408 VENETIAN INDEX

is no blood, no stabbing or cutting, but there is an awful substitute for these in the chiaroscuro. The scene is the outer vestibule of a palace, the slippery marble floor is fearfully barred across by sanguine shadows, so that our eyes seem to become bloodshot and strained with strange horror and deadly vision; a lake of life before them, like the burning seen of the doomed Moabite on the water that came by the way of Edom: a huge flight of stairs, without parapet, descends on the left; down this rush a crowd of women mixed with the murderers; the child in the arms of one has been seized by the limbs; she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head downmost, dragging the child out of the grasp by her weight;-she will be dashed dead in a second:-close to us is the great struggle; a heap of the mothers, entangled in one mortal writhe with each other and the swords; one of the murderers dashed down and crushed beneath them, the sword of another caught by the blade and dragged at by a woman’s naked hand; the youngest and fairest of the women, her child just torn away from a death grasp, and clasped to her breast with the grip of a steel vice, falls backwards, helplessly over the heap, right on the sword points; all knit together and hurled down in one hopeless, frenzied, furious abandonment of body and soul in the effort to save. Far back, at the bottom of the stairs, there is something in the shadow like a heap of clothes. It is a woman, sitting quiet,-quiet quiet,-still as any stone; she looks down steadfastly on her dead child, laid along on the floor before her, and her hand is pressed softly upon her brow.”¹

I have nothing to add to the above description of this picture, except that I believe there may have been some change in the colour of the shadow that crosses the pavement. The chequers of the pavement are, in the light, golden white and pale grey; in the shadow, red and dark grey, the white in the sunshine becoming red in the shadow. I formerly supposed that this was meant to give greater horror to the scene,² and it is very like Tintoret if it be so; but there is a strangeness and discordance in it which make me suspect the colours may have changed.

5. The Magdalen. This and the picture opposite to it, “St. Mary of Egypt,” have been painted to fill up narrow spaces between the windows which were not large enough to receive compositions, and yet in which single figures would have looked awkwardly thrust into the corner. Tintoret has made these spaces as large as possible by filling them with landscapes, which are rendered interesting by the introduction of single figures of very small size. He has not, however, considered his task of making a small piece of wainscot look like a large one, worth the stretch of his powers, and has painted these two landscapes just as carelessly and as fast as an upholsterer’s journeyman finishing a room at a railway hotel. The colour is for the most part opaque, and dashed or scrawled

¹ [Modern Painters, vol. ii. sec. ii. ch. iii. § 21 (Vol. IV. pp. 272-273). The MS. version of the description, though to the same effect as this from Modern Painters, is differently worded and arranged. One detailed criticism is added: “One figure in the picture hurts it excessively-the executioner on the right, whose action is entirely theatrical and false.”]

² [Ibid., § 25 (Vol. IV. p. 278).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]