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in making the circuit of the church, which is full of interesting monuments: but I wish especially to direct his attention to two pictures, besides the celebrated Peter Martyr:¹ namely,

1. The Crucifixion, by Tintoret; on the wall of the left-hand aisle, just before turning into the transept.² A picture fifteen feet long by eleven or twelve high. I do not believe that either the “Miracle of St. Mark,” or the great “Crucifixion,” in the Scuola di San Rocco, cost Tintoret more pains than this comparatively small work, which is now utterly neglected, covered with filth and cobwebs, and fearfully injured. As a piece of colour, and light and shade, it is altogether marvellous. Of all the fifty figures which the picture contains, there is not one which in any way injures or contends with another; nay, there is not a single fold of garment or touch of the pencil which could be spared; every virtue of Tintoret, as a painter, is there in its highest degree,-colour at once the most intense and the most delicate, the utmost decision in the arrangement of masses of light, and yet half tones and modulations of endless variety; and all executed with a magnificence of handling which no words are energetic enough to describe. I have hardly ever seen a picture in which there was so much decision, and so little impetuosity, and in which so little was conceded to haste, to accident, or to weakness. It is too infinite a work to be describable; but among its minor passages of extreme beauty, should especially be noticed the manner in which the accumulated forms of the human body, which fill the picture from end to end, are prevented from being felt heavy, by the grace and the elasticity of two or three sprays of leafage which spring from a broken root in the foreground, and rise conspicuous in shadow against an interstice filled by the pale blue, grey, and golden light in which the distant crowd is invested, the office of this foliage being, in an artistical point of view, correspondent to that of the trees set by the sculptors of the Ducal Palace on its angles. But they have a far more important meaning in the picture than any artistical one. If the spectator will look carefully at the root which I have called broken, he will find that, in reality, it is not broken, but cut: the other branches of the young tree having lately been cut away. When we remember that one of the principal incidents in the great San Rocco Crucifixion is the ass feeding on withered palm-leaves,³ we shall be at no loss to understand the great painter’s purpose in lifting the branch of this mutilated olive against the dim light of the distant sky; while, close beside it, St. Joseph of Arimathea drags along the dust a white garment,-observe, the principal light of the picture,-stained with the blood of that King before whom, five days before, His crucifiers had strewn their own garments in the way.

2. Our Lady with the Camerlenghi. (In the centre chapel of the three on the right of the choir.⁴) A remarkable instance of the theoretical

¹ [Since destroyed by fire: see Vol. III. p. 28 n.]

² [This picture was subsequently removed to the Accademia; it is now No. 213 in that collection.]

³ [See Vol. IV. p. xxxviii.]

⁴ [This picture also is now in the Accademia, No. 210. It is inscribed “Unanimis concordiæ Simbolus, 1566.” The third saint in attendance on the Virgin is now called not St. Carlo but St. Mark.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]