would have made the congregation hurrying to gather it, and wondering at it. Tintoret at once makes us remember that they have been fed with it “by the space of forty years.”² It is a large picture, full of interest and power, but scattered in effect, and not striking except from its elaborate landscape.

2. The Last Supper. (Opposite the former.) These two pictures have been painted for their places, the subjects being illustrative of the sacrifice of the mass. This latter is remarkable for its entire homeliness in the general treatment of the subject; the entertainment being represented like any large supper in a second-rate Italian inn, the figures being all comparatively uninteresting; but we are reminded that the subject is a sacred one, not only by the strong light shining from the head of Christ, but because the smoke of the lamp which hangs over the table turns, as it rises, into a multitude of angels, all painted in grey, the colour of the smoke; and so writhed and twisted together that the eye hardly at first distinguishes them from the vapour out of which they are formed, ghosts of countenances and filmy wings filling up the intervals between the completed heads. The idea is highly characteristic of the master. The picture has been grievously injured, but still shows

¹ [Ruskin’s first note of these pictures is in his diary of 1846:-

“In this church there are six Tintorets, but four almost extinguished. Two are still most wonderful-one of The Last Supper, Christ giving the sop to Judas: an awful grey light cast on the cloth from the swinging lantern -chandelier rather-whose lamps wave and writhe into volumes of lurid smoke, which, as it passes into the shade, takes the forms of wings and countenances, and fills the chamber with grey spectral angels-a piece of grand fancy which no one but Tintoret could have dared. The whole picture is one of the most striking pieces of light and shade-or rather of light, for it is all light of some kind-which exist of the master, though a little dramatic and forced.

“The other, The Gathering of Manna, is a composition which it would take a year to examine properly, so full is it of point and various material. The stooping figure with the shoulder bare is most lovely, and the piece of retiring landscape on the left.”

In the same place Ruskin notices the carving of the choir-stalls, which are the work of Albert de Brule, a Fleming (1599):-

“The woodwork round the choir is the life of St. Benedict, often very clever in its story-telling and landscape distances-wonderful pieces of defective-effective perspective-everything dared and done, nothing very great or touching anywhere.”]

² [A recollection of Exodus xvi. 35 and (in the phrasing) Acts vii. 42, etc.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]