ess changeable personality. In spite of his youth,
Giorgione made a profound impression upon all the artists of his time.
They did not copy his designs, but the beauty of his pictures made
them look at the world with his romantic eyes and paint in his dreamy
mood. It was almost as though Giorgione had absorbed the romance of
Venice into his pictures, so that for a time no Venetian painter could
express Venetian romance except in Giorgione's way.

But in 1518, eight years after Giorgione's death, another great
innovating master was born at Venice, Tintoret by name, who in his
turn opened new visions of the world to the artists of his day. While
painting in the rest of Italy was becoming mannered and sentimental,
lacking in power and originality, Tintoret in Venice was creating
masterpieces with a very fury of invention and a corresponding
swiftness of hand. He was his own chief teacher. Outside his studio
he wrote upon a sign to inform or attract pupils--'The design of
Michelangelo and the colouring of Titian.' Profound study of the works
of these two masters is manifest in his own. Like Michelangelo he worked
passionately rather than with the sober competence of Titian. His
thronging visions, his multitudinous and often vast canvases are a
surpassing record. Prolonged study of the human form had given to him,
as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures.
His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale.
He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice
with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times
before; but each as he treated it was a new thing. Centuries of
tradition governed the arrangement of such subjects as the Crucifixion
and the Last Judgment, so that even the free painters of the Renaissance
had deviated but little from it. In Tintoret the freedom of the
Renaissance reached its height. For him tradition had no fetters. When
he painted a picture of Paradise for the Doge's Palace it measured
84 by 34 feet, and contained literally hundreds of figures. His
imagination was so prolific that he seems never to have repeated a
figure. New forms, new postures, new groupings flowed from his brush
in exhaustless multitude.

It is necessary to go to Venice to see Tintoret's most famous works,
still remaining upon the walls of the churches and buildings for which
they were painted, or in which they have been brought together. But
the National G