lity. The company is all
at one side of the table and the two ends, except the wretched
foredoomed Judas. There is plenty to eat. Attendants bustle about
bringing more food. A girl, superbly drawn and painted, washes plates,
with a cat beside her. A dog steals a bone. The disciples seem restless
and the air is filled with angels. Compared with the intensity and
single-mindedness of Leonardo, this is a commonplace rendering; but as
an illustration to the Venetian Bible, it is fine; and as a work of art
by a mighty and original genius glorying in difficulties of light and
shade, it is tremendous. Opposite is a quieter representation of the
miracle of the manna, which has very charming details of a domestic
character in it, the women who wash and sew and carry on other
employments being done with splendid ease and naturalness. The manna
lies about like little buttons; Moses discourses in the foreground; in
the distance is the Israelite host. All that the picture lacks is light:
a double portion: light to fall on it, and its own light to be allowed
to shine through the grime of ages.

Tintoretto also has two altar-pieces here, one an "Entombment," in the
Mortuary Chapel--very rich and grave and painful, in which Christ's
mother is seen swooning in the background; and the other a death of S.
Stephen, a subject rare with the Old Masters, but one which, were there
occasion to paint it, they must have enjoyed. Tintoretto has covered the
ground with stones.

The choir is famous for its series of forty-six carved panels,
representing scenes in the life of S. Benedict; but some vandal having
recently injured one or two, the visitor is no longer allowed to
approach near enough to examine them with the thoroughness that they
demand and deserve. They are the work of a carver named Albert de Brule,
of whose life I have been able to discover nothing. Since before
studying them it is well to know something of the Saint's career, I tell
the story here, from _The Golden Legend_, but not all the incidents
which the artist fixed upon are to be found in that biography.

Benedict as a child was sent to Rome to be educated, but he preferred
the desert. Hither his nurse accompanied him, and his first token of
signal holiness was his answered prayer that a pitcher which she had
broken might be made whole again. Leaving his nurse, he associated with
a hermit who lived in a pit to which food was lowered by a rope. Near by
dwelt a priest, who on