tiful fresco at Lugano; by the side of the painting at S.
Rocco everything is tame, except, perhaps, Rembrandt's etching called
the Three Crosses. After this, and especially to be compared with the
frescoes of Masaccio and Ghirlandaio of the same subject, comes the
Baptism of Christ. The old details of figures dressing and undressing,
which gave so much pleasure to earlier painters, for instance, Piero
della Francesca, in the National Gallery, are entirely omitted, as the
nose-holding in the Raising of Lazarus, is omitted by Rembrandt. Christ
kneels in the Jordan, with John bending over him, and vague multitudes
crowding the banks, distant, dreamlike beneath the yellow storm-light.
Of Tintoret's Christ before Pilate, of that figure of the Saviour, long,
straight, wrapped in white and luminous like his own wraith, I have
spoken already. But I must speak of the S. Rocco Christ in the Garden,
as imaginative as anything by Rembrandt, and infinitely more beautiful.
The moonlight tips the draperies of the three sleeping apostles, gigantic,
solemn. Above, among the bushes, leaning His head on His hand, is seated
Christ, weary to death, numbed by grief and isolation, recruiting for
final resistance. The sense of being abandoned of all men and of God has
never been brought home in this way by any other painter; the little
tear-stained Saviours, praying in broad daylight, of Perugino and his
fellows, are mere distressed mortals. This betrayed and resigned Saviour
has upon Him the _weltschmerz_ of Prometheus. But even here we begin to
feel the loss, as well as the gain, of the painter being forced from the
dramatic routine of earlier days: instead of the sweet, tearful little
angel of the early Renaissance, there comes to this tragic Christ, in
a blood-red nimbus, a brutal winged creature thrusting the cup in His
face. The uncertainty of Tintoret's inspirations, the uncertainty of
result of these astonishing pictorial methods of attaining the dramatic,
the occasional vapidness and vulgarity of the man, unrestrained by any
stately tradition like the vapidness and vulgarity of so many earlier
masters,[12] comes out already at S. Rocco. And principally in the
scene of the Temptation, a theme rarely, if ever, treated before the
sixteenth century, and which Tintoret has made unspeakably mean in its
unclean and dramatically impotent suggestiveness: the Saviour parleying
from a kind of rustic edifice with a good-humoured, fat, half feminine