oret showed for his own
higher self, his fellow-men, and his art, would scarcely seem well
qualified to take up sacred subjects. But criticism is entirely and
hopelessly divided on the question, for while some authorities hold that
he made of the awful scene of the Crucifixion a merely historical and
decidedly theatrical procession, other authorities maintain that he
preserved in that 'great composition' 'repose and dignity, solemnity and
reverence.'

Here is M. Charles Blanc, the French art critic's opinion of Tintoret's
largest work, seventy-four feet in length and thirty feet in height: The
Glory of Paradise, in the great hall or throne-room of the Doge's
Palace:--

'If the shadows had not become so black, such a picture would have had
something of sublimity; but that sky, without transparency, the lights
of which, even, are of a burnt and baked colour, has rather the air of a
lit-up Erebus than of a Paradise. Four hundred figures are in motion in
this vast enclosure, some naked, others draped, but draped uniformly in
a staring red or a hard blue, which form as many spots, in some sort
symmetrical. The manner is quick; a little loose, but confident. The
models are neither taken from nature nor from the ideal, they are drawn
from practice, and are in general only turns of the head, without beauty
and without delicacy. The angels are agitated like demons; and the
whole--coarse enough in execution as in thought, is imposing
nevertheless by mass, movement, and number. It is the striking image of
a multitude in the air, a rout in the heavens, or rather in purgatory.'

Here, again, is Mr Ruskin's unequalled estimate of Tintoret's works: 'I
should exhaust the patience of the reader if Ion the various stupendous
developments of the imagination of Tintoret in the Scuola di San Rocco
alone. I would fain join awhile in that solemn pause of the journey into
Egypt, where the silver boughs of the shadowy trees lace with their
tremulous lines the alternate folds of fair cloud, flushed by faint
crimson light, and lie across the streams of blue between those rosy
islands like the white wakes of wandering ships; or watch beside the
sleep of the disciples among those mossy leaves that lie so heavily on
the dead of the night beneath the descent of the angel of the agony, and
toss fearfully above the motion of the torches as the troop of the
betrayer emerges out of the hollows of the olives; or wait through the
hour of accusing beside