ROCCO-ROCCO, SCUOLA DI SAN 403

horses and warriors in the most magnificent confusion of fall and flight ever painted by man. They seem all dashed different ways as if by a whirlwind; and a whirlwind there must be, or a thunder-bolt, behind them, for a huge tree is torn up and hurled into the air beyond the central figure as if it were a shivered lance. Two of the horses meet in the midst, as if in a tournament; but in madness or fear, not in hostility: on the horse to the right is a standard-bearer, who stoops as from some foe behind him, with the lance laid across his saddlebow level, and the flag stretched out behind him as he flies, like the sail of a ship drifting from its mast; the central horseman, who meets the shock, of storm, or enemy, whatever it be, is hurled backwards from his seat, like a stone from a sling; and this figure, with the shattered tree trunk behind it, is the most noble part of the picture. There is another grand horse on the right, however, also in full action. Two gigantic figures on foot, on the left, meant to be nearer than the others, would, it seems to me, have injured the picture, had they been clearly visible; but time has reduced them to perfect subordination.

ROCCO, SCUOLA DI SAN, bases of, IX. 344, 471; soffit ornaments of, IX. 392. An interesting building of the early Renaissance (1517), passing into Roman Renaissance. The wreaths of leafage about its shafts are wonderfully delicate and fine, though misplaced.

As regards the pictures which it contains, it is one of the three most precious buildings in Italy; buildings, I mean, consistently decorated with a series of paintings at the time of their erection, and still exhibiting that series in its original order. I suppose there can be little question but that the three most important edifices of this kind in Italy are the Sistine Chapel, the Campo Santo of Pisa, and the Scuola di San Rocco at Venice: the first painted by Michael Angelo; the second by Orcagna, Benozzo Gozzoli, Pietro Laurati, and several other men whose works are as rare as they are precious;¹ and the third by Tintoret.

Whatever the traveller may miss in Venice, he should, therefore, give unembarrassed attention and unbroken time to the Scuola di San Rocco; and I shall, accordingly, number the pictures, and note in them, one by one, what seemed to me most worthy of observation.²

They are sixty-two in all, but eight of these are merely of children or children’s heads, and two of unimportant figures. The number of valuable pictures is fifty-two; arranged on the walls and ceilings of three rooms, so badly lighted, in consequence of the admirable arrangements of the Renaissance architect, that it is only in the early morning that some of the pictures can be seen at all, nor can they ever be seen but imperfectly. They were all painted, however, for their places in the dark, and, as compared with Tintoret’s other works, are therefore, for the most part, nothing more than vast sketches, made to produce, under a certain degree of shadow, the effect of finished pictures. Their treatment is thus to be considered as a kind of scene-painting; differing from ordinary scene-painting only in this, that the effect aimed at is

¹ [See Vol. IV. pp. xxx., 84.]

² [For Ruskin’s first impressions of the Scuola di San Rocco, see Vol. IV. pp. xxxvii., 354.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]