156 GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE

the third, supremely powerful art corrupted by taint of death, 1520-1600, which we will call the Tintoret epoch.

Of course the lives of the painters run in and out across these limits; yet if you fasten these firmly in your mind,-80, 40, 80,-you will find you have an immense advantage and easy grip of the whole history of Venetian art.

In the first epoch, however, I do not mean to detain you; but the room you first entered, into which I will now ask you to return, is full of pictures which you will find interesting if you have time to decipher them, and care for Christianity and its expressions. One only I will ask you to look at, after Titian’s Assumption, the little Ascension by Nicolo Semitecolo, low down, on the right of the vicar’s picture in Number 21.¹ For that Ascension is painted in real belief that the Ascension did take place; and its sincerity ought to be pleasant to you, after Titian’s pretence.

Now, returning up the steps, and taking the corridor to your right, opposite the porter’s table, enter the little room through the first door on your right; and therein, just on your right as you go in, is Mantegna’s St. George;² to which give ten minutes quietly, and examine it with a magnifying glass of considerable power. For in that you have a perfect type of the Italian methods of execution corresponding to the finish of the Dutch painters in the north; but far more intellectual and skilful. You cannot see more wonderful work in minute drawing with the point of the brush; the virtue of it being that not only every touch is microscopically minute, but that, in this minuteness, every touch is considered, and every touch right. It is to be regarded, however, only as a piece of workmanship.

¹ [No. 21 consists of a central panel, signed by the “Vicar,” as aforesaid (p. 150 n.), and other compartments. The “Ascension,” here described, is in the lowest righthand compartment. The central panel was at some time substituted for an “Incoronation of the Virgin” (once ascribed to Niccolò Semitecolo) which is now in the Brera Gallery at Milan. Hence No. 21 was at the time of Ruskin’s writing ascribed (except the central compartment) to Niccolò also; the panels are now given to “Unknown Painters.” A signed and dated (1351) picture by Niccolò is No. 23.]

² [The local directions are no longer applicable; Mantegna’s “St. George” is No. 588 in Room XVII.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]