attaining far more perfect light; his grasp of nature is more
extensive, and his view of her more imaginative, (incidental notices of
his landscape will be found in the chapter on Imagination penetrative,
of the second volume,) but he is usually too impatient to carry his
thoughts as far out, or to realize with as much substantiality as
Titian. In the St. Jerome of the latter in the gallery of the Brera,
there is a superb example of the modes in which the objects of landscape
may be either suggested or elaborated according to their place and
claim. The larger features of the ground, foliage, and drapery, as well
as the lion in the lower angle, are executed with a slightness which
admits not of close examination, and which, if not in shade, would be
offensive to the generality of observers. But on the rock above the
lion, where it turns towards the light, and where the eye is intended to
dwell, there is a wreath of ivy of which every leaf is separately drawn
with the greatest accuracy and care, and beside it a lizard, studied
with equal earnestness, yet always with that right grandeur of manner to
which I have alluded in the preface. Tintoret seldom reaches or attempts
the elaboration in substance and color of these objects, but he is even
more truth-telling and certain in his rendering of all the great
characters of specific form, and as the painter of Space he stands
altogether alone among dead masters; being the first who introduced the
slightness and confusion of touch which are expressive of the effects of
luminous objects seen through large spaces of air, and the principles of
aerial color which have been since carried out in other fields by
Turner. I conceive him to be the most powerful painter whom the world
has seen, and that he was prevented from being also the most perfect,
partly by untoward circumstances in his position and education, partly
by the very fulness and impetuosity of his own mind, partly by the want
of religious feeling and its accompanying perception of beauty; for his
noble treatment of religious subject, of which I have given several
examples in the third part, appears to be the result only of that grasp
which a great and well-toned intellect necessarily takes of any subject
submitted to it, and is wanting in the signs of the more withdrawn and
sacred sympathies.

But whatever advances were made by Tintoret in modes of artistical
treatment, he cannot be considered as having enlarged the sphere