derick
therefore forbidding his subjects to render obedience any longer to the
Pontiff. And among other fanciful things that are in this scene, that
part is most beautiful in which the Pope and the Cardinals are throwing
down torches and candles from a high place, as is done when some person
is excommunicated, and below is a rabble of nude figures that are
struggling for those torches and candles--the most lovely and pleasing
effect in the world. Besides all this, certain bases, antiquities, and
portraits of gentlemen that are dispersed throughout the scene, are
executed very well, and won him favour and fame with everyone. He
therefore painted, for places below the work of Pordenone in the
principal chapel of S. Rocco, two pictures in oils as broad as the width
of the whole chapel--namely, about twelve braccia each. In one he
depicted a view in perspective as of a hospital filled with beds and
sick persons in various attitudes who are being healed by S. Rocco; and
among these are some nude figures very well conceived, and a dead body
in foreshortening that is very beautiful. In the other is a story
likewise of S. Rocco, full of most graceful and beautiful figures, and
such, in short, that it is held to be one of the best works that this
painter has executed. In a scene of the same size, in the centre of the
church, he painted Jesus Christ healing the impotent man at the Pool of
Bethesda, which is also a work held to be passing good.

[Illustration: THE MIRACLE OF S. MARK

(_From the painting by =Jacopo Tintoretto=. Venice: Accademia_)

_Alinari_]

In the Church of S. Maria dell'Orto, where, as has been told above,
Cristofano and his brother, painters of Brescia, painted the ceiling,
Tintoretto has painted--that is, on canvas and in oils--the two walls of
the principal chapel, which are twenty-two braccia in height from the
vaulting to the cornice at the foot. In that which is on the right hand
he has depicted Moses returning from the Mount, where he had received
the Laws from God, and finding the people worshipping the Golden Calf;
and opposite to that, in the other, is the Universal Judgment of the
last day, painted with an extravagant invention that truly has in it
something awesome and terrible, by reason of the diversity of figures of
either sex and all ages that are there, with vistas and distant views of
the souls of the blessed and the damned. There, also, may be seen the
boat of Charon, but in a manner so d