r, nobler Tintoretto
gives us the second. There is something in his greatest pictures, as,
for instance, in the Crucifixion, at St. Rocco, which no other artist
approaches. The lordly composition gives us an impression of
intellectual grasp and vigor. The foreground group of prostrate women is
full of a tenderness. The rich pearly light, which floods the centre,
glows with a solemn picturesqueness, and the great Christ, who hangs
like a benediction over the whole, is vocal with a piety which no other
picture in the world displays. And the Presentation of the Virgin, in
Santa Maria dell'Orto, is the consummate presentation of that beautiful
subject, its beauty not lost in its majesty."

Of other pictures Dr. Brooks said:--

"In the Academia there is the sunshine of three hundred years ago.
Paris Bordone's glowing picture of the Fisherman who brings the
Ring of St. Mark to the Doge, burned like a ray of sunlight on the
wall. Carpaccio's delightful story of St. Ursula brought the old
false standards of other days back to one's mind, but brought them
back lustrous with the splendor of summers that seemed forever
passed, but are perpetually here. Tintoretto's Adam and Eve was, as
it always is, the most delightful picture in the gallery, and
Pordenone's great St. Augustine seemed a very presence in the vast
illuminated room."

Tennyson loved best, of all the pictures in Venice, a Bellini,--a
beautiful work, in the Church of Il Redentore; and he was deeply
impressed by the "Presentation of the Virgin," from Tintoretto, in the
Church of the Madonna dell'Orto. "He was fascinated by St. Mark's,"
writes the poet's son, "by the Doge's Palace and the Piazza, and by the
blaze of color in water and sky. He climbed the Campanile, and walked to
the library where he could scarcely tear himself away from the Grimani
Breviary."

Venice, though not containing any single gallery comparable with the
Pitti and the Uffizi, is still singularly rich in treasures of art, and
rich in legend and story. The school of encrusted architecture is
nowhere so wonderfully represented as here, and it is only in this
architecture that a perfect scheme of color decoration is possible. In
all the world there is no such example of encrusted architecture as that
revealed in St. Mark's. It is a gleaming mass of gold, opal, ruby, and
pearl; with alabaster pillars carved in designs of palm and pomegranate
and li