imaginative fairly confound their identity.

This, however, is vague praise. Tintoret's great merit, to my
mind, was his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had
conceived the germ of a scene it defined itself to his
imagination with an intensity, an amplitude, an individuality of
expression, which makes one's observation of his pictures seem
less an operation of the mind than a kind of supplementary
experience of life. Veronese and Titian are content with a much
looser specification, as their treatment of any subject that the
author of the Crucifixion at San Cassano has also treated
abundantly proves. There are few more suggestive contrasts than
that between the absence of a total character at all commensurate
with its scattered variety and brilliancy in Veronese's "Marriage
of Cana," at the Louvre, and the poignant, almost startling,
completeness of Tintoret's illustration of the theme at the
Salute church. To compare his "Presentation of the Virgin," at
the Madonna dell' Orto, with Titian's at the Academy, or his
"Annunciation" with Titian's close at hand, is to measure the
essential difference between observation and imagination. One has
certainly not said all that there is to say for Titian when one
has called him an observer. Il y mettait du sien, and I
use the term to designate roughly the artist whose apprehension,
infinitely deep and strong when applied to the single figure or
to easily balanced groups, spends itself vainly on great dramatic
combinations--or rather leaves them ungauged. It was the whole
scene that Tintoret seemed to have beheld in a flash of
inspiration intense enough to stamp it ineffaceably on his
perception; and it was the whole scene, complete, peculiar,
individual, unprecedented, that he committed to canvas with all