it near; it was most
terribly dark but nobly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle Belle
Arti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, but sufficiently
restored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of the
greatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre,
passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so well
adapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandly
contrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is
triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and
awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of
which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the
Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling
of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with
awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in
her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, and
not without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which
her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the
climax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous,
more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure
in the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual
character, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.

[Illustration: _The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice_.]

Placed as the _Assunta_ now is in the immediate neighbourhood of one of
Tintoretto's best-preserved masterpieces, the _Miracolo del Schiavo_, it
undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern
connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely
triumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual,
more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that
unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its
agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right
to exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with his
subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above
the earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, in
unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in
poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian
stands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it were
necess