undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern
connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely
triumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual,
more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that
unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its
agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right
to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his
subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above
the earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, in
unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in
poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian
stands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it were
necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the
life-work of the other--making the world the poorer by the loss of
Titian or Tintoretto--can it be doubted for a moment what the choice
would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face
with the mighty genius of the latter?

But to return for a moment to the _Assunta_. The enlargement of
dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group
of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It
carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable,
without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime
beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank
with the finest of those in Raphael's _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in a
higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of
vitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is
the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is not
always the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhere
adhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overrated