184 GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE

interest; but of which I have no time, nor much care, to speak-except in complaint that detestable daubs by Callot, Dujardin,¹ and various ignoti, should be allowed to disgrace the sixth sala, and occupy some of the best of the very little good light there is in the Academy; thrusting the lovely little Tintoret, 270,²-purest work of his heart and fairest of his faculty,-high beyond sight of all its delicious painting; and the excellent quiet portrait, 237,³ into an unregarded corner. I am always puzzled by the smaller pictures of John Bellini; many of them here, of whose authorship there can be little doubt, being yet of very feeble merit. 596⁴ is fine; and the five symbolical pictures,

must be named here as the only fragment left of another great picture destroyed by fire, which Tintoret had so loved and studied that he replaced it from memory.⁵

¹ [The works of Callot (Nos. 114, 136, 139) remain in Room VI., though they are now stated to be copies. Various pictures by Dujardin have been removed to store-rooms and are no longer exhibited. This removal had already taken place when Ruskin’s Guide was revised in 1891; hence the reviser erroneously stated that the Academy contained no Dujardin, and suggested that Ruskin might have referred to a Jordaens, then exhibited in Room VI., but also now consigned to a store-room.]

² [“The Madonna and the Faithful”; now well hung in Room X.]

³ [“Portrait of Battista Morosini”; now well hung in Room XIX.]

⁴ [The well-known little panel, showing the Virgin and Child, with two trees (symbolical of the Old and New Testaments); dated 1487. Now given a place of honour in the Bellini room (XVII.); formerly in the Pinacoteca Contarini. Ruskin placed a photograph of the picture in his Standard Series at Oxford (No. 37): see Vol. XXI. p. 25. The revised edition of the Guide erroneously altered the number to fit the picture which is now 583 in the same room-a very much less attractive work of Bellini. The error is reproduced in the Italian edition.]

⁵ [See in Vol. XIX., Plate X., and pp. lxxvi., 248, 250, 269. Ruskin refers to his acquisition of the picture in a letter to Rawdon Brown (now in the British Museum), dated September 2, 1864:-

“You will be glad to hear I have just possessed myself of a portrait of the Doge Andrea Gritti. It is my notion of Titian’s work, and that is all I care about. I bought it of the Dean of Bristol, after it was exhibited at the British Institute, where it looked well, and I’ve been trying to get it ever since-and have got it at last. It is probably the last picture I shall ever buy; for, though I have enough money for all useful and necessary employment, I can’t afford buying pictures at the prices the dealers have run things up to. This is fearfully damaged-said to be the only remnant of the Fire Sacrifice. But it is Vecelli’s, I’ll aver.”

The “Fire Sacrifice” means the conflagration of 1574, which destroyed much of the Ducal Palace (see Vol. X. pp. 354-355). In this fire it is supposed that Titian’s picture of the Doge Gritti presented to the Madonna by St. Mark perished; the picture was put up in the Sala del Collegio in 1531, and is described by Sanuto. There is now in that room a picture of the same subject by Tintoret.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]