the vehemence of his talent. Compare his "Last Supper," at San
Giorgio--its long, diagonally placed table, its dusky
spaciousness, its scattered lamp-light and halo-light, its
startled, gesticulating figures, its richly realistic foreground-
-with the customary formal, almost mathematical rendering of the
subject, in which impressiveness seems to have been sought in
elimination rather than comprehension. You get from Tintoret's
work the impression that he felt, pictorially, the great,
beautiful, terrible spectacle of human life very much as
Shakespeare felt it poetically--with a heart that never ceased to
beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of his brush.
Thanks to this fact his works are signally grave, and their
almost universal and rapidly increasing decay doesn't relieve
their gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great
collection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is
settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the
sombre splendour of their great chambers like gaunt twilight
phantoms of pictures. To our children's children Tintoret, as
things are going, can be hardly more than a name; and such of
them as shall miss the tragic beauty, already so dimmed and
stained, of the great "Bearing of the Cross" in that temple of
his spirit will live and die without knowing the largest
eloquence of art. If you wish to add the last touch of solemnity
to the place recall as vividly as possible while you linger at
San Rocco the painter's singularly interesting portrait of
himself, at the Louvre. The old man looks out of the canvas from
beneath a brow as sad as a sunless twilight, with just such a
stoical hopelessness as you might fancy him to wear if he stood
at your side gazing at his rotting canvases. It isn't whimsical
to read it as the face of a man who felt that he had given the