402 VENETIAN INDEX

to show what waste of human mind there is in these dark churches of Venice, it is worth recording that, as I was examining these pictures, there came in a party of eighteen German tourists, not hurried, nor jesting among themselves, as large parties often do, but patiently submitting to their cicerone, and evidently desirous of doing their duty as intelligent travellers. They sat down for a long time on the benches of the nave, looked a little at the “Pool of Bethesda,” walked up into the choir, and there heard a lecture of considerable length from their valet-de-place upon some subject connected with the altar itself, which, being in German, I did not understand; they then turned and went slowly out of the church, not one of the whole eighteen ever giving a single glance to any of the four Tintorets, and only one of them, as far as I saw, even raising his eyes to the walls on which they hung, and immediately withdrawing them, with a jaded and nonchalant expression, easily interpretable into “Nothing but old black pictures.” The two Tintorets above noticed, at the end of the church, were passed also without a glance; and this neglect is not because the pictures have nothing in them capable of arresting the popular mind, but simply because they are totally in the dark, or confused among easier and more prominent objects of attention. This picture, which I have called “St. Rocco in the Hospital,” shows him, I suppose, in his general ministrations at such places, and is one of the usual representations of disgusting subjects from which neither Orcagna¹ nor Tintoret seems ever to have shrunk. It is a very noble picture, carefully composed and highly wrought; but to me gives no pleasure, first, on account of its subject, secondly, on account of its dull brown tone all over,-it being impossible, or nearly so, in such a scene, and at all events inconsistent with its feeling, to introduce vivid colour of any kind. So it is a brown study of diseased limbs in a close room.

6. Cattle Piece. (Above the picture last described.) I can give no other name to this picture, whose subject I can neither guess nor discover, the picture being in the dark, and the guide-books leaving me in the same position. All I can make out of it is, that there is a noble landscape, with cattle and figures. It seems to me the best landscape of Tintoret’s in Venice, except the “Flight into Egypt;” and is even still more interesting from its savage character, the principal trees being pines, something like Titian’s in his “St. Francis receiving the Stigmata,” and chestnuts on the slopes and in the hollows of the hills: the animals also seem first-rate. But it is too high, too much faded, and too much in the dark to be made out. It seems never to have been rich in colour, rather cool and grey, and very full of light.

7. Finding of Body of San Rocco. (On the left-hand side of the altar.) An elaborate, but somewhat confused picture, with a flying angel in a blue drapery; but it seemed to me altogether uninteresting, or, perhaps, requiring more study than I was able to give it.²

8. San Rocco in Campo d’ Armata. So this picture is called by the sacristan. I could see no San Rocco in it; nothing but a wild group of

¹ [See in Vol. XII., Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 123.]

² [The picture is called by Ridolfi “S. Rocco struck by death and visited by an angel.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]