Complete. From “A Venetian Medley.”

A STORY is told of Poussin, the French painter, that when he was asked why he would not stay in Venice, he replied, “If I stay here, I shall become a colorist!” A somewhat similar tale is reported of a fashionable English decorator. While on a visit to friends in Venice he avoided every building which contains a Tintoretto, averring that the sight of Tintoretto’s pictures would injure his carefully trained taste. It is probable that neither anecdote is strictly true. Yet there is a certain epigrammatic point in both; and I have often speculated whether even Venice could have so warped the genius of Poussin as to shed one ray of splendor on his canvasses, or whether even Tintoretto could have so sublimed the prophet of Queen Anne as to make him add dramatic passion to a London drawing-room. Anyhow it is exceedingly difficult to escape from color in the air of Venice, or from Tintoretto in her buildings. Long, delightful mornings may be spent in the enjoyment of the one and the pursuit of the other by folk who have no classical or pseudo-mediæval theories to oppress them.

  Tintoretto’s house, though changed, can still be visited. It formed part of the Fondamenta dei Mori, so called from having been the quarter assigned to Moorish traders in Venice. A spirited carving of a turbaned Moor leading a camel charged with merchandise remains above the water line of a neighboring building, and all about the crumbling walls sprout flowering weeds—samphire and snapdragon and the spiked campanula, which shoots a spire of sea-blue stars from chinks of Istrian stone.

  The house stands opposite the Church of Santa Maria dell’ Orto, where Tintoretto was buried, and where four of his chief masterpieces are to be seen. This church, swept and garnished, is a triumph of modern Italian restoration. They have contrived to make it as commonplace as human ingenuity could manage. Yet no malice of ignorant industry can obscure the treasures it contains—the pictures of Cimabue, Giovanni Bellini, Palma, and the four Tintorettos, which form its crowning glory. Here the master may be studied in four of his chief moods: as the painter of tragic passion and movement, in the huge “Last Judgment”; as the painter of impossibilities, in the “Vision of Moses upon Sinai”; as the painter of purity and tranquil pathos, in the “Miracle of St. Agnes”; as the painter of biblical history brought home to daily life, in the “Presentation of the Virgin.” Without leaving the “Madonna dell’ Orto,” a student can explore his genius in all its depth and breadth; comprehend the enthusiasm he excites in those who seek, as the essentials of art, imaginative boldness and sincerity; understand what is meant by adversaries who maintain that, after all, Tintoretto was but an inspired Gustave Doré. Between that quiet canvas of the “Presentation,” so modest in its cool grays and subdued gold, and the tumult of flying, running, ascending figures in the “Judgment,” what an interval there is! How strangely the white lamb-like maiden, kneeling beside her lamb in the picture of “St. Agnes,” contrasts with the dusky gorgeousness of the Hebrew women despoiling themselves of jewels for the golden calf! Comparing these several manifestations of creative power, we feel ourselves in the grasp of a painter who was essentially a poet, one for whom his art was the medium for expressing before all things thought and passion. Each picture is executed in the manner suited to its tone of feeling, the key of its conception.

  Elsewhere than in the “Madonna dell’ Orto” there are more distinguished single examples of Tintoretto’s realizing faculty. The “Last Supper” in San Giorgio, for instance, and the “Adoration of the Shepherds,” in the Scuola di San Rocco, illustrate his unique power of presenting sacred history in a novel, romantic framework of familiar things. The most commonplace circumstances of ordinary life have been employed to portray in the one case a lyric of mysterious splendor; in the other an idyl of infinite sweetness. Divinity shines through the rafters of that upper chamber, where round the low large table the Apostles are assembled in a group translated from the social customs of the painter’s days. Divinity is shed upon the straw-spread manger, where Christ lies sleeping in the loft, with shepherds crowding through the room beneath.

  A studied contrast between the simplicity and repose of the central figure and the tumult of passions in the multitude around may be observed in the “Miracle of St. Agnes.” It is this which gives dramatic vigor to the composition. But the same effect is carried to its highest fulfillment, with even a loftier beauty, in the episode of Christ before the judgment seat of Pilate, at San Rocco. Of all Tintoretto’s religious pictures that is the most profoundly felt, the most majestic. No other artist succeeded as he has here succeeded in presenting to us God incarnate. For this Christ is not merely the just man, innocent, silent before his accusers. The stationary, white-draped figure raised high above the agitated crowd, with tranquil forehead slightly bent, facing his perplexed and fussy judge, is more than man. We cannot say perhaps precisely why he is divine. But Tintoretto has made us feel that he is. In other words, his treatment of the high theme chosen by him has been adequate.

  We must seek the Scuola di San Rocco for examples of Tintoretto’s liveliest imagination. Without ceasing to be Italian in his attention to harmony and grace, he far exceeded the masters of his nation in the power of suggesting what is weird, mysterious, upon the borderland of the grotesque. And of this quality there are three remarkable instances in the Scuola. No one but Tintoretto could have evoked the fiend in his “Temptation of Christ.” It is an indescribable hermaphroditic genius, the genius of carnal fascination, with outspread downy rose-plumed wings, and flaming bracelets on the full, plump arms, who kneels and lifts aloft great stones, smiling entreatingly to the sad, gray Christ seated beneath a rugged penthouse of the desert. No one again but Tintoretto could have dashed the hot lights of that fiery sunset in such quivering flakes upon the golden flesh of Eve, half hidden among laurels, as she stretches forth the fruit of the Fall to shrinking Adam. No one but Tintoretto, till we come to Blake, could have imagined yonder Jonah, summoned by the beck of God from the whale’s belly. The monstrous fish rolls over in the ocean, blowing portentous vapor from his trump-shaped nostril. The prophet’s beard descends upon his naked breast in hoary ringlets to the girdle. He has forgotten the past peril of the deep, although the whale’s jaws yawn around him. Between him and the outstretched finger of Jehovah calling him again to life there runs a spark of unseen spiritual electricity.

  To comprehend Tintoretto’s touch upon the pastoral idyl we must turn our steps to San Giorgio again, and pace those meadows by the running river in company with his Manna-Gatherers. Or we may seek the Accademia, and notice how he here has varied the “Temptation of Adam by Eve,” choosing a less tragic motive of seduction than the one so powerfully rendered at San Rocco. Or in the Ducal Palace we may take our station, hour by hour, before the “Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne.” It is well to leave the very highest achievements of art, untouched by criticism, undescribed. And in this picture we have the most perfect of all modern attempts to realize an antique myth—more perfect than Raphael’s “Galatea” or Titian’s “Meeting of Bacchus with Ariadne,” or Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus from the Sea.” It may suffice to marvel at the slight effect which melodies so powerful and so direct as these produce upon the ordinary public. Sitting, as is my wont, one Sunday morning, opposite the “Bacchus,” four Germans with a cicerone sauntered by. The subject was explained to them. They waited an appreciable space of time. Then the youngest opened his lips and spake: “Bacchus war der Weingott.” And they all moved heavily away. Bos locutus est. “Bacchus was the wine god!” This, apparently, is what a picture tells to one man. To another it presents divine harmonies, perceptible indeed in nature, but here by the painter poet for the first time brought together and cadenced in a work of art. For another it is perhaps the hieroglyph of pent-up passions and desired impossibilities. For yet another it may only mean the unapproachable inimitable triumph of consummate craft.

  Tintoretto, to be rightly understood, must be sought all over Venice—in the church as well as the Scuola di San Rocco; in the “Temptation of St. Anthony” at St. Trovaso no less than in the “Temptations” of Eve and Christ; in the decorative pomp of the Sala del Senato, and in the paradisal vision of the Sala del Gran Consiglio. Yet, after all, there is one of his most characteristic moods, to appreciate which fully we return to the “Madonna dell’ Orto.” I have called him “the painter of impossibilities.” At rare moments he rendered them possible by sheer imaginative force. If we wish to realize this phase of his creative power, and to measure our own subordination to his genius in its most hazardous enterprise, we must spend much time in the choir of this church. Lovers of art who mistrust this play of the audacious fancy—aiming at sublimity in supersensual regions, sometimes attaining to it by stupendous effort or authentic revelation, not seldom sinking to the verge of bathos, and demanding the assistance of interpretative sympathy in the spectator—such men will not take the point of view required of them by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the “Worship of the Golden Calf” and in the “Destruction of the World by Water.” It is for them to ponder well the flying archangel with the scales of judgment in his hand, and the seraph-charioted Jehovah enveloping Moses upon Sinai in lightnings.

  The gondola has had a long rest. Were Francesco but a little more impatient, he might be wondering what had become of the padrone. I bid him turn, and we are soon gliding into the Sacca della Misericordia. This is a protected float, where the wood which comes from Cadore and the hills of the Ampezzo is stored in spring. Yonder square white house, standing out to sea, fronting Murano and the Alps, they call the Casa degli Spiriti. No one cares to inhabit it; for here, in old days, it was the wont of the Venetians to lay their dead for a night’s rest before their final journey to the graveyard of San Michele. So many generations of dead folk had made that house their inn, that it is now no fitting home for living men. San Michele is the island close before Murano, where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror of disgust.

  The morning has not lost its freshness. Antelao and Tofana, guarding the vale above Cortina, show faint streaks of snow upon their amethyst. Little clouds hang in the still autumn sky. There are men dredging for shrimps and crabs through shoals uncovered by the ebb. Nothing can be lovelier, more resting to eyes tired with pictures than this tranquil, sunny expanse of the lagoon. As we round the point of the Bersaglio new landscapes of island and Alp and low-lying mainland move into sight at every slow stroke of the oar. A luggage train comes lumbering along the railway bridge, puffing white smoke into the placid blue. Then we strike down Cannaregio, and I muse upon processions of kings and generals and noble strangers, entering Venice by this water path from Mestre, before the Austrians built their causeway for the trains. Some of the rare scraps of fresco upon house fronts, still to be seen in Venice, are left in Cannaregio. They are chiaroscuro allegories in a bold bravura manner of the sixteenth century. From these and from a few rosy fragments on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fabbriche Nuove, and precious fading figures in a certain courtyard near San Stefano, we form some notion how Venice looked when all her palaces were painted. Pictures by Gentile Bellini, Mansueti, and Carpaccio help the fancy in this work of restoration. And here and there, in black canals, we come across colored sections of old buildings, capped by true Venetian chimneys, which for a moment seem to realize our dream.

  A morning with Tintoretto might well be followed by a morning with Carpaccio or Bellini. But space is wanting in these pages. Nor would it suit the manner of this medley to hunt the Lombardi through palaces and churches, pointing out their singularities of violet and yellow pannelings in marble, the dignity of their wide-opened arches, or the delicacy of their shallow chiseled traceries in cream-white Istrian stone. It is enough to indicate the goal of many a pleasant pilgrimage; warrior angels of Vivarini and Basaiti, hidden in a dark chapel of the Frari; Fra Francesco’s fantastic orchard of fruits and flowers in distant S. Francesco della Vigna; the golden Gian Bellini in San Zaccaria; Palma’s majestic San Barbara in San Maria Formosa; San Giobbe’s wealth of sculptured frieze and floral scroll; the Ponte di Paradiso, with its Gothic arch; the painted plates in the Museo Civico; and palace after palace, loved for some quaint piece of tracery, some molding full of mediæval symbolism, some fierce impossible Renaissance freak of fancy.