396 VENETIAN INDEX

been grappled with in its Verity; not typically nor symbolically, but as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one traditional circumstance he has received, with Dante and Michael Angelo, the Boat of the Condemned; but the impetuosity of his mind bursts out even in the adoption of this image; he has not stopped at the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at the sweeping blow and demon dragging of the other, but, seized Hylas-like by the limbs and tearing up the earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake, that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly cataract; the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf where the world has melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruins of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling, like water-wheels. Bat-like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of the earth, the bones gather, and the clay heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam Pool; shaking off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the clangour of the trumpets of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as they awake, by the white light of the new Heaven, until the great vortex of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment-seat; the Firmament is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and floats, and falls into the interminable, inevitable light; the bright clouds are darkened with them as with thick snow, currents of atom life in the arteries of heaven, now soaring up slowly, and higher and higher still, till the eye and the thought can follow no farther, borne up, wingless, by their inward faith and by the angel powers invisible, now hurled in countless drifts of horror before the breath of their condemnation.”

Note in the opposite picture the way the clouds are wrapped about the distant Sinai.

The figure of the little Madonna in the “Presentation” should be compared with Titian’s in his picture of the same subject in the Academy.¹ I prefer Tintoret’s infinitely; and note how much finer is

¹ [In his 1846 diary Ruskin works out the contrasts in detail:-

“Tintoret’s is grey, grand and useful, no picturesqueness admitted; Titian’s is brown and mean, and with all the evil of picturesqueness, without its nature; it is awkwardly chipped and stained. Tintoret puts an arabesque on the steps in gold, actual gilding with a brown touch of paint beside it; these sweeping steps are rich and delicious (perhaps suggested by the beautiful decoration of those of the Giant’s Staircase). Titian’s are meagre, square, and cold; his old woman with her basket of eggs is altogether vulgar, singularly inferior to Tintoret’s grand sitting figure looking down on the child, though this latter even is a little hurtful as absolutely uninterested in the chief action; the profile of the upright ascending figure on the right [i.e. in Tintoret’s picture] is about the most beautiful Venetian face of a certain order that I know. In Tintoret’s architecture the projecting balcony above, p. 27 [i.e. in Ruskin’s notebook], on the perspective side of the house, is curious for its severe and not very tasteful simplicity. I think the interstices

[Version 0.04: March 2008]