154 GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE

not, at heart, half so much amused by his work as John Bellini, or one quarter so much amused as the innocent old vicar. On the contrary, a strange gloom has been cast over him, he knows not why; but he likes all his colours dark, and puts great spaces of brown, and crimson passing into black, where the older painters would have made all lively. Painters call this “chiaroscuro.” So also they may call a thunder-cloud in the sky of spring; but it means more than light and shade.

(III.) You see that in all the three earlier pictures everybody is quiet. Here, everybody is in a bustle. If you like to look at my pamphlet on the relation of Tintoret to Michael Angelo, you will see how this comes to pass, and what it means.¹ And that is all I care for your noticing in the Assumption, just now.

Next, look on right and left of it at the two dark pictures over the doors (41, 43).²

Darkness visible, with flashes of lightning through it. The thunder-cloud upon us, rent with fire.

Those are Tintorets; finest possible Tintorets; best possible examples of what, in absolute power of painting, is supremest work, so far as I know, in all the world.

Nothing comes near Tintoret for colossal painter’s power, as such.³ But you need not think to get any good of these pictures; it would take you twenty years’ work to understand the fineness of them as painting; and for the rest, there is little good in them to be got. Adam and Eve no more sat in that warm-weather picnic manner, helping each other politely to apples, on the occasion of their fall, than the Madonna went up all bending about in her red and blue cloak on the occasion of her Assumption. But of the wrong and the truth, the error and the glory of these pictures, I have no time to speak now; nor you to hear.

¹ [See Vol. XXII. pp. 85 seq.]

² [Again in Room II. “The Death of Abel” (41) and “Eve driven out of Paradise” (43). For other references to the pictures, see Vol. III. pp. 173, 509, 583, 593.]

³ [Compare Vol. IV. pp. xxxviii. seq., and Vol. XVIII. p. 460.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]