and even at last, when his name became famous, he was invited
to work upon the walls of the Ducal Palace, the highest honour which a
Venetian painter could hope to win.

The days of the poor, bare studio, and lonely, sad life were ended now.
Tintoretto had no longer to struggle with poverty and neglect. His
house was a beautiful palace looking over the lagoon towards Murano,
and he had married the daughter of a Venetian noble, and lived a happy,
contented life. Children's voices made gay music in his home, and the
pattering of little feet broke the silence of his studio. Fame had come
to him too. His work might be strange but it was very wonderful, and
Venice was proud of her new painter. His great stormy pictures had
earned for him the name off 'the furious painter,' and the world began
to acknowledge his greatness.

But the real sunshine of his life was his little daughter Marietta. As
soon as she learned to walk she found her way to her father's studio,
and until she was fifteen years old she was always with him and helped
him as if she had been one of his pupils. She was dressed too as a boy,
and visitors to the studio never guessed that the clever, handsome boy
was really the painter's daughter.

There were many great schools in Venice at that time, and there was
much work to be done in decorating their walls with paintings. A school
was not really a place of education, but a society of people who joined
themselves together in charity to nurse the sick, bury the dead, and
release any prisoners who had been taken captive. One of the greatest
of the schools was the 'Scuola de San Rocco,' and this was given into
the hands of Tintoretto, who covered the walls with his paintings,
leaving but little room for other artists.

But it is in the Ducal Palace that the master's most famous work is
seen. There, covering the entire side of the great hall, hangs his
'Paradiso,' the largest oil painting in the world.

At first it seems but a gloomy picture of Paradise. It is so vast, and
such hundreds of figures are crowded together, and the colour is dark
and sombre. There is none of that swinging of golden censers by
white-robed angels, none of the pure glad colouring of spring flowers
which makes us love the Paradise of Fra Angelico.

But if we stand long enough before it a great awe steals over us, and
we forget to look for bright colours and gentle angel faces, for the
figures surging upwards are very real and human, and