It is singular that the most finished and best preserved work of Tintoretto should be one which he had least time allowed him to terminate—the Apotheosis of S. Rocco in the principal ceiling-piece of the Schola, conceived, executed, and presented, instead of the sketch which he had been commissioned with the rest of the concurrent artists to produce for the examination of the fraternity: a work which equally strikes by loftiness of conception, a style of design as correct as bold, and a suavity of colour which entrances the eye. Though constructed on the principles of that sotto in su, then ruling the platfonds and cupolas of upper Italy, unknown to or rejected by M. Angelo, its figures recede more gradually, yet with more evidence, than the groups of Correggio, whose ostentatious foreshortenings generally sacrifice the actor to his posture.
That Tintoretto acquired, during his stay with or after his dismissal from the study of Tiziano's principles, the power of representing the surface and the texture of bodily substance with a truth bordering on illusion, is proved with more irresistible because more copious evidence, in the picture of the Angelic Salutation; though it cannot be denied that the admiration due to the magic touch of the paraphernalia is extorted at the expense of the essential parts: Gabriel and Maria are little more than foils of her husband's tools; for their display, the artist's caprice has turned the solemn approach of the awful messenger into boisterous irruption, the silent recess of the mysterious mother into a public dismantled shed, and herself into a vulgar female. Nowhere would the superiority of refined over vulgar art, of taste and judgment over unbridled fancy, have appeared more irresistibly than in the sopraporta by Tiziano on the same subject and in the same place, had that exquisite master been inspired more by the sanctity of the subject than the lures of courtly or the ostentatious bigotry of monastic devotion. If Maria was to be rescued from the brutal hand that had travestied her to the mate of a common labourer, it was not to be transformed to a young abbess, elegantly devout, submitting to canonization, amongst her delicate lambs; if the angel was not to rush through a shattered casement on a timid female with a whirlwind's blast, the waving grace and calm dignity of his gesture and attitude, ought to have been above the assistance of theatrical ornament; nor should Palladio have been consulted to construct classic avenues for the humble abode of pious meditation. It must however be owned that we become reconciled to this mass of factitious embellishments by a tone which seems to have been inspired by Piety itself; the message whispers in a celestial atmosphere,
Θειη ἀμφεχυτ' ὀμφη—
and so forcibly appears its magic effect to have influenced Tintoretto himself, ever ready to rush from one extreme to another, that he imitated it in the Annunciata of the Arimani Palace:[153] not without success, but far below the mannerless unambitious purity of tone that pervades the effusion of his master, and of which he himself gave a blazing proof in the Resurrection of the Saviour,—a work in which sublimity of conception, beauty and dignity of form, velocity and propriety of motion, irresistible flash, mellowness and freshness of colour, tones inspired by the subject, and magic chiaroscuro, less for "mastery strive," than relieve each other and entrance the absorbed eye.
FOOTNOTES
[134] Thus in an order of the Justiziarii we read: "Mcccxxii. Indicion Sexta die primo de Octub. Ordenado e fermado fo per Misier Piero Veniero & per Miser Marco da Mugla Justixieri Vieri, lo terzo compagno vacante. Ordenado fo che da mo in avanti alguna persona si venedega come forestiera non osa vender in Venexia alcuna Anchona impenta, salvo li empentori, sotto pena, &c. Salvo da la sensa, che alora sia licito a zaschun de vinder anchone infin chel durerà la festa," &c. And a picture in the church of S. Donato at Murano, has the following inscription: "Corendo Mcccx. indicion viii. in tempo de lo nobele homo Miser Donato Memo honorando Podestà facta fo questa Anchona de Miser S. Donato."
[135] In the church at Cassello di Sesto, which has an abbey founded in 762, there are pictures of the ninth century.
[136] Gelasio di Nicolo della Masuada di S. Giorgio, was of Ferrara, and flourished about 1242. Vid. Historia almi Ferrariensis Gymnasii, Ferraria, 1735.
[137] At that time he painted in the palace of Cari della Scala at Verona, and at Padoua a chapel in the church 'del Sarto;' he repeated his visit in the latter years of his life to both places. Of what he did at Verona no traces remain, but at Padoua the compartments of Gospel histories round the Oratorio of the Nunziata all' Arena, by the freshness of the fresco and that blended grace and grandeur peculiar to Giotto, still surprise.
[138] Fiorillo has confounded this questionable name with the real one of Luigi, who painted about 1490.—See Fiorillo Geschichte, ii. p. 11.