[Illustration: THE COLLEONI STATUE AND S.S. GIOVANNI E PAOLO]
Certain of Tintoretto's sayings prove his humour to have had a caustic turn. Being once much harassed by a crowd of spectators, including men of civic eminence, he was asked why he painted so quickly when Bellini and Titian had been so deliberate. "They had not so many onlookers to drive them to distraction," he replied. Of Titian, in spite of his admiration for his colour, he was always a little jealous and could not bear to hear him much praised; and colour without drawing eternally vexed him. His own colour is always subservient. The saying of his which one remembers best bears upon the difficulties that beset the conscientious artist: "The farther you go in, the deeper is the sea."
Late in life Tintoretto spent much time with the brothers of S. Rocco. In 1594, at the age of seventy-six, he died, after a short illness. All Venice attended his funeral.
He was one of the greatest of painters, and, like Michael Angelo, he did nothing little. All was on the grand scale. He had not Michael Angelo's towering superiority, but he too was a giant. His chief lack was tenderness. There is something a little remote, a little unsympathetic, in all his work: one admires and wonders, and awaits in vain the softening moment. To me he is as much a dramatist of the Bible as a painter of it.
One is rarely satisfied with the whole of a Tintoretto; but a part of most of his works is superb. Of all his pictures in Venice my favourite secular one is the "Bacchus and Ariadne" in the Doges' Palace, which has in it a loveliness not excelled in any painting that I know. Excluding "The Crucifixion" I should name "The Marriage in Cana" at the Salute as his most ingratiating Biblical scene. See opposite pages 48 and 96.
The official programme of the Scuola pictures, printed on screens in various languages, badly needs an English revisor. Here are two titles: "Moise who makes the water spring"; "The three children in the oven of Babylony." It also states "worthy of attention are as well the woodcarvings round the wall sides by an anonymous." To these we come later. Let me say first that everything about the upper hall, which you will note has no pillars, is splendid and thorough--proportions, ceiling, walls, carvings, floor.