ich deals with the Magdalen. She mourns her
dead in that solemn, restrained "Entombment," where the enfolding
shadows frame the cross against the sad dawn, which adorns the mortuary
chapel of S. Giorgio Maggiore; and the Pieta in the Brera, the long
lines of which add to the impression of tender repose, has its peace
broken by the passionate cry of the woman who loved much. Tintoretto's
ideas are exhaustless; he can paint the same scene in a dozen different
ways, and, in fact, the book of sketches lately acquired by the British
Museum shows as many as thirty trials dashed off for one subject, and
after all he uses one composed for something quite different. It is this
habit of throwing off red-hot essays, fresh from his brain, that has led
to the common but superficial judgment that Tintoretto was merely a
great improvisatore, whose successes came more or less by good luck. He
could, indeed, paint pictures at a pace at which many great masters
could only sketch, but he had already designed and considered and
rejected, doing with oil, ink, and paper what many of his contemporaries
did mentally. Such achievements as the Ante-Collegio cycle, the "House
of Martha and Mary," the "Marriage of Cana," the "Temptation of S.
Anthony," to name only a few, show a finish and perfection and a balance
of design which preclude the idea of their being lightly painted
pictures. When he was actually engaged, Tintoretto let himself go with
impetuous ardour, but we may feel assured he left nothing to chance,
though he had his own way of making sure of the result.

It is strange to hear people, as one does now and then, talking of the
"Paradiso" as "a splendid failure." It may be granted that the subject
is an impossible one for human art to realise, yet when all allowance
has been made for a lamentable amount of drying and blackening, it is
difficult to agree that Ruskin was all wrong in his admiration of that
thronging multitude, ordered and disciplined by the tides of light and
shadow, which roll in and out of the masses, resolving them into groups
and single figures of almost matchless beauty and melting away into a
sea of radiant aether, which tells us of the boundless space which
surrounds the serried ranks of the Blessed.

Tintoretto was seventy-eight when it was allotted to him, and it was the
last great effort of his mind and hand. Studies for it are preserved
both at the Louvre and at Madrid, and it is evident that the painter
has