feeling, comes his
love of space, which makes him less regard the rounding and form of
objects themselves, than their relations of light and shade and
distance. Therefore Rubens and Michael Angelo made the fiery serpents
huge boa constrictors, and knotted the sufferers together with them.
Tintoret does not like to be so bound; so he makes the serpents little
flying and fluttering monsters like lampreys with wings; and the
children of Israel, instead of being thrown into convulsed and
writhing groups, are scattered, fainting in the fields, far away in
the distance. As usual, Tintoret's conception, while thoroughly
characteristic of himself, is also truer to the words of Scripture. We
are told that "the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they
_bit_ the people;" we are not told that they crushed the people to
death. And while thus the truest, it is also the most terrific
conception. M. Angelo's would be terrific if one could believe in it:
but our instinct tells us that boa constrictors do not come in armies;
and we look upon the picture with as little emotion as upon the handle
of a vase, or any other form worked out of serpents, where there is no
probability of serpents actually occurring. But there is a probability
in Tintoret's conception. We feel that it is not impossible that there
should come up a swarm of these small winged reptiles: and their
horror is not diminished by their smallness: not that they have any of
the grotesque terribleness of German invention; they might have been
made infinitely uglier with small pains, but it is their
_veritableness_ which makes them awful. They have triangular heads
with sharp beaks or muzzle; and short, rather thick bodies, with bony
processes down the back like those of sturgeons; and small wings
spotted with orange and black; and round glaring eyes, not very large,
but very ghastly, with an intense delight in biting expressed in them.
(It is observable, that the Venetian painter has got his main idea of
them from the sea-horses and small reptiles of the Lagoons.) These
monsters are fluttering and writhing about everywhere, fixing on
whatever they come near with their sharp venomous heads; and they are
coiling about on the ground, and all the shadows and thickets are full
of them, so that there is no escape anywhere: and, in order to give
the idea of greater exten