Again, Tintoret’s pigments have suffered more than those of any other master. The darker colors, in many cases, have become almost black; the lighter have faded, and sometimes completely changed.[13] How far this is due to an original defect in the paints, how far to exposure and neglect, I cannot say. It must always be remembered that, as popular canvases have been frequently varnished and restored, many Titians and Raphaels are as fresh to-day as they were when they left the easel. How much remains of the original painting is another question. Directors of galleries aim at pleasing the public, not at respecting the preferences of connoisseurs, and the public craves lively colors. It would feel itself imposed upon if it traveled to Dresden only to find the “Sixtine Madonna” as dark as would probably be the case if the restorer had not interfered. In every gallery you will observe that the crowds flock to the brightest pictures, irrespective of their merits. The fact that they have been kept bright is an advertisement that they are deemed precious; and besides, it requires less time to glance at a clean canvas and pass on than to recover, after patient scrutiny and an effort of the imagination, some of the beauty which time and dust conceal. It is significant that the one painting by Tintoret which is most commonly mentioned by all classes of tourists—“St. Mark Freeing a Fugitive Slave”—is precisely that one which the directors of the Venice Academy keep polished as good as new.
[13] In some of the paintings at San Giorgio the blues are now milky splotches.
I cannot dismiss this subject without alluding to another cause for the slight attention given to Tintoret: his pictures are almost invariably condemned to oblivion by the position in which they have been hung. You must look for them in dark corners near the ceiling, or in cross-lights which render an examination impossible. Of those which still exist in the churches for which they were painted, some have been injured by the drippings from candles; others have been partly hidden by tabernacles, reliquaries, and other objects of church ceremonial. Travelers in Venice a generation ago record that rain leaked through the roof of the School of San Rocco, and soaked some of the canvases; others, hung near windows, have had to suffer from the strong sunlight for centuries. In the Ducal Palace, one series of ceiling paintings have succumbed to the daubing of restorers, and are now hardly recognizable as being Tintoret’s; while the matchless “Paradise,” when I recently saw it,[14] was falling rapidly to decay. The seams where the vast canvas was originally joined had rotted in many places; the canvas itself was warped and rumpled, forming little shelves and unevennesses on which the dust had collected so as to hide the colors; and from the ceiling dangled a ragged fringe of cobwebs, in some places two or three feet long.
[14] In August, 1889.
A few generations hence, when these incomparable works have been irretrievably damaged, posterity will wonder—with a wonder intensified by indignation—that we allowed them to perish. Early Christians, who mutilated pagan works of art because they believed them to be pernicious, may be excused; but what excuse has our age to offer? We pretend to cherish all manifestations of culture, and we have ample means to preserve them; yet whilst our museums are daily adding to their collections of half-barbarous antiquities, dug up in Arizona, in Mexico, in Yucatan, in Peru, in Asia Minor, in Mesopotamia, there are surely hastening to destruction scores of the works of the mightiest genius who ever honored painting. During the past twenty years, New York millionaires have paid more for the immoralities and inanities of modern French painters than would be necessary to erect a separate gallery in Venice for the proper preservation of Tintoret’s masterpieces. If there were but a single manuscript of Hamlet in the world, and no printing-presses, what should we say to those who allowed it to perish through neglect? Yet there are many of Tintoret’s pictures, each of them as precious in its way as a page of Hamlet, which we raise no voice to save. In our selfishness, we forget that the treasures which we have inherited from the past are not ours to dissipate and destroy; we hold them in trust for the future, and woe unto us if, unmindful of our responsibility, we prove careless stewards.[15]
[15] So long as the originals exist, copies of great paintings are as unsatisfactory as a Beethoven symphony or a Wagner opera on the piano; but when the originals have perished, copies may serve a worthy purpose in perpetuating at least the concept and general treatment of the painter. It is greatly to be desired that some capable student should do for Tintoret what Toschi has done for Correggio at Parma. A series of faithfully executed sketches would enable posterity to judge of Tintoret’s range of imagination and inexhaustible powers of treatment, although his coloring and drawing could not be reproduced. Many of his paintings have never been engraved, and not one has been well engraved.
II. HIS WORKS.
What, then, are some of the qualities of Tintoret’s genius? First of all, he had vast scope: Christian and classic lore, the legend and story of Venice, contemporary scenes, and portraiture,—all these lay within his province. But scope alone, unguided by rarer powers, does not suffice for the equipment of the supreme master. Rubens had scope, even Doré had it, and neither ranks among the foremost. In Tintoret it was accompanied by a most intense imagination, which penetrated to the elemental reality and understood the intertangled relations of life. Imagination operated through him with a vigor more like Nature’s own than that of any other man except Shakespeare; a vigor which seems at once inexhaustible and effortless, which never wastes and never scants. In creating a beggar or a seraph he expended just as much energy as was necessary for each; you do not feel that one was harder for him than the other. Tintoret’s creations have this further resemblance to Shakespeare’s: they live! You do not exclaim, “This is a great picture!” but, “This is a great scene!” He is like a traveler who brings back views from a strange country: albeit you have never been there, yet the views are so real, the figures are painted so freely and lifelike, and not in conscious or conventional attitudes, that you cannot doubt their faithfulness, and are absorbed by the wonders and beauties they present.
Tintoret never conspires to startle you by sensational devices. Even in those works where he is most daring he is really painting what his imagination saw naturally, and is no more bent on inventing oddities and marvels than was John in the Apocalypse. Before beginning a Biblical or an historical subject, he seems to have asked himself, “How did this look to a bystander?” and he relies upon the actuality of the scene to produce the desired impression. He has been charged, sometimes, with making Christ and his disciples too vulgar. Other painters have so accustomed you to look for a kingly personage in Christ, and for princely garments on his followers, that when you first see a “Last Supper”: by Tintoret you miss the habitual elegance; for he shows you simple and earnest but not ignoble fishermen and artisans of Judea. If you contemplate them wisely, your astonishment will deepen as you reflect that it was through and by such lowly and zealous men as these, and not by philosophers and prelates and princes, that the gospel of brotherly love was disseminated among mankind. It is legitimate for an artist to invest an historic character with emblems which bespeak the significance posterity has attached to him; but it is wholesome to see him as he probably appeared to his contemporaries, before subsequent generations have discovered a retroactive importance in his career. Tintoret employed now one method and now the other, and whosoever has been moved by the “Christ before Pilate” and “The Crucifixion” of the School of San Rocco needs not to be told that pathos and sublimity belong only to the former method.
Tintoret’s versatility would have made a lesser man renowned. He counted it but an amusement, when the learned critics chided him for not obeying academic rules, to imitate the style of Titian, or Paul Veronese, or Schiavone, so that the critics themselves were deceived and confounded. He invariably adapted his treatment to the requirements of each work: if it was to be viewed from a considerable distance, he painted broadly; if it was to be seen near, no one surpassed him in the delicacy and carefulness of his finish. This sense of fitness governed his composition as well as his drawing. In a picture intended for a refectory, for instance, he introduced proportions in harmony with the dimensions of that refectory, causing it to appear more spacious and imposing. Where Tintoret’s figures are not correctly drawn, the apparent fault was often intentional: restore the picture to the position for which he designed it, and the drawing will no longer offend; for he always took into account the distance and angle from which the spectator would look, and he is not responsible for the changes in location. In studying any picture, remember that there is one, and only one, point of view where it can be seen as the artist wished it to be seen. If you stand too far or too near, you will miss his purpose. In a portrait by Titian or Tintoret, no line, no dot of color is superfluous: you must adjust your vision until the tiniest flake of white on the tip of the chin or on the pupils of the eyes shows you its reason for being there. Try to imagine that last perfecting touch away, and you will learn its value. For these men did nothing haphazard: they would as soon have wasted diamonds and rubies as their precious colors; every hair of their pencil was a nerve through which their imagination transmitted itself to the canvas.