ROCCO, SCUOLA DI SAN 421

important in this picture, Moses himself being among them; in fact, the whole scene is filled chiefly with middle-size figures, in order to increase the impression of space. It is interesting to observe the difference in the treatment of this subject by the three great painters, Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Tintoret. ¹ The first two, equal to the latter in energy, had less love of liberty: they were fond of binding their compositions into knots, Tintoret of scattering his far and wide; they all alike preserve the unity of composition, but the unity in the first two is obtained by binding, and that of the last by springing from one source; and, together with this feeling, comes his love of space, which makes him less regard the rounding and form of objects themselves than their relations of light and shade and distance. Therefore Rubens and Michael Angelo made the fiery serpents huge boa-constrictors and knotted the sufferers together with them. Tintoret does not like to be so bound; so he makes the serpents little flying and fluttering monsters, like lampreys with wings; and the children of Israel, instead of being thrown into convulsed and writhing groups, are scattered, fainting in the fields, far away in the distance. As usual, Tintoret’s conception, while thoroughly characteristic of himself, is also truer to the words of Scripture. We are told that “the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people;”² we are not told that they crushed the people to death. And, while thus the truest, it is also the most terrific conception. M. Angelo’s would be terrific if one could believe in it: but our instinct tells us that boa-constrictors do not come in armies; and we look upon the picture with as little emotion as upon the handle of a vase, or any other form worked out of serpents, where there is no probability of serpents actually occurring. But there is a probability in Tintoret’s conception. We feel that it is not impossible that there should come up a swarm of these small winged reptiles; and their horror is not diminished by their smallness: not that they have any of the grotesque terribleness of German invention; they might have been made infinitely uglier with small pains, but it is their veritableness which makes them awful. They have triangular heads with sharp beaks or muzzles; and short, rather thick bodies, with bony processes down the back like those of sturgeons; and small wings spotted with orange and black; and round glaring eyes, not very large, but very ghastly, with an intense delight in biting expressed in them. (It is observable that the Venetian painter has got his main idea of them from the sea-horses and small reptiles of the Lagoons.³) These monsters are fluttering and writhing about everywhere, fixing on whatever they come near with their sharp venomous heads; and they are coiling about on the ground, and all the shadows and thickets are full of them, so that there is no escape anywhere: and, in order to give the idea of greater extent to the plague, Tintoret has not been content

¹ [Michael Angelo’s painting of the subject, on one of the corner spandrils of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is discussed in Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 120 n.) Rubens’s picture is in the National Gallery (No. 59). Tintoret’s is again referred to in Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 278).]

² [Numbers xxi. 6.]

³ [See Vol. X. p. xxxv., and Plate 5 in Vol. IV.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]