ol of Titian,
where Tintoretto only remained a short time. Titian did not choose to
impart what could be imparted of his art to his scholars, and, in all
probability, Tintoretto was no deferential and submissive scholar. There
is a tradition that Titian expelled this scholar from his academy,
saying of the dyer's son, that 'he would never be anything but a
dauber.'

Tintoret was not to be daunted. He lived to be a bold-tempered, dashing
man, and he must have been defiant, even in his boyhood, as he was
swaggering in his youth, when he set up an academy of his own, and
inscribed above the door, 'The drawing of Michael Angelo and the
colouring of Titian.' He had studied and taught himself from casts and
theories since he left the school of Titian, and then, with worldly
wisdom equal to his daring, he commenced his artistic career by
accepting every commission, good or bad, and taking what pay he could
get for his work; but, unfortunately for him and for the world, he
executed his work, as might have been expected, in the same headlong,
indiscriminate spirit, acquiring the name of 'Il Furioso' from the
rapidity and recklessness of his manner of painting. Often he did not
even give himself the trouble of making any sketch or design of his
pictures beforehand, but composed as he painted.

Self-confident to presumption, he took for his inspirations the merest
impulses, and considerably marred the effect of his unquestionably grand
genius by gross haste and carelessness. He was a successful man in his
day, as so energetic and unscrupulous a man was likely enough to be, and
his fellow-citizens, who saw principally on the surface,[20] were
charmed beyond measure by his tremendous capacity for invention, his
dramatic vigour, his gorgeous, rampant richness and glare; or, by
contrast, his dead dulness of ornament and colouring; and were not too
greatly offended by his occasional untruthfulness in drawing and
colouring, and the inequality of his careless, slovenly, powerful
achievements. Yet even Tintoret's fascinated contemporaries said of him
that he 'used three pencils: one gold, one silver, one lead.'

Naturally Tintoretto painted an immense number of pictures, to only
three of which, however, he appended his name. These were, 'The
Crucifixion,' and 'The Miracle of the Slave,' two of fifty-seven
pictures which he painted for the school of St Roch alone, in Venice;
the other was the 'Marriage at Cana,' in the church of Santa M