these records are of great value in ascertaining
costumes, architecture, and so forth.

I speak elsewhere of the Palazzo Giovanelli as being an excellent
destination to give one's gondolier when in doubt. After leaving it,
with Giorgione's landscape still glowing in the memory, there are worse
courses to take than to tell the poppe to row on up the Rio di Noale to
the Misericordia, in which Tintoretto painted his "Paradiso". This great
church, once the chief funeral church of Venice, is now a warehouse,
lumber rooms, workshops. Beside it is the head-quarters of the _pompes
funebres_, wherein a jovial fellow in blue linen was singing as I
passed.

At the back of the Misericordia is an ancient abbey, now also
secularized, with a very charming doorway surmounted by a pretty relief
of cherubs. Farther north is the Sacco of the Misericordia opening into
the lagoon. Here are stored the great rafts of timber that come down the
rivers from the distant hill-country, and now and then you may see one
of the huts in which the lumber-men live on the voyage.

From the Misericordia it is a short distance to the Fondamenta dei Mori,
at No. 3399 of which is the Casa di Tintoretto, with a relief of the
great painter's head upon it. Here he lived and died. The curious carved
figures on this and the neighbouring house are thought to represent
Morean merchants who once congregated here. Turning up the Campo dei
Mori we come to the great church of the Madonna dell'Orto, where
Tintoretto was buried. It should be visited in the late afternoon,
because the principal reason for seeing it is Tintoretto's
"Presentation," and this lovely picture hangs in a dark chapel which
obtains no light until the sinking sun penetrates its window and falls
on the canvas. To my mind it is one of the most beautiful pictures that
Tintoretto painted--a picture in which all his strength has turned to
sweetness. We have studied Titian's version in the Accademia, where it
has a room practically to itself (see opposite page 36); Tintoretto's is
hung badly and has suffered seriously from age and conditions. Titian's
was painted in 1540; this afterwards, and the painter cheerfully
accepted the standard set by the earlier work. Were I in the position of
that imaginary millionaire whom I have seen in the mind's eye busy in
the loving task of tenderly restoring Venice's most neglected
masterpieces, it is this "Presentation" with which I should begin.

[Illustration: