aria
della Saluto, Venice.

There is an authentic story told of Tintoretto in his age, which is in
touching contrast to what is otherwise known of the man. Dominico, who
was a painter, Tintoret had a daughter, Marietta, very dear to him, who
was also a painter--indeed, so gifted a portrait painter, as to have
been repeatedly invited to foreign courts to practise her art,
invitations which she declined, because she would not be parted from her
father. To Tintoret's great grief, this daughter died as she was thirty
years of age, and her father was in his seventy-eighth year. When her
end was unmistakably near, the old man took brush and canvas and
struggled desperately to preserve a last impression of the beloved
child's face, over which death was casting its shadow.

Tintoretto died four years later, in 1594. His portrait is that of a man
who holds his head high and resolutely; he has, strange to say, a
somewhat commonplace face, with its massive nose, full eye, short curly
beard and hail. The forehead is not very broad, but the head is 'long,'
as Scotch people say, and they count long-headedness not only an
indication of self-esteem, but of practical shrewdness. Tintoret's power
was native, and had received little training; it is a proof of the
strength of that power that he could not quench it. His faults, as a
painter, I have already had to chronicle in the sketch of the man. He
was greatest on large canvases, where his recklessness was lost in his
strength; and in portraits, where his quickness in seizing striking
traits more than equalled that rapidity of conclusion in realizing, and
still more notably in classifying, character, which, to say the least,
is liable to error.

Even before Tintoretto lived sacred subjects and art had entirely
changed places. In the days of Fra Angelico and the Van Eycks, art was
the means by which painters brought before men sacred subjects, to whose
design painters looked with more or less of conviction and feeling. By
the time that Tintoret painted, sacred subjects were the means by which
painters showed their art; means, the design of which was largely lost
sight of, and which might be freely tortured and twisted, falsified,
well-nigh burlesqued, if, by so doing, painters could better display
their originality, skill, and mastery of technicalities. Sacred subjects
had become more and more human in the lower sense, and less and less
divine. A man who had so little reverence as Tint