ting several of the pictures of
Titian, as proofs of his grand and solemn specimens of colour, he thus
proceeds--"But perhaps it is not to Titian, but to Tintoret and Paul
Cagliari, that the debaucheries of colour, and blind submission to
fascinating tints, the rage of scattering flowers to no purpose,
are ascribed. Let us select from Tintoret's most extensive work
in the Scuola of San Rocco, the most extensive composition, and his
acknowledged masterpiece--'The Crucifixion,' and compare its tone with
that of Rubens and Rembrandt of the same subject. What impression feels
he who for the first time casts a glance over the immense scenery of
that work? a whole whose numberless parts are connected by a lowering,
mournful, minacious tone. A general fearful silence hushes all around
the central figure of the Saviour suspended on the cross, his fainting
mother, and a group of male and female mourners at its foot--a group of
colours that less imitate than rival nature, and tinged by grief itself;
a scale of tones for which even Titian offers me no parallel--yet all
equally overcast by the lurid tone that stains the whole, and like a
meteor hangs in the sickly air. Whatever inequality or dereliction of
feeling, whatever improprieties of commonplace, of local and antique
costume, the master's rapidity admitted to fill his space, and they
are great, all vanish in the power which compresses them into a single
point, and we do not detect them till we recover from our terror."

The picture of Rubens which we oppose to Tintoret was painted for the
Church of St. Walburgha, at Antwerp, after his return from Italy, and
has been minutely described and as exquisitely criticised by Reynolds:
"Christ," he says, "is nailed to the cross, with a number of figures
exerting themselves to raise it. The invention of throwing the cross
obliquely from one corner of the picture to the other, is finely
conceived, something in the manner of Tintoret." So far Reynolds. "In
Tintoret," says Fuseli, "it is the cross of one of the criminals they
attempt to raise, who casts his eye on Christ, already raised. The body
of Christ is the grandest, in my opinion, that Rubens ever painted;
it seems to be imitated from the Torso of Apollonius, and that of the
Laocoon. How far it be characteristic of Christ, or correspondent with
the situation, I shall not here inquire; my object is the ruling tone of
the whole--and of this the criticism quoted says not a word, thoug